This June, Resolve to Celebrate Fidelity

T oday is the first day of June, which means that many across the country are beginning to celebrate Pride Month. (In Washington, D.C., such festivities began in late May.) University campuses, public parks, libraries, and historic downtowns across America will start donning the colors of the rainbow. Some Fortune 500 companies will likewise adapt their logos (at least in the Western world) to show their LGBTQ+ solidarity. But while rainbows will dominate the public square for some, other groups are insisting upon a different emblem — and a far worthier celebration.

Two years ago, Robert P. George, professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, started Fidelity Month. It’s a grassroots movement to celebrate the classic, American virtues that have long made this nation great. The movement aims to encourage both individual and communal fidelity: to God, to family, and to country. Fidelity Month’s emblem is the golden myrtle wreath. In an age of doubt, worry, and selfishness, Fidelity Month is a breath of fresh air.

We need Fidelity Month now more than ever. The National Opinion Research Center, in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal, has found that the values of patriotism, religion, family, and community have declined drastically since 1998. Over the 25 year period, those who consider patriotism as “very important” to them fell from 70 percent to 38 percent, those who said the same about religion fell from 68 percent to 39 percent, the importance of having children went from 59 percent to 30 percent, and the value placed on community dropped from 47 percent to 27 percent. At the same time, value placed upon money has grown by 12 percent. These data attest numerically to a broader anomie detectible even without numbers.

Though the permanent things are losing some of their luster in the broader culture, there are pockets of hope. In stark contrast with the usual trend, young men are now becoming more religious than young women. With this religious devotion comes also a devotion to community, family, and a balanced understanding of financial gain. As the New York Times reports: “[This] has the potential to reshape both politics and family life.”

In fact, it may already be reshaping political life. Politics is downstream from culture, as Andrew Breitbart reminded us. And culture is downstream of religion. The fact that some in the rising generation are rejecting the rampant secularism that has dominated cultural discourse will have positive knock-on effects that will manifest, slowly but surely, over time.

Fidelity Month aspires to embody this rejection of the status quo. Yet it is not a reactionary movement. It is a vision of renewal. It offers a positive vision of human flourishing rooted in the timeless virtues of fidelity to God, family, and country. The initiative insists that fidelity is not a relic of days gone by — rather, it is the very foundation of the good life. As Robert George stated in the Deseret News, “Our movement is not a reactionary one; on the contrary, we are lighting a candle rather than merely cursing the darkness . . . we are joyously proclaiming an alternative (and timeless) vision of the true, the good and the beautiful.”

True fidelity begins with fidelity to God. Though America is not an explicitly Christian nation, the American civil religion is foundational to our values and communities. God is the very fountain of goodness, truth, and beauty. Thus, when individuals, communities, and nations seek to align their will with His, the nation flourishes. Our Founders recognized this. John Adams observed that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington in his Farewell Address spoke of religion and morality as “indispensable supports” for political prosperity.

Communal and national fidelity to God do not imply a conflation of church and state. They simply acknowledge the proper relationship between morality and the state. Over time, many churches have gone too far in their patriotism and allowed the nation to usurp the role of God. As John D. Wilsey argues in his book American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion, “In supporting civil religion, many churches have vacated their place in society and left it for civil religion to replace the church with the nation.” But true fidelity to God allows no room for such negligence. Rather, by placing fidelity to God first, Fidelity Month encourages us to order our affections rightly, never allowing the nation to replace the role of God Himself.

The same is true for fidelity to family. Flowing from our love of God, we love those around us. That starts with our immediate neighbors: our families. It is good and right to love your family more than someone else’s family. It is good and right to love your wife more than your neighbor’s wife. This is not to say you only love your own family and no one else’s. Rather, to be faithful to your family is to insist upon a correct understanding of love, one that looks beyond the self to the good of the other.

This same principle bears out also for singles as well. True love of one’s neighbor looks like loving those around you well, whether that be someone down the dormitory hall or across the pew. As C. S. Lewis warns in The Four Loves, we ought not merely to love Man in the abstract, but to love actual men and women. Fidelity to family and community does not simply exist in the realm of ideas. It must be lived out. A correct understanding of love leads to fidelity in both family and community.

From this principle comes a love of one’s own country and a desire to be faithful to her. Fidelity Month recognizes the foundational truth that we are born into both families and communities. And with this blessing comes also a stewardship. As John Adams wrote in 1808, “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. We ought to do all we can.” The same is true today. Our rightly ordered loves demand that we be faithful to what is good, true, and beautiful within these communities and within the nation at large. God has shed many graces upon America. It is part of our stewardship as citizens to be faithful to this nation, and to call others to fidelity in the process.

Each act of fidelity inspires us to live similarly. This idea is central to the Fidelity Month initiative. It exists not to react negatively against the idea of pride and licentiousness, but to cast a more noble vision. Robert George speaks of it as a “positive and uplifting project — one that is committed to the popular rejuvenation of the values that have historically been our society’s central sources of strength and unity” — a reminder that by donning the robes of virtue and prudence, living lives consecrated to God and, flowing from that, embodying a fidelity to family, community, and nation, we call on others to do the same.

This June, we can all resolve — as individuals, as communities, and as a nation — to live lives of fidelity. Such a resolution can lead to concrete action. The Fidelity Month website presents a local resolution from the Commonwealth Policy Center (where I work) for local communities to adopt, one that consecrates the month of June to the cause of fidelity. Fidelity is a virtue for the whole year. But this June could begin a renewed commitment to fidelity, rooted in God and lived out in family, community, and nation. In doing so, we affirm the timeless values that continue to sustain this great nation.