What if the future of the republic is being decided around the dinner table? Long before children become voters, they learn truth, responsibility, sacrifice, forgiveness, authority, and faith within the home. John and Abigail Adams understood that liberty had to be handed from one generation to another. Scripture understood it long before them. If America is to recover the character necessary for freedom, perhaps we should spend less time asking who ruined the culture and loo

America’s Founders understood that liberty could not survive without moral restraint. John Adams envisioned “a government of laws and not of men,” but that principle applies to citizens as surely as rulers. Chapter 27 turns the mirror toward us: if we want to recover ordered liberty, we must become people capable of self-government. Before asking what must change in America, we must ask a harder question: Who governs me?

America's greatest crisis is not political, economic, or military. It is a crisis of character. The Founders understood that constitutions can restrain power, but they cannot create virtue. Long before a republic is preserved in its laws, it is preserved in the lives of ordinary citizens who govern themselves according to truth. This week's Founders' Quill invites us to look beyond the headlines—and into the mirror.