CENTER FOR RELIGION, CULTURE & DEMOCRACY
CIVIC RENEWAL
THE REDISCOVERY OF CIVICS
Civics That Inspires Real Attachment
Americans need a robust understanding and a meaningful love of our nation’s ideals, institutions, and culture. Yet, these virtues seem to be in short supply. Fewer than half of Americans can name a majority of the rights that are protected in the First Amendment and trust in American institutions is at all-time lows. First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy (CRCD) believes that the rediscovery of American civics must include a robust appreciation for the role of religion in American public life, from the founding to the present. To this end, CRCD is developing a civics curriculum as part of its civic renewal initiative. The curriculum approaches America through three mutually reinforcing dimensions: ideals, institutions, and culture. This framework corresponds, in civic terms, to the tripartite structure of the human person, constituted of mind, body, and heart. Ideals, the mind of civilization, supply direction: they name what a people hold to be true, good, beautiful, and worthy of reverence. Institutions, the body, supply durable form: they embody those principles in practices, offices, laws, associations, and habits that can endure across generations. Culture, the heart, generates attachment: it teaches citizens what to remember, imitate, and love. Using this framework, CRCD’s civics curriculum seeks to form the whole citizen.
"The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other." — Alexis de Tocqueville
Project Experts
“Religion is at the core of who a people are. The United States was not grown in a test tube in a lab. It has an organic culture that certainly includes the Christian faith, which has deeply informed its law and politics.”
“A true civic education includes not only the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, but also the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the landscape paintings of Thomas Cole, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poetry of Robert Frost, and the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. It is within this broader conversation—spanning politics, statesmanship, philosophy, theology, literature, and art—that a people comes to understand itself as a people. A free society will not endure because its citizens know facts about its government or can recite the components of its constitutional structure. It will endure when citizens understand its principles, inhabit its institutions, and admire that civilizational inheritance enough to assume responsibility for its future.”
What Our Fellows Have to Say
Jacob Wolf, “Civics is Not Enough: A Proposal for the Study of American Civilization,” Reading Wheel Review
John D. Wilsey, “A republic of virtue,” WORLD Opinions
Mark David Hall, “The Declaration’s Promise and Peril at 250,” Law & Liberty
Wilfred McClay, “American Principle, Memory, and Home,” Civitas Collection 250
Hunter Baker, “Dreisbach’s Project and the Organic Roots of America,” Reading Wheel Review
Jordan J. Ballor, “America’s Two Constitutions,” Public Discourse
Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug, “The Ladies, and How We Remember Them,” Jack Miller Center
James Patterson, “God and the Declaration,” Civitas Collection 250