Last week, I joined roughly two dozen faith leaders, writers, activists, and policy advocates inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a White House Faith Office briefing.
As someone who has spent years writing about antisemitism, Israel, and the role faith plays in public life, I expected discussions about religious liberty, faith-based initiatives, and public policy.
Instead, I left reflecting on something much deeper: whether a constitutional republic can endure when the moral culture that sustains it begins to erode.
Throughout the day, Jennifer Korn, Deputy Assistant to the President and Faith Director of the White House Faith Office, Pastor Paula White-Cain, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office, Border Czar Tom Homan, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Assistant to the President and White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf, Special Assistant to the President for Jewish Outreach Martin Marks, Deputy Assistant to the President Kailee Buller, and other senior administration officials addressed the room.
Their responsibilities ranged from national security and immigration to Jewish outreach, religious liberty, and combating human trafficking. Yet despite their different portfolios, they repeatedly returned to the same conviction: America’s future depends not only on sound policies but on the moral and spiritual character of its people.
What struck me most was not simply that God was mentioned, but how naturally He was spoken about.
For nearly six and a half hours, references to God, prayer, faith, and moral responsibility arose repeatedly and without hesitation. They did not feel scripted or politically calculated. Several speakers became visibly emotional as they spoke about prayer and the role faith had played in their own lives and public service.
There was no hesitation in invoking God. There was no sense that faith needed to be hidden behind carefully crafted political language. It was spoken of with sincerity, conviction, and genuine belief.
Throughout the day, speaker after speaker described restoring faith to American civic life as one of the defining missions of the White House Faith Office. Whether discussing religious liberty, border security, combating human trafficking, strengthening families, or confronting antisemitism, they consistently returned to the same idea: government can protect liberty, but it cannot manufacture virtue.
Whether one agrees with this administration or not, the White House Faith Office reflects a conviction that was expressed repeatedly throughout the briefing: America’s deepest challenges are not merely political but moral. That is more than a policy position. It is a philosophy of government.
The underlying premise is that laws can punish crime, budgets can fund programs, and executive orders can shape policy, but none of them can create character. If that premise is correct, then the long-term health of the republic ultimately depends upon the moral formation of its citizens.
Listening to those presentations, I found myself thinking less about the administration and more about the Founding Fathers.
US Constitution a great historical achievement
The Constitution is rightly celebrated as one of history’s greatest political achievements. Yet the Framers never imagined that liberty could survive on constitutional mechanics alone. They designed a system of checks and balances because they understood the dangers of concentrated power. But they also believed that self-government required citizens capable of governing themselves.
John Adams famously wrote that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people” and was “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Whether one agrees entirely with that assessment or not, it reflects a conviction shared by many of the Founders: free institutions ultimately depend upon virtuous citizens.
That observation feels remarkably relevant today.
Americans spend enormous amounts of time debating inflation, immigration, education, crime, foreign policy, and the expanding role of government. Those debates matter. But perhaps they are downstream from a more fundamental question.
What happens when a society no longer shares a common moral foundation?
Every civilization is shaped by values. The question is never whether values will influence public life but which values will prevail. History suggests that societies rarely abandon their moral foundations all at once. One generation treats a principle as optional. The next forgets it ever existed.
In my view, many progressive political and cultural movements have sought to reshape American institutions through lawful political, educational, and cultural change. Their supporters regard these efforts as expanding equality and opportunity.
I see something different: a gradual replacement of the moral assumptions that undergirded the American experiment with a framework in which identity politics, expressive individualism, and an ever-expanding role for the state increasingly displace the institutions that have traditionally formed character: families, faith communities, local associations, and civic life.
For American Jews, this discussion is no longer theoretical. Antisemitic assaults, harassment, intimidation, and the normalization of anti-Jewish hatred have become alarmingly common. Every act of antisemitism is the responsibility of the individual who commits it.
But we should also ask what kind of civic culture allows hatred to become normalized and what moral vocabulary remains available to condemn it consistently, regardless of who the victim happens to be.
Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democracies rarely lose their freedoms through dramatic revolutions. More often, they drift toward greater centralization as citizens gradually transfer responsibilities once carried by families, religious communities, and local institutions to the state.
Friedrich Hayek similarly cautioned that liberty is often surrendered incrementally, each expansion of authority justified by the crisis of the moment until the destination becomes visible only in hindsight. Their warnings were not about one political party or one election. They were about human nature.
One need not agree with every policy advanced by President Donald Trump to recognize the significance of the question his administration is asking. The White House Faith Office reflects a belief expressed repeatedly throughout the briefing: that political freedom cannot endure indefinitely if the moral culture that sustains self-government continues to erode.
The Constitution is not weakened only when it is openly violated. It can also be hollowed out gradually when each generation accepts just enough civic and moral decline that the next mistakes the exception for the norm.
As I left the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, I realized that the most important conversation I had heard that day was not about a single policy initiative. It was about whether America still believes that virtue, faith, and moral responsibility are indispensable to the survival of a constitutional republic.
America’s future will not be determined solely by the laws we pass or the elections we win. It will also be determined by the moral convictions we preserve, the truths we are willing to defend, and the values we pass on to our children.
That was the deeper lesson I took away from my day inside the White House Faith Office. The speakers came from different backgrounds and carried different responsibilities, yet they shared a common conviction: that no constitutional republic can long endure if it loses the moral foundation upon which its freedoms rest. Whether Americans ultimately embrace or reject that premise may prove to be one of the defining questions of our time.
Because in the end, a Constitution can preserve a nation’s freedom. Only its people can preserve the moral character that allows that freedom to endure.
The writer is an author and strategist whose work explores Jewish life, culture, and public affairs. She is the founder of 250Shabbat, a grassroots initiative strengthening Jewish identity through the shared experience of Shabbat, and host of The Silent Revolution podcast.