After fifty years at the intersection of faith, enterprise, and public life, I believe this with everything I have: America's best days are not behind her.
I know that is not what many people feel right now. The cynicism runs deep. The divisions are real. The sense that the great American experiment is fraying — at the edges or at the center — is not an illusion. These are serious times.
But I have also watched what happens when people of faith and conviction step into the arena. I have watched a group of parents in San Antonio change the trajectory of education policy in America. I have watched a small nonprofit founded with big convictions become a force that has shaped state and national policy for thirty years. I have watched ordinary people, in ordinary circumstances, do extraordinary things because they refused to believe the cynics.
I call believers back to the seven mountains of cultural influence — religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. Not because politics will save us. Politics will not save us. But because absence is not faithfulness. Retreat is not humility. And the people who shape these mountains will shape the future, whether we are present or not.
The question is not whether someone will climb. Someone always does. The question is whether the people who carry the values of faith, family, and freedom will be the ones at the summit.
I believe they will be. I believe that because I have seen what believers are capable of when they decide to stop waiting for someone else to go first.
Amazing grace. That is the anthem of this nation's best moments — not a confidence in human perfection, but a faith that something larger than our failures is at work. That the thread of divine purpose running through American history has not been cut.
It has not. The best days are still ahead. But they will require us. Are you willing to climb?