Human flourishing depends on healthy communities and America’s strength has historically been its vast, vibrant civil society–families, households, civic organizations, churches, synagogues, and neighborhoods. These mediating institutions help shape a citizenry’s enjoyment of freedom with their duty to family, neighbor, and country. After decades of being hollowed out, a renewal of healthy communities is vital to the preservation of freedom in America.

First and foremost, this begins with intact families where fathers, mothers, and guardians are present and responsible for the education, growth, moral grounding, and civic duty instilled in their children. Flourishing and intact families form the fundamental building block necessary for a healthy community.

Flowing outward from families are the values that maintain the physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental health of our communities. 

These values include dedication to preserving life, affirming the equal worth and self-dignity of every person in the eyes of their Creator, helping those in need through civic duty, defending the most vulnerable, unapologetic love of country and the American idea, and upholding the truth about the human condition in the face of an ever-flowing tide of deception.

Standing in the way of this revitalization, however, is a litany of challenges. 

Communities are being ravaged by opioids and other dangerous drugs, much of it flowing into neighborhoods from an unsecure southern border. Families are fearful about the safety of their homes as crime skyrockets and radicals seek to both abolish the police and strip away the right to self-defense with authoritarian gun control measures. Parents are battling against a radical transgender movement that rejects fundamental truths about human biology and pushes children down a path of despair and deception about who they are created to be. 

The Center for Renewing America is committed to defeating these societal poisons to revive the health of our families and communities. This will require a sustained focus on encouraging all Americans to live out and defend the values we know will reinvigorate our spirits, allow future generations to flourish, and renew the vitality of our great nation.