On the Republic and Its Soul  

The soul of a nation is shaped by its central myth. The myth can be grounded in fact. Tolkien and Lewis saw Christianity as the greatest of all myths precisely because the Gospel really happened. It’s factually true. Alternatively, the myth can be a persuasive fantasy, or even a zealous lie. But no society can endure without a unifying myth to order its meaning and mission. 

In medieval Europe, the Christian story penetrated every aspect of life. The Church explained humanity’s purpose. She defined virtue and sin, determined the good, and policed the bad. The Chinese Communist Party plays exactly the same role today. China officially tolerates Christianity. At the same time, it relentlessly harasses Christian clergy and believers. It bans religious education and, as noted by the Pew Research Center, “[Chinese] children under 18 are constitutionally prohibited from having any formal religious affiliation.” The reason is simple:  The party, with its committed atheism, is China’s “established Church.” It allows no competing narrative about the meaning of human life and relations to exist outside its authority. It brooks no interference with its vision. And that vision includes a global future with China at its center, displacing U.S. power with its own.   

It’s worth considering a few facts linked to that goal. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), China is now the global leader in shipbuilding, with more than half the world’s shipbuilding market. The U.S. share of the same market has dropped to barely 0.1 percent. A recent CSIS report noted that “In 2024 alone, one Chinese shipbuilder constructed more commercial vessels by tonnage than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II.”   

In the space of a few decades, China has also built the world’s largest navy. It produces warships at an annual rate sharply higher than the United States. And to borrow a warning from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, in any armed engagement with Beijing, “[China] would enjoy an immense advantage. Having modernized and expanded its merchant fleet, the Chinese military can now tap more than 5,500 vessels to transport troops, supplies, fuel, armaments, and tanks; … the U.S. has only 80 ships to accomplish the same mission.” This is ugly news for a traditional sea power like the United States. And meanwhile, China’s military buildup across from Taiwan continues, and the technological advantages of the United States erode as China steadily closes the science and tech gap. 

All of which is simply a preamble to what follows. 

Late this summer I picked up a copy of The Technological Republic, half-expecting to resent it.  American culture has a deeply pragmatic streak. It’s solution-oriented. This feeds the nation’s genius for technology. But it also fuels a naive and short-sighted techno-boosterism. The book’s authors, Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, are senior Silicon Valley figures. Zamiska is head of corporate affairs and legal counsel for Palantir Technologies. Karp, with a net worth north of $15 billion, is Palantir’s cofounder and CEO. Palantir provides high-level software solutions to both commercial and government clients. The work, to put it mildly, is lucrative. And yet the authors’ message is closer to an indictment of Silicon Valley than to another round of applause.   

In their opening pages, the authors argue that tech industry titans have “turned inward, focusing [their] energy on narrow consumer products, rather than projects that speak to and address our greater security and welfare.” That disregard for issues of national identity and purpose, they stress, now infects nearly every element of our leadership classes. And it’s toxic. The result “is a culture in which those responsible for making our most consequential decisions—in any number of public domains, including government, industry and academia—are often unsure of what their own beliefs are, or more fundamentally, if they have any firm or authentic beliefs at all.” 

The same theme pervades the entire book. For the Christian reader, it makes for compelling material. Take for example: “[We] need to admit that even the faintest whiff of actual religion in certain circles, an unironic belief in something greater,” is derided in many corporate boardrooms and top-tier universities “as essentially preindustrial and retrograde.” The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is “one of the most telling signs” of its own fraudulent open-mindedness. Another example: “If contemporary elite culture continues its assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state? What have we built, or aspired to build, in its place?” And another: “An aspirational desire for tolerance of everything has descended into support of nothing.” Finally: 

The leaders of Silicon Valley are drawn from a disembodied generation of talent in America that is committed to little more than vehement secularism, but beyond that nothing much of substance. We must, as a culture, make the public square safe again for substantive notions of the good or virtuous life, which, by definition, exclude some ideas in order to put forward others. 

The authors’ personal religious views, if any, are unclear. And the purpose of Christian faith is not to “sustain the state.” It’s to worship God and draw the world into his love. A healthy, unified culture is a secondary effect of that larger purpose. Nonetheless, the authors’ goals are admirable: mutual respect in civic dialogue; restraint in our disagreements; the recovery of shared values and vision; and the renewal of the nation’s economic, moral, and global leadership. To put it in Christian terms, Karp and Zamiska show persuasively that America has lost its soul. It has enormous wealth and material success, yet no sustaining myth, and in a world of determined enemies (China is merely the most dangerous of several), it urgently needs to find one again.   

The trouble is, the soul of a nation can never be constructed or cobbled back together as a means to some other end. It’s not a social utility. It’s a matter of the spirit. It’s an end in itself; a fact of conversion to some higher, organizing belief which then influences every behavior flowing from it. The historian Christopher Dawson observed that every culture, however it describes itself, ultimately has religious roots. America’s roots are biblical. Even the Enlightenment is a child of Christianity and unimaginable without the biblical framework it tried to outgrow. The Technological Republic has a wealth of good writing, worthy instincts, and valuable information. Where it fails is the authors’ inability to define what a renewed national identity and shared set of values would look like, and how to get them. It’s thick on analysis and thin on solutions.  

Where does that leave us as Christians? A forest begins with seeds. We change a culture by first changing ourselves; by knowing our faith, trusting God, and then actually living and defending what we claim to believe, whatever the cost. That sounds pathetically small and weak. And in a way, it’s both. It’s also easy to say, and hard to do, but in the long run, that’s what moves the world. It happened once, and it can happen again. The only obstacle that can prevent it is the indifference of our own hearts. 

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