He left when I was six weeks old. Chased a party girl with a red car right out of our lives and into someone else’s, because that’s the kind of man he was — the kind who leaves, and keeps leaving, a trail of children he didn’t stay for. Next was a mall clerk. Then the circus girl. And a trail of children. Momma never said so. Not once. Never said his name in anger, never planted the seed of abandonment in me, never let her wound become my wound. I was just smart enough to see through, and loved by her so completely that it didn’t matter anyway.

She was nineteen.

Nineteen years old, six weeks postpartum, and she picked me up and she held on. I have the photographs. I hold the story of Momma’s younger sister’s boyfriend saying “give me that baby’s bassinet”… helping her transition back home to her own momma and daddy. She is so young in them it breaks something open in my chest now to look. Dark blonde curls, soft glossed lips, smiling like she meant it. Holding me like I was the whole world. Because I was. Because she decided I would be.

I don’t know when I understood that I was taking care of her too. It was before I had words for it. I remember her crying, uncontrollably, and me — not yet two years old — pulling at my own diaper tabs because I had to do something. I had to fix it. I didn’t know how. I just knew I couldn’t bear her tears.

I remember lying across her lap on a Monte Carlo bench seat while Journey played on the radio and she shakily lit a cigarette. Her hand trembled. I was small enough to fit across her lap and I was already reading her. Already tracking her steadiness.

She worried about me, always. Worried I’d be taken. She never once made me sleep alone when I was scared, even when I was sixteen. Some people might call that too much. I call it a woman who understood loss at the cellular level and refused to let her child feel it. She knew how fast someone could be gone. She was not going to let that happen twice.

She never knew how much I worried - still worry- about her.

The song is called “Send Her My Love.” The narrator is the one who left. Writing back. Asking someone else to carry what he couldn’t — the tenderness, the apology, the acknowledgment that something real was broken. He sends his love from a safe distance because he cannot bear to deliver it himself.

But it was me. I was the one who could not bear her tears. I was the one who stayed. I was the one bearing those lyrics “send her, send her my love”.

A baby cannot leave. But I grew up and I still didn’t leave. I learned.

Momma is a bit worn down now by a whole lot of life. Life took more from her than one man leaving — the first stepfather broke her and me in ways that went deeper, lasted longer. Then the third stepfather, names we don’t speak. They don’t deserve it. But Momma still sees beauty. She’s not as cynical as me. I love her childlike view of goodness. Case in point… in my twenties, I was driving, Momma was the passenger. The guy in the car next to us was paying special attention..Momma giggled… I held up two middle fingers and honked the horn with my knee.

She has deep faith, the kind that doesn’t come from an easy life. The kind that’s been tested down to the wire and came back, scarred, still standing.

And she still hopes for love.

After everything. She still hopes for love.

That is the most defiant thing I have ever witnessed. Not the nineteen-year-old smiling in those photographs with her whole heart blown open and her arms full of me. Not the woman who protected me so well from bitterness that I had to figure out the truth on my own. Not even the mother who showed up in the dark every time I was scared.

This. This is the bravest thing.

That after all of it, she still believes love is real and coming and worth waiting for.

She taught me that. She taught me by doing it in front of me for forty three years while I watched.

Momma and me, holding it together since 1983.

I would not have it any other way.

Yesterday, the United States and Iran reached a peace agreement. Pakistan’s Prime Minister announced it. Trump posted it on Truth Social. The signing ceremony is set for June 19th in Switzerland. The Strait of Hormuz, which has been largely closed since February, will reopen. Military operations on all fronts — including Lebanon — are to cease immediately and permanently.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council confirmed that Tehran had finalized a memorandum of understanding, declaring all military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, would cease “immediately and permanently.”

Read that again. Including Lebanon.

Israel was not at the table for any of it.

Netanyahu has said Israel is not a party to the negotiated deal, and the agreement in its current form is considered a deep disappointment by Israel’s government. Netanyahu struck Beirut anyway, hours before the announcement, and Trump said publicly that Netanyahu had almost “derailed” the deal with that airstrike on Lebanon’s capital.

Think about what just happened structurally. The United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran together in February. They went to war as partners. And yet when it came time to negotiate an end to that war, Trump praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin for helping advance the settlement, while criticizing Netanyahu directly, calling him “a very difficult guy” and saying he should be “very thankful” for what the US negotiated on Israel’s behalf.

An American president thanked Russia and China for this deal. That sentence alone deserves a long pause.

The exclusion of Israel from the negotiating table wasn’t incidental. The peace terms specifically address Israeli military behavior — attacks in Lebanon, regional operations — conditions that could only exist in a framework Israel had no hand in shaping. You cannot negotiate terms about a party that is sitting across from you at the table. The architecture of this deal required Israel’s absence.

Whether that signals a genuine shift in the relationship, or a temporary rupture driven by frustration, is something we don’t yet know. What we do know is that this is not normal.

And while that diplomatic drama was unfolding, something else was moving quietly through Congress.

Section 224 and the Back Door

Section 224 of the House version of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), introduced on May 26, 2026, proposes a new mechanism for continued close collaboration between Israel and US military and intelligence agencies. Section 224 would not only allow the exceptionally close military relationship to continue, but would also shelter it from the vagaries of regular congressional votes on military aid and make it almost impossible to uproot.

The NDAA funds the entire framework of the Department of Defense. Things buried in it have a way of becoming permanent.

Section 224 would require the US defense secretary to appoint an “executive agent”, a single official to coordinate military cooperation between the US and Israel, covering joint research and development, shared production of weapons, and the linking of military systems and data.

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft put it plainly: Section 224 “would give Israel deeper military integration with the US than any country in the world, including NATO allies.”

Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned over US arms policy toward Israel and now runs the advocacy group A New Policy, said it directly: “What Congress is trying to do now is find different ways of entrenching the relationship so deep in America’s own defense industrial base that it’s impossible to root it out.”

As political pressure builds to reduce US military assistance to Israel, Section 224 provides the framework for continuing and expanding those ties by entrenching Israeli technology within the US defense supply chain in a way that would shield it from the annual appropriations process. Translation: if this passes, future Congresses and future presidents face a structural obstacle to changing course, one built by this Congress, right now, while the country is watching Lebanon burn and waiting to see if a peace deal holds.

On June 4th, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna introduced an amendment to strike Section 224 from the bill. The committee voted it down. Republican Thomas Massie has said he will oppose the provision on the House floor. The full Congress has not yet voted.

Netanyahu has recently claimed he wants to end Israel’s reliance on US military aid within ten years, and critics note that provisions like Section 224 would ensure Israel gets American cooperation by other means, bypassing the public accountability that comes with a straightforward aid package.

This is the part worth watching. A peace deal was just announced without Israel’s involvement. And simultaneously, a provision is moving through Congress that would make the US-Israel military relationship harder to monitor, harder to debate, and harder to undo than it has ever been.

Those two things are happening at the same time. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a competition between diplomatic momentum toward a new regional order, and a legislative effort to lock in the old one before the window closes.

Where Does Trump Stand?

That’s the question nobody can answer cleanly right now, because Trump hasn’t said.

Section 224 is a Congress initiative, not a White House one. The analysts tracking it describe Israel’s supporters in Congress as racing to lock in the relationship while they still control the legislature, before the November midterms and public opinion hardens further, before the political window closes. They are moving fast precisely because the climate is shifting.

And the climate is shifting in part because of Trump himself. On the same day he announced this peace deal, he publicly called Netanyahu a difficult guy, credited Russia and China for the outcome, and said Israel should be grateful for American protection. That is not the posture of a president eager to permanently fuse America’s defense industrial base with Israel’s.

Congressman Khanna made that same argument during the committee debate, framing his opposition to Section 224 in explicitly Trumpian language: “I am for Team America. I am for the interests of this country, and I believe that’s what Donald Trump ran on. That includes American interests against any foreign country.” The committee voted him down anyway.

The American people are paying attention. A May 2026 poll found that only 16% of Americans want the United States to keep supplying Israel with weapons without new restrictions, while 38% want weapons transfers stopped entirely.

Congress should be listening to that. The question is whether Trump will make them.

A final thought…

Netanyahu struck Beirut hours before the announcement, which suggests he was racing against the clock. And now the ceasefire terms explicitly cover Lebanon, negotiated without him in the room.

The wildcard is enforcement. The agreement says military operations on all fronts cease “immediately and permanently”, but Israel has consistently said it doesn’t consider itself bound by the deal’s terms. So the real pressure point becomes Trump. If Israel continues strikes on Lebanon and Trump follows through on withdrawing support, that’s a genuinely new dynamic. If he blinks, the agreement’s teeth come out fast.

What’s worth watching is how Israel responds in the next 72 hours before the June 19th signing in Switzerland. That response will tell us more about where the US-Israel relationship actually stands than any diplomatic statement will.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Not all at once. That would have been easier to name. It happened the way summer comes in the Deep South: gradual in February, then suddenly all at once by official Spring. A word I couldn’t reach. A sentence I lost before it was finished. A conversation I’d drift out of mid-stream, like a boat with a cut rope, floating somewhere no one else could follow. Random long rants in texts or on social media, none of which made real good sense.

Two years ago, I was triple diagnosed. Lupus. Rheumatoid arthritis. Systemic sclerosis. Three diseases stacked like stones on a chest, and I’ve carried them while watching the image. I hurt all over, all time for so long, I stopped remembering what it felt like not to. Also holding on to keeping on keeping on. Because, you have to. People need you, people depend on you. So. You adapt. You grieve quietly. You keep going.

But this past year was different.

The forgetting got worse. I’d open my mouth to say an ordinary word, a word I’d used ten thousand times, and find nothing. Just white space where language used to live. My personality was changing in ways I could feel but not stop. I was there, and then I wasn’t. Present, and then somewhere dim and far away, even in rooms full of people I love. My eldest daughters began to worry about my ability to even hold a grandbaby.

My hands quit on me. I couldn’t grip a pencil. I, who have written my whole life, who have built something real and lasting out of words….I could not write my own name. Two weeks ago, I tried. I could not do it.

I hadn’t applied makeup in months. That sounds like vanity. It wasn’t. It was a signal. When a woman who has always cared for her appearance no longer has the motor control to brush lashes with mascara, something underneath has changed. I knew it. My husband knew it. We didn’t say it out loud.

I’ve seen a lot of doctors over the years. Good ones. Ones who genuinely tried. I am not writing this to indict the medical profession wholesale because that would be unfair, and I don’t deal in unfair. But I will say this simply: our medical system was not built to find what I was looking for. It was built to treat what it already knows how to treat, and to bill for the rest.

I had a gut feeling for at least two years that something else was going on. Something underneath the diagnoses, or hiding inside them. When I have a gut feeling, I have never once been wrong. I felt what was wrong was something no doctor had entertained in my questions and concerns. More MRIs and CT Scans than two hands can number. And nothing. I brought the question up again, because that is what my entire soul kept silently screaming. Parasites. I know how that sounds. I know the eye-roll it invites. I sat with that instinct for a long time before I trusted it, long enough to watch myself diminish, long enough to exhaust every other option that was offered to me.

When your doctors have done what they can do and you are still disappearing, you start listening to yourself differently.

I ordered human-dosed Ivermectin.

I want to be careful here, because I say this with absolute care for anyone reading this: I am not telling you to do what I did. I am not a doctor. I am not making a medical claim. I am not prescribing anything to anyone. What I am doing is telling you the truth about my own life, in my own words, because I was given a voice and I intend to use it honestly. Because I have been slowly and silently in a very loud manner, dying. Two weeks ago, I was ready to give up completely and recuse myself to a ward so my family didn’t have to bear the weight of fading away me. That is where I was as of two weeks ago. It was either try Ivermectin or die. That is how dire this has become for me.

Nine days ago, I took a compounded dose of Ivermectin.

Within eighteen hours of one dose, I was back.

Not better. Back.

There is a difference. Better implies progress along a continuum. What happened to me felt like a door opening, or rather, like walking back through a door I hadn’t realized had closed behind me.

My mind was clear. The words were there. I could follow a conversation from beginning to end and arrive somewhere with it. I could think. I could move my head from side to side, up and down. I could kiss my husband without crying out in agony for angling my neck a few degrees.

My husband looked at me across the church parking lot last Sunday, his eyes filled with tears. “You’re glowing,” he said. He said it the way a man says something when he’s been afraid to hope.

He’s lost me for so very long. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard this has been on him.

I hadn’t realized how far I’d gone until I came back. That’s the thing about this kind of slow disappearance; you don’t see it clearly until you’re standing on the other side of it, looking back at the shape of where you were.

I don’t know exactly what happened in my body. I have theories. I have that gut instinct, now confirmed in the way that felt confirmation does, not loud, just settled. I believe I had a parasitic load that was interacting with my existing conditions in ways no one was looking for, because no one was looking for it.

Parasitic infection is underdiagnosed in this country. That’s not conspiracy; it’s a gap in the system, partly because testing is inconsistent, partly because it doesn’t fit neatly into the autoimmune framework most rheumatologists work within, and partly because there is very little financial incentive to investigate it.

Follow the money. It won’t always lead you to the truth, but it will usually show you where the truth wasn’t followed.

I’m not asking you to follow my path. Every body is different. Every situation has variables I don’t know and can’t account for. What worked for me may mean nothing for you, and I would never want someone to make a dangerous decision based on my story alone.

What I am asking is that you trust yourself.

Not blindly. Not recklessly. Not in opposition to every doctor you’ve ever had. But as a co-investigator of your own life and health — someone with data that no chart captures, with a history that lives in your body, with instincts that have been trained by years of paying attention.

You know yourself. Doctors know medicine. Those are not the same thing, and the best outcomes happen when both kinds of knowing are in the room.

Two weeks ago I couldn’t write my name.

Today I wrote this.

I don’t take that lightly. I don’t share it casually. I treasure it. I share it because I spent two years half-absent from my own life, and if anything in this story gives someone else the courage to keep asking questions — to keep listening to the thing in themselves that says this isn’t everything, there’s something else — then telling it was worth every word.

I’m still here. I came back.

And if you’re in the middle of your own disappearing, I want you to know: so might you.

This essay reflects personal experience only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment.

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One Nation, Under God, Indivisible.

Eleven syllables. Five powerful words. Together, these words form quite a beautiful and altogether holy posture. The moral architecture: a people held together by shared purpose, guided by divine authority, and committed to remaining whole even in the face of strain.

This is more than a line we recite; it’s a vision of what a people can be when we remember who we are and to Whom we answer.

Maybe, if we have the grit of the people before us who built this nation, and I pray we do, we will persevere.

If you are reading this and do not share my faith, I invite you to stay. Not because I aim to convert, but because I hope we can all agree by now on one truth: there is evil in this world. Not simply evil acts. Pure evil.

And if evil exists, we must ask ourselves a hard question:
Are we fueling evil by ignoring who we really are and becoming slaves of destruction?

If we continue to forget that we are one nation, under the authority of God, a people who refuse to be divided, my friend, we are in for a long, hard road ahead.

At its core, “One Nation” is a call to shared identity. It says: ‘You belong to each other. You are responsible for one another. You are not enemies, but neighbors.’ A community bound by responsibility, sacrifice, and a common moral imagination.

That is the human, societal echo of Christ’s explanation of the second greatest command:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” –Jesus, Matthew 22:39

It’s no wonder society begins to fracture when we turn against one another. It is no small thing to find ourselves at odds with our fellow man. It’s deeply painful.

Uncorrected, it is the hollowing out I discussed in my last article on Rome. Uncorrected, we collapse just as a house collapses when the foundation is fractured.

A nation cannot be “one” without mutual care, humility, and a willingness to bear one another’s burdens.

Unity is not political—it’s relational. It’s love lived.

“Under God” → Love God

This is the vertical commandment.

It places our entire nation beneath God’s divine authority, divine law, divine truth.

We do not invent morality. We receive it. We do not worship the state. We worship God. We do not place human power at the top. We place God at the top.

“Under God” is the civic way of living under the Greatest Command:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” –Jesus, Matthew 22:37

It’s a posture of humility, dependence, and reverence. And it is imperative to understand that we serve a holy and just God. If you’re still reading, this is where I need you to stay with me.

The evidence of evil in this world needs no further proof, especially if you have been living anywhere but under a rock as of late.

Scripture gives us a clear picture of the spiritual forces at work behind human systems. During the temptation of Jesus, Satan offers Him “all the kingdoms of the world” if He would worship him, illustrating his temporary sway over worldly systems (Matthew 4). This passage reveals the spiritual struggle that has always surrounded human authority.

Throughout history, many who held power have faced that same temptation—to pursue control rather than truth, influence rather than righteousness. Today is no different. Satan’s tactics have never changed, he still tells the same tired lie.

The truth is, the prince of this world is also the prince of deception. And deception always bears fruit in the real world. Dark, unholy acts of pain, injustice, and chaos are being practiced. Celebrated. Protected. By people who have rejected living under God, and chased after the greatest deceiver of all time. This evil deceiver dances in celebration the more we divide, and the further we turn from God.

If we, the people, one nation, reject evil, united under God, no party nor any political official or elite power can put asunder an indivisible people.

Remember, as outlined in 1776, this government exists only by the consent of its people.

“Indivisible” → The fruit of both commandments

When a people love God (vertical) and love one another (horizontal), the natural result is indivisibility.

Not uniformity.
Not agreement on every issue.

But a covenantal unity that refuses to fracture.

Indivisibility calls us to the hard, disciplined work of unity—not the shallow unity of sameness, but the covenantal unity that refuses to let disagreement dissolve the bonds of belonging. It’s the societal expression of spiritual maturity.

When our pride is humbled, a common good prevails. When we love one another (even if we don’t feel like it), responsibility is shared.
And when God is honored above it all, we are indivisible.

When you step back and look at the whole phrase…Eleven syllables. Five words. It becomes a moral blueprint.

Reading it through the lens of the two greatest commandments, the pledge becomes almost liturgical:

• Love God → Under God

• Love one another → One Nation

• Live out the fruit of both → Indivisible

It’s astonishingly simple and profoundly demanding.

And when you sit with it, it becomes obvious.

It’s the architecture of a healthy people.

It’s the moral spine of a free society.

It’s the spiritual truth that holds a nation together.

A note from me:

I write from my heart about the beauty around me, my family, my sweet plot of life in the country, and even more about the state of humanity in this very broken world. Above is a piece that is completely unedited and published “as is”, and just as messy as me. Written as my thoughts tumble out of my head and onto paper. I like it that way, even if no one else does. Because, you see, I am human. And I am interested in protecting humanity in an age that is quickly, rather than slowly, losing humanity to the metaphysical (Ai). Be an encourager to your writer friends, your fellow artists, to let their work be human, untouched by anything artificial. All great works in our history have been borne of a writer, a composer, a thinker…a human. Let us protect that sacredness.

What unsettles me most right now isn’t just institutional decay. It’s the way ordinary citizens are being conditioned to see one another as disposable. I saw a post recently from a liberal woman calling for “war,” insisting that “straight, white conservative men” should be sent to the front lines. It wasn’t satire. It wasn’t fringe. It was another example of what we have become as a people divided. As if fantasizing about violence against political opponents were a form of moral courage.

That’s the part that stopped me cold.
Not the politics.
The dehumanization.

Rome didn’t collapse because people disagreed. It collapsed when citizens stopped believing they shared a common fate. When contempt became a virtue. When the idea of “those people” dying felt righteous.

That’s the part of Rome’s story we should fear most — and the part we’re beginning to echo.

Contempt is always the shortcut. It’s easier to demonize than to understand, easier to flatten whole groups of people than to wrestle with the complexity of a shared civic life. But contempt is also how a republic teaches itself that some citizens are expendable — and once that lesson takes root, the center cannot hold.

We’re watching elites shape narratives in real time. We’re watching media outlets tell us not to trust our own eyes. We’re watching citizens fracture into tribes while the same small circle of powerful people quietly protects itself. And now, with the Epstein files surfacing, we’re seeing something rare: Americans across political lines reacting with the same disgust, the same clarity, the same sense that something foundational has been violated.

For the first time in a long time, the truth is cutting through the noise.
The question is whether we’ll unite around it — or whether the same forces that hid this for years will divide us again.

That’s what sent me back to Rome. Not the Hollywood version with flames and mobs, but the slow hollowing that actually happened.

Rome didn’t lose its republic in a dramatic moment. It kept its institutions long after people stopped believing those institutions could restrain the powerful or protect the ordinary. The Senate still met. Courts still ruled. Elections still happened. But the spirit that made those forms meaningful had drained away.

The crisis wasn’t that laws disappeared. It was that laws became tools rather than limits. Leaders broke norms “for good reasons.” Emergency powers were justified as necessary. Precedents were violated to save precedent. Each exception felt small, even reasonable. But together they taught everyone the same lesson: the rules were optional when the stakes were high.

A republic that abandons order in the name of compassion eventually loses both. You can’t have compassion without structure. You can’t have mercy without stability. Rome learned that too late — and we are flirting with the same mistake when we treat boundaries, laws, or limits as inherently oppressive rather than necessary for the vulnerable to flourish.

Rome didn’t lose its constitution. It lost its confidence in the constitution.

And once that confidence eroded, loyalty migrated. Soldiers stopped seeing themselves as servants of the Republic and instead attached themselves to individual generals — men who paid them, defended them, and rewarded them when institutions failed to do so fairly.

It wasn’t tanks in the streets. It was trust quietly relocating — from process to person, from system to power.

But the deeper danger — the one Rome couldn’t recover from — was the emotional shift. The rise of civic contempt. The belief that some citizens were obstacles, not neighbors. That some lives were expendable for the sake of “saving the Republic.”

That’s the tone I hear now. Not everywhere, but enough to matter. Enough to warn us.

What strikes me most when I read Roman voices from this period is the emotional tone. Not panic — fatigue. Not chaos — a weary clarity. Cicero didn’t sound like a man trying to ignite a revolution. He sounded like someone watching the ground shift beneath his feet, knowing exactly what was slipping away and knowing he couldn’t stop it.

That feeling is familiar. It’s the quiet heaviness many Americans carry now — the sense that something essential is eroding even as daily life goes on. We still work, raise children, worship, argue, and hope. But the civic world that once held us together feels thinner, less capable of forming us. Rome didn’t end its citizens’ lives. It simply stopped shaping them. That’s the danger we’re flirting with.

But here’s where the comparison must be handled carefully.

Rome lacked several things America still has.

It had no deep tradition of decentralized power. No widespread ethic of conscience standing above the state. No strong intermediary institutions — families, churches, local communities — capable of forming people independently of political authority.

America still has these things, even if they’re strained. And that distinction matters.

A healthy republic doesn’t outsource virtue to the state. Compassion can be encouraged by law, but it cannot be manufactured by it. Virtue must be lived, not legislated. When a people forget that, they start asking politics to do the work of families, churches, and communities. And politics is terrible at soul work.

Rome’s renewal failed in part because nothing stood between the individual and the state once the Republic weakened. America is not there. And that gap — those layers of moral and communal life — are exactly where our responsibility lies.

Because here’s the truth:
Republics don’t collapse when institutions wobble.
They collapse when moral infrastructure disappears…and nothing remains to absorb strain.
When every conflict must be resolved at the center.
When power is no longer feared, and limits are no longer loved.
When citizens stop seeing one another as citizens.

America is strained, not terminal. Rome was terminal when norms died and no moral ecosystem remained to carry people through the transition.

Understanding that difference doesn’t remove responsibility. It clarifies it.

The work of preservation doesn’t begin with seizing power or predicting catastrophe. It begins with sustaining the forms of life that Rome no longer had when it needed them most — families that teach virtue, communities that tell the truth, institutions that refuse to bow to power, citizens who refuse to be divided by the very people who fear their unity.

The Epstein files are a test of that. A moment of clarity. A chance to see whether we still have enough shared moral instinct to recognize evil when it’s exposed — and enough courage to stand together against it.

Rome hollowed because its people stopped believing the Republic was worth the sacrifice — and because they stopped believing one another were worth the effort. Civic contempt did what no invading army could do.

America hasn’t reached that point.
But we are being tested.
And what we do now will determine whether we still deserve a republic at all.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on faith, virtue, and constitutional self-government.

A note….

This was a heavy piece to write. Not because the history is unfamiliar, but because the emotional terrain is. I see good people growing weary. I see contempt becoming casual. I see institutions still standing, but trust quietly relocating. And I keep asking myself: what holds a republic together when the scaffolding starts to crack?

If this essay stirred something in you—grief, clarity, resolve—I hope you’ll sit with it. Share it. Talk about it around the table. Because the work ahead isn’t just political. It’s moral. And it begins with refusing to see our fellow citizens as enemies.

If the last essay traced the principles we’re quietly letting go, this one turns to the habits that still hold a republic together when its institutions begin to strain.

One of the quiet distortions of our moment is the belief that republics are saved—or lost—at the center.

When institutions strain in the very eyes of citizens, our instinct is to look upward: to elections, courts, executives, national movements. We talk as if the fate of the country turns primarily on who holds formal power.

History tells us the truth. Republics rarely collapse because the center fails first. They erode because the moral infrastructure beneath them thins out.

This is where most conversations go wrong. We focus almost exclusively on political outcomes and neglect the pre‑political conditions that make self‑government possible in the first place.

Republics are not preserved top‑down. They are preserved before politics. A republic is for the people. The people unite to preserve.

The First Condition: Strong Families

Strong families are the first of those conditions, and not for sentimental reasons. Families form citizens capable of delayed gratification, self‑command, and responsibility—qualities no law can manufacture at scale.

They reduce dependence on the state not because they are ideologically motivated, but because they actually do the work of formation. Every durable republic rests on the family, whether it acknowledges it or not.

When families weaken, the state doesn’t become kinder. It becomes larger.

I’ve seen this in my own home, where the hardest lessons aren’t political but personal: telling the truth when it costs you, taking responsibility when it would be easier to blame, learning to govern yourself before trying to govern anything else.

These are the small, unseen habits that make a free people possible.

The Second Condition: Local Life

When national institutions wobble, local ones matter more, not less.

Churches, schools, town councils, voluntary associations, and informal networks of care do something centralized systems cannot: they teach people how to self‑organize in healthy, community‑rooted ways.

They give ordinary citizens practice in responsibility. They make problems concrete rather than abstract.

A republic survives strain when people still know how to govern small things together.

The Third Condition: Truth‑Telling

Truth‑telling is another quiet pillar, and one of the most endangered.

Not truth‑telling as performance or provocation, but as discipline. The refusal to lie even when it would benefit “your side.” The willingness to correct falsehoods calmly. The resistance to apocalyptic language.

Hysteria accelerates collapse more reliably than corruption. Corruption can be contained. Hysteria spreads.

A society that loses the ability to speak truth without panic begins to substitute force, shame, or narrative control for persuasion. That substitution feels stabilizing in the short term. It isn’t.

The Fourth Condition: Cultural Memory

Cultural memory matters far more than we tend to admit.

Republics fail when people forget why limits exist, why power is dangerous, and why freedom requires restraint. This isn’t about memorizing dates or documents. It’s about understanding the logic of self‑government.

A people who don’t know why their system exists won’t defend it when it becomes inconvenient.

This is why education—not just schooling, but the cultivation of wisdom—plays such an outsized role in moments of strain. Schools transmit information. Cultures transmit meaning. When meaning thins, institutions are asked to do work they were never designed to do.

The Fifth Condition: Moral Courage Without Drama

All of this converges at the personal level, where the most overlooked form of preservation takes place: moral courage without drama.

Not marches. Not viral posts.

But refusing to lie. Refusing to say what you don’t believe. Refusing to demonize neighbors. Modeling restraint, humility, and responsibility in ordinary life.

Every historical renewal began this way—not with a majority, but with minorities who refused to surrender inner freedom even when outer systems decayed.

They didn’t imagine themselves as heroes. They simply declined to be reshaped by lies.

This is the part of the conversation many people avoid because it feels unsatisfying. There’s no lever to pull. No enemy to defeat. No moment of release.

But it’s also the part that actually works.

America is not losing its soul because of one election, one policy, or one party. It is only at risk if citizens decide that principles are optional when inconvenient.

A republic survives if enough people continue to live as if law matters, truth matters, family matters, conscience matters, and limits matter.

That kind of fidelity is slow. It’s often unseen. It rarely feels dramatic.

But it has outlasted empires.

And it’s the ground on which everything else still stands.

Next week, I’ll turn to What the Slow Death of Rome Reveals About the Fate of Republics

This essay is part of an ongoing series on faith, virtue, and constitutional self-government.

If you prefer to read this piece on my website, please visit Quietly Becoming.

I don’t come to these questions as a theorist. I come to them as someone who became a mother at sixteen and raised a large family around a dinner table where Scripture, history, and difficult conversations were ordinary. I grew up in a home where the Constitution wasn’t an abstraction but something you were expected to take seriously, and I married a man whose service to this country came with real costs our family lived with. My concern about America’s direction is not abstract. It is tied to the world my children and grandchildren will inherit.

Not all principles erode at once. Some are ornamental. Others are structural. When the structural ones weaken, everything above them begins to strain.

Several of America’s foundational principles are under pressure—not through open rejection, but through gradual redefinition. That kind of change is easy to excuse and hard to notice until the effects are already visible.

This is not an argument for nostalgia, nor a claim that the past was purer or more just than the present. It is also not a denial of complexity, pluralism, or the real constraints of governing a modern nation. The founders themselves disagreed deeply, failed often, and built a system precisely because they did not trust human virtue to be constant. My concern is narrower and more modest: that certain principles were designed to restrain power, instill responsibility, and preserve legitimacy over time—and that when those principles are slowly reinterpreted as obstacles rather than safeguards, the system may continue to function mechanically even as its moral authority thins. I am not predicting collapse. I am asking whether we still recognize the conditions that make self-government possible at all.

One of the most vulnerable is the equal application of the rule of law.

The founding idea was demanding: no one stands above the law, and the law is not a weapon. It was meant to restrain power as much as behavior. Process mattered because it protected legitimacy, even when the outcome wasn’t what you hoped for.

What is at risk now is not the existence of law, but its credibility. When enforcement shifts depending on who is involved or what outcome feels justified, the structure weakens quietly. Whether these failures are isolated or becoming patterned matters less than how often they are defended instead of corrected. When people begin to believe the law is political, compliance becomes conditional. History suggests that when this shift goes uncorrected, republics rarely remain stable for long.

This is not about party. It is about precedent. Once law is treated as a tool rather than a restraint, its future use no longer has clear limits.

Closely related is the erosion of consent of the governed. American legitimacy was meant to come from the people, not from credentials or efficiency. Consent requires persuasion. It requires explaining decisions to those who must live under them. It requires lawmakers who are willing to do that work rather than bypass it.

Yet many consequential decisions are now resolved through administrative rulemaking rather than legislative deliberation, leaving the public with little opportunity to understand or challenge what is being decided. “You don’t understand the issue—trust us” replaces the harder work of democratic persuasion. As consent thins, governance drifts toward management rather than trust.

Limited government is under strain as well—not because it has been openly rejected, but because exception has become familiar. Emergency powers once understood as temporary are now treated as normal. The risk is not one crisis, but how quickly people stop questioning crisis logic at all. A system built on restraint cannot operate indefinitely on urgency without changing the habits of both rulers and citizens.

Freedom of conscience and speech is also narrowing without formal prohibition. The founding assumption was that truth emerges from open debate, not enforced agreement. A republic can endure disagreement. It cannot endure being told that certain questions are no longer open for discussion.

Today, informal censorship operates through platforms, funding mechanisms, professional consequences, and reputational pressure. Moral questions are treated as settled. Dissent is discouraged less by law than by the quiet fear of losing standing, work, or community. Over time, disagreement does not disappear; people simply learn when to stay quiet. Public discourse grows thinner and less honest, even as it grows louder.

Beneath these developments lies a neglected principle: civic virtue.

The founders were clear that a free people must govern themselves internally before they can govern themselves politically. The Constitution assumes a population capable of restraint and responsibility. Without those habits, no system of checks and balances can hold.

This is not only a political failure but a human one. Discernment takes practice. It takes self-control, the ability to pause, and the willingness to notice when emotion is driving judgment. When those capacities weaken, people become easier to manage and harder to persuade, and institutions adjust to that reality.

Moral formation is increasingly handed off to institutions that were never meant to carry it. Freedom is often understood as doing whatever one wants rather than learning how to govern oneself. Responsibility is treated as coercion. Limits are dismissed instead of understood as the conditions that make freedom workable.

You don’t have to share the founders’ faith to see where this leads. A society that struggles to form self-command in its people will lean more heavily on external control—not because anyone set out to dominate, but because something has to fill the gap.

None of this means the country is lost. It does suggest that the health of the republic depends less on the next election than on whether citizens still believe these principles apply to them, even when they are inconvenient.

A republic endures not because its ideals are perfectly lived out, but because enough people continue to treat them as real.

I feel the weight of this not as a commentator, but as someone who has had to think about what gets passed down. Around our dinner table, we have tried to form the habits a free people need. That is why this moment feels heavy. Before questions of policy or power, it raises a quieter one: whether we are still forming people capable of carrying freedom without being managed.

Next week, I’ll turn to What Actually Preserves a Republic When Institutions Wobble

This essay is part of an ongoing series on faith, virtue, and constitutional self-government.

If you prefer to read this piece on my website, please visit Quietly Becoming.

I’ve been sitting with a question that doesn’t arrive as panic or melodrama, but as a kind of weight.

Not Is America collapsing?

Not Who ruined everything?

Something quieter, and harder to answer without flinching:

What kind of country is America becoming?

The unease many people feel isn’t about tanks in the streets or a dictator waiting in the wings. It’s subtler than that. It’s the sense of watching something familiar shift in character while the outer forms remain intact. The institutions are still there. Elections still occur. Courts still issue rulings. Yet something essential feels thinner, as if the scaffolding is holding, but the beams inside are weakening.

America isn’t burning down. It’s drifting.

More precisely, it’s moving from a constitutional republic grounded in shared civic principles toward a managerial, technocratic order held together by procedures, incentives, and curated narratives. That sounds abstract, but the shift shows up in daily life: more rules, more forms, more intermediaries, more “guidance” from people no one elected.

The American Founding assumed citizens were capable of moral agency. It assumed local self‑governance, limits on centralized power, and a deep suspicion of concentrated authority. The system was intentionally constrained because its architects believed something unfashionable today—that human beings are fallible, and good intentions are not a safeguard against abuse.

What’s emerging now feels different. We increasingly talk about populations instead of citizens, outcomes instead of limits. Rights are filtered through institutions rather than exercised directly. Administrative systems become increasingly complex, and moral questions are quietly delegated to experts, panels, and professional consensus.

This isn’t tyranny in the old sense. It’s softer, more procedural, and in some ways more durable. Power is exercised through funding streams, credentialing, compliance regimes, and reputational pressure rather than force. Most of it is legal. Much of it is justified as compassionate or necessary.

Law is shifting, too. In the American imagination, law once restrained the government as much as it did citizens. Process mattered. Equal application was an ideal, even when imperfectly practiced. Increasingly, law is treated as an instrument: What result do we want? Enforcement becomes selective. Process becomes negotiable. Legitimacy is explained through narrative—“for safety,” “for equity,” “for democracy”—rather than through shared agreement about limits.

Even when intentions are good, this erodes trust. When people begin to believe the law is political, compliance becomes conditional. History has seen that pattern before.

Culturally, we’ve moved from a thin but real moral consensus to something closer to managed pluralism. America once relied on shared civic myths and a common moral grammar that allowed disagreement within boundaries. Those boundaries were imperfect—sometimes unjust—but they existed. Today, there’s no shared moral language. Institutions try to manage diversity rather than cultivate unity. Dissent is tolerated only if it fits within approved categories. That’s why everything feels brittle. There’s no cultural shock absorber anymore. Every disagreement feels existential.

Perhaps the most significant shift is where moral authority now resides. Faith, family, and local community once shaped character and transmitted norms. Now, moral authority flows from media, academia, NGOs, courts, and federal agencies. Legitimacy comes from credentials rather than conscience. Consensus statements stand in for moral argument. Conscience itself is treated as a private quirk rather than a public good.

This is the part that weighs on people who are paying attention. It feels as if something sacred is being displaced—not attacked outright, just quietly crowded out.

It’s important to say what this is not.

America is not becoming a dictatorship or a failed state. This isn’t a collapse scenario. Republics rarely fall suddenly; they erode slowly. Think in decades, not years.

In the near term, polarization deepens, trust in institutions continues to fray, and procedural democracy keeps functioning while feeling increasingly hollow. Emergency powers, court orders, and administrative rule-making become the default tools of governance.

A decade or two from now, the fork becomes clearer: either a renewed emphasis on constitutional limits and civic responsibility, or the normalization of centralized managerial governance. The country still calls itself “America,” but the lived experience changes.

Further out, the outcome depends less on elections than on whether families, faith communities, and local institutions remain intact; whether civic education recovers; and whether citizens demand limits before crisis forces them.

Empires often fall suddenly. Republics tend to erode quietly.

The crucial distinction is this: America is becoming a country where procedures replace principles, and stability begins to outrank liberty. That loss is quieter—and harder to resist—which is why it feels heavy rather than dramatic.

If this burden resonates with you, it isn’t nostalgia. It’s discernment. It shows up in people who love the idea of America, not just its power; who understand that freedom requires virtue, not just laws; who sense when a nation is losing confidence in its own moral foundations.

History offers one sober but hopeful note. Periods of American renewal have often followed seasons like this—when institutions overreach, citizens disengage, and truth feels negotiable.

Renewal doesn’t begin in Washington. It begins with people who refuse to let their homes, communities, and consciences be hollowed out.

The country America is becoming is not yet settled. The country America will be depends less on who wins elections than on whether enough people continue to live as if the founding principles still matter.

That’s where the conversation becomes serious—and real.

Next week, I’ll turn to The Founding Principles We’re Quietly Letting Go

This essay is part of an ongoing series on faith, virtue, and constitutional self-government.

On September 10, 2025, I finally put a name to what I had been feeling.

I am angry.

I have been angry for a long time.

This is what we, as mothers, understand as Momma Bear.

My family calls it Momma Jess—a fierce protector of truth and justice.

This is not hateful rage. What I feel is righteous anger.

There are many descriptions and theological explanations of righteous anger, but here is the brief and blunt truth: it is the anger that rises from the deepest place of the soul as grief over sin—sin against God and against His Holy Word.

On September 10, 2025, something fractured further—both in an already broken world, and within me.

And I stopped giving a flying biscuit about offending people who are actively offending God.

I am not a righteous woman. I am flawed. I sin. I strive to follow God righteously—and I fail. Often.

But I know the difference between wrestling with my own sin and witnessing a generation—within a nation built on the Word of God—openly and unapologetically giving Him the middle finger.

It should go without saying, but I will say it plainly: I love God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit with all my heart. I gave my life to Jesus at eight years old—alone, at night, in my bedroom—holding an old 1960s Bible, crying as I read. I remember glancing at my soon-to-be-born baby sister’s crib and coming face-to-face with the reality of what Jesus did so that I might be free.

I would face death in defense of His Name.

I love my family—so deeply that at times it steals my breath. I would lay down my life to protect them without hesitation.

I love the United States of America. I believe in the purposes and principles upon which our Constitution was created to govern a sovereign people. I love her deeply enough that I would give my life to protect the blessing of freedom and independence.

The United States is a Judeo-Christian nation.

You may disagree. That is fine. Disagreement does not erase truth or fact.

The United States is a Judeo-Christian nation because:

1. The Christian ethic (New Testament): Love your neighbor as yourself—whether that neighbor is friend or enemy.

2. The Judeo law (Old Testament): Government exists to protect people, punish those who break the law, prevent the destruction of property, and hold both citizens and elected officials accountable.

Many people claim the Holy Bible is not politically relevant. I would suggest those people have either not fully read it—or did not understand what they read.

From the very first page, Scripture makes a political declaration: The Lord is God. The Lord is One. There is only one King of Kings.

This is not Allah of the Quran. Allah is solitary, remote, unknowable. YHWH—the God of the Holy Bible—is personal, loving, relational. He created the universe and remains actively involved within and among His human creation. This distinction matters.

I could expand on this in theological depth, but that is not the purpose of this essay.

That truth alone is a direct challenge to every human power structure. In the ancient world, kings claimed divine authority. Scripture shatters that claim: Pharaoh is not sovereign. Caesar is not ultimate. Empires rise and fall under God—because God is the God of all nations.

This is not partisan politics. It is political theology.

When Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar,” that passage is often used to argue the Bible is apolitical. In reality, it does the opposite. Jesus acknowledges Caesar’s limited authority while denying him ultimate authority.

Coins belong to Caesar.
Human allegiance belongs to God.

That is not retreat—it is boundary-setting.

I am not interested in partisan games. I do not care who is on the Left or the Right.

I do care that this beautiful, free nation is preserved.

Whether people who have lived under America’s freedoms acknowledge it or not, we are among the most blessed nations on earth. And we are blessed only because we were built—brick by brick—by a people standing firmly on the Holy Bible and Judeo-Christian principles.

You are free to come here and be Buddhist.
You are free to come here and be Muslim.
You are free to come here and be atheist.

What you are not free to do is uproot the foundations of a Judeo-Christian nation.

You may come and enjoy these freedoms—freedoms you will not find elsewhere—but assimilation is required. Otherwise, another nation may better suit you. No one has the right to force their belief system onto this one.

I know how this world ends. No nation escapes that reality.

Until then, if you cannot live within the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation of independence and freedom—while still practicing your own beliefs—then this may not be the nation for you.

“I thank God that I have lived to see my country independent and free. She may long enjoy her independence and freedom, if she will. It depends upon her virtue.”
—Samuel Adams