Key Takeaways

• Communio founder J.P. De Gance published a Fourth of July op-ed in Townhall arguing that while the World Cup has reminded the world why it loves America, the nation’s true greatness was never rooted in spectacle — it was rooted in faith and family.

• Tocqueville identified the secret of American strength 60 years after the nation’s founding: America was great because it was good — morally and spiritually — in ways that ran deeper than its laws, its institutions, or its economy.

• Recent polling consistently shows that patriotism is declining among Americans. De Gance argues the solution is not a government program or national ceremony. It is a grassroots renewal, starting in families and local churches.

• Civic decay cannot be solved through grand government spectacles. The renewal of a nation happens not from the top down but from the ground up, in the millions of small, ordinary, repeated acts of family life that form character across generations.

• The pathway to America 300, America 350, and America 400 runs through the family — and the local church is the institution best positioned to strengthen it.

The Story: A Fourth of July Argument That Goes Deeper Than Fireworks

On July 4, 2026, as America celebrated its 250th birthday, J.P. De Gance published an op-ed in Townhall that asked a question worth sitting with amid the celebrations.

The World Cup, hosted on American soil this summer, has been a genuine moment of national pride. European fans raving about Chick-fil-A. International visitors falling in love with Buc-ee’s. Social media filled with people from around the globe discovering America in ways that feel, for a moment, like a reminder of everything this country does well.

But De Gance’s piece argues that while those moments are worth celebrating, they reveal something important: the origins of America’s greatness lie elsewhere. They lie not in its sandwiches or its stadiums but in the faith and moral character that motivated the pilgrims, pioneers, and settlers who built the foundations of what we see today.

About 60 years after the nation’s founding, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled America to understand what made it work — why this democratic experiment was producing something that European societies weren’t. His answer was not America’s institutions or geography. It was that America was good. And it was good because its pulpits were aflame with righteousness, and because the character being formed in families and churches was producing the civic virtues a free society requires.

De Gance’s argument on the 250th anniversary is simple and serious: that foundation is eroding. And no fireworks display or World Cup celebration can substitute for what is being lost.

The Core Finding: What Made America Great Is What’s Now Under Strain

De Gance draws a direct line between the cultural vitality Tocqueville observed in the 1830s and the institutions that produced it — specifically the family and the church. These were the environments where moral formation happened, where character was built, where the habits of self-governance, civic trust, and covenant commitment were practiced daily before they were exercised publicly.

That formation is now measurably weaker. Polling consistently shows that love of country has declined significantly among Americans in recent decades. The institutions that once produced shared civic identity are under strain. And the most fundamental of those institutions — the family — is showing the fractures in divorce rates, fertility numbers, and the mental health data of the generation coming of age.

De Gance connects this directly to the decline of marriage and family stability over the past half century. When marriages weaken and families fragment, the civic and spiritual formation that flows from them weakens too — not immediately, but a generation later, in ways that are now visible in the data.

Tocqueville observed that America’s greatness came not from the top down but from the ground up — from the ordinary goodness of ordinary families, reinforced by communities of faith. The decline of that goodness follows the same pattern: it happens quietly, in millions of homes, before it shows up in the public square.

The Counterintuitive Angle: America’s Problems Cannot Be Solved in Washington. They Were Never Created There.

Here is the reframe at the heart of De Gance’s Townhall argument, and it is the most important insight in the piece.

When a nation faces civic decline, the instinct is to reach for the large gesture: a national address, a commemorative event, a government initiative. But De Gance argues clearly that civic decay cannot be solved through grand government spectacles. The source of America’s greatness was never in its government. And neither is the source of its renewal.

The renewal of a nation happens in exactly the same place its original greatness was built: in families. In the daily, repeated, ordinary acts of parents who pray with their children, who keep their marriages, who build homes where faith and virtue are practiced rather than merely declared. In communities of faith that surround those families with support, formation, and a shared vision of what human life is for.

As De Gance writes: the pathway to making sure America celebrates its 300th and 350th and 400th anniversaries runs through the family. Not through Washington. Through the dinner tables and neighborhoods where the next generation is being formed right now.

That is a pastoral argument as much as a civic one. And it places the local church at the center of the most important work happening in America today.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, De Gance’s Townhall argument is the conviction behind everything we do. The church is not a peripheral institution in the renewal of American society. It is the primary one — because it is the community best positioned to strengthen the families that produce the moral formation a free society cannot survive without.

Think about what that means for your congregation right now. Every marriage you strengthen is a family more capable of forming the next generation in faith and virtue. Every father you engage is another child more likely to grow up rooted, purposeful, and civically engaged. Every couple you walk alongside through the hard years of marriage is producing something the World Cup cannot: the kind of ordinary, durable, self-giving love that has always been the foundation of American greatness.

This is not abstract. It is the most practical thing a pastor can do for the country this Fourth of July — and every week that follows. Invest in the families God has placed in your care. The nation will be better for it a generation from now.

Take the Next Step

Communio partners with churches to build marriage and family ministry that strengthens the relational foundations where faith, virtue, and civic character are formed.

► Read J.P. De Gance’s full Townhall op-ed → townhall.com

► Explore Communio’s resources for churches → communio.org

Frequently Asked Questions

What did J.P. De Gance argue in his Fourth of July Townhall op-ed? De Gance argued that while the World Cup has been a moment of national pride, America’s true greatness was never rooted in spectacle. Drawing on Tocqueville’s observation that America was great because it was good, De Gance makes the case that the nation’s civic strength has always been built on faith and family, and that its renewal will come not through government initiatives or national ceremonies but through grassroots, family-centered formation at the local level.

What did Tocqueville observe about the source of American greatness? Approximately 60 years after the nation’s founding, Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, identifying the underlying cultural causes of America’s vitality. He found that America was great because it was good, and that this goodness was moral and spiritual in character, flowing from the homes and churches that formed the character of ordinary citizens. That formation, he observed, produced the civic virtues that made self-governance possible.

Why is patriotism declining in America? Recent polling consistently shows declining love of country among Americans. De Gance links this to the broader weakening of the institutions that historically produced civic virtue and moral formation, particularly the family and the church. When these institutions are strong, they produce the character that a free society requires. When they weaken, civic identity and national confidence weaken with them, a generation later.

Why can’t government solve America’s civic decline? De Gance argues that civic decay cannot be solved through grand government spectacles because the source of America’s greatness was never in its government. Tocqueville identified the source as the moral and spiritual formation happening in families and churches. Since that is where the problem originates, that is where the solution must begin — in the grassroots, local, relational renewal of family life.

What is the church’s role in renewing American civic culture? The local church is the institution most capable of strengthening the families that produce civic virtue, moral formation, and the capacity for self-governance. When churches invest in marriages and families, they are not just doing pastoral ministry — they are building the foundation of the communities and the nation that their congregations will inhabit for generations to come.

Credit: This post draws on J.P. De Gance’s op-ed published in Townhall on July 4, 2026. Read the full op-ed here.