• Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.
• This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.  Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.
• deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame,
• disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.
• The Shape of Power
• The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.”  The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.  These are just a few examples.
• to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.
• learn
• rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness
• innovation
• the richness of American history
• instilling pride

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• The collapse of The Episcopal Church in the United States doesn’t really qualify as headline news. Membership has been in a freefall for decades now.
• More than 30 years ago, a prominent sociologist of religion declared in the Wall Street Journal that the church’s days were numbered. The article’s headline stated the issue clearly: “The Episcopalian Goes the Way of the Dodo.”
• Arguably, the Episcopal tradition stood at the top of the denominational status pyramid for something like 200 years of American history.
• Even a brief glance at the church’s history in the United States reveals a denomination that once was absolutely supreme in financial power and unchallenged in cultural power. Just go to New York City and see the massive and elegant Episcopal parish churches, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Trinity Church in the heart of historic Manhattan. See St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square, where U.S. presidents appear for inaugural services. Look at the statistics ranking the Episcopal Church in terms of Ivy League tradition, representation in Congress, residence in the White House, and family wealth.
• The Episcopal Church was created out of the emergency situation created by the American Revolution. Let’s just say that identification as the Church of England presented a pretty powerful challenge as the colonists declared independence and went to war against King George III, who included among his royal titles “Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” The Anglican tradition would continue after the revolution, but was recast in the new nation as The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America
• “Half of America’s founders were Episcopalians, the American counterpoint to the Church of England.
• But theological liberalism began to spread in the denomination by the early decades of the 20th century, and it was largely driven by shifts among the intellectual and cultural elites.
• Over the last several decades, the Episcopalians had joined the sexual revolution, ordained women as priests, moved toward the full blessing of the LGBTQ spectrum, and embrace radical theology. 
• The Episcopal Church ordained women as priests in the 1970s, consecrated its first woman bishop in 1989, and consecrated an openly homosexual man, Rev. Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.
• Its clergy marched steadily leftward and its left wing, driven by various forms of Marxism, liberal theology, critical theory, and social activism, increasingly dominated.
• Since the 1970s, The Episcopal Church’s membership rolls have been plummeting. We are talking about absolute collapse. That’s why sociologist Wade Clark Roof predicted extinction more than 30 years ago. Roof broadened his prediction of doom to most of the established denominations of liberal Protestantism, but the Episcopalians were at the top of the charts. 
• In recent days, the church has announced plans to sell its Manhattan headquarters, formally known as the Episcopal Church Center.
• In any event, the announcement of the intention to sell the denomination’s headquarters is deeply revealing. The story has to include the displacement of The Episcopal Church in American culture. The church of presidents has moved so steadily to the left that it has become a parable of postmodern Christianity—what’s left when the gospel is sidelined and the Holy Scriptures are undermined.
• But it’s a very different thing when denomination collapse is on the horizon. That’s the parable visible in this announcement from The Episcopal Church. In that sense, the sale of a building is the least of its problems.

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• This June, during the 62nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, a coalition of transgender advocacy organizations called Trans Europe and Central Asia (TGEU) brought fourteen participants from around the world to make a specific and revealing argument:
• That opposition to gender ideology is not simply discrimination against a vulnerable minority. It is evidence of democratic backsliding.
• The official agenda for this year’s Trans Advocacy Week lists among its central themes: “Analyzing how the instrumentalization of trans and gender diverse people and attacks on gender equality function as a gateway to wider assaults on democratic governance and multilateral human rights systems.”
• In short, if you don’t believe boys can become girls, you are endangering all human rights.
• The United Kingdom’s landmark 2024 Cass Review—a four-year, NHS-commissioned investigation—found the evidence base for medical interventions in gender-dysphoric youth to be deeply inadequate and recommended halting surgical interventions on children, which the National Health Service in England did.
• Similarly, Sweden and Finland have effectively ended the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors outside of clinical studies. This is not the American Bible belt. They are the some of the very countries that pioneered gender medicine in the first place but are concluding the scientific and medical evidence doesn’t support what they were doing to children.
• A YouGov survey found that 74% of Britons opposed men identifying as women competing in women’s sporting events.
• Upon learning that the public does not agree with them about the beauty of a genderless world, they appeal to our moral sensibilities by suggesting a retreat on gender ideology is a retreat from human rights more broadly
• TGEU’s own Trans Rights Index, published this month, states explicitly: “Attacks on trans people are never only about trans people. They signal a broader erosion of democratic safeguards: When governments decide whose dignity and rights are negotiable, they weaken the democratic system.”
• They want you to believe that if boys can’t compete with girls or use the girls’ restroom, then democracy simply collapses.
• So, when transgender activists go to the UN and claim that threats to transgender rights are a threat to democracy itself, it’s force of habit. In their world, democracy doesn’t mean majority rule; democracy means they win. And if they aren’t winning, then democracy is failing. Once we understand the cynical linguistic games they’re playing, the games become less effective.

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• This “earthly city” will always fall short of the justice it claims to pursue, because it is shaped by human sin.

  And yet, Christians are not told to abandon it.
• Instead, they are commanded to endure it faithfully. To live within flawed institutions without becoming defined by them. To seek justice without expecting perfection. To obey God even when the surrounding culture does not. To “build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce” (Jeremiah 29:5) as God commanded the nation of Israel when they were taken captive by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.
• In a moment when political hope often rises and falls with each election cycle, Augustine offered a bracing corrective. Don’t expect ultimate justice from earthly systems. Don’t confuse national success with moral truth. And don’t let the failures of society shake your commitment to Christian virtue.
• The call is simpler—and far more demanding: Live the gospel where you are, endure what is broken without surrendering to it, and fix your ultimate hope on the kingdom where God’s will, finally and perfectly, is law. That gets right to the heart of a proper Christian patriotism.

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