If You Can Keep It, Part 3: The Republic Begins at the Table

Where a free country is preserved

Ask most people where the future of the country is decided and they will point you to Washington, D.C. I believe they are looking in the wrong direction. Our future is not decided in the halls of government. It is decided in our homes, around our tables and in the small family habits of everyday Americans. 

Ben Sasse, a former U.S. Senator, father, husband, and terminally ill man, recently accepted an award where he then spoke from the podium reiterating what I have just said. Speaking with a clarity that often only comes when we realize our days are numbered, he spent much of his remarks talking about parents instead of politics. 

Our deepest problems, he told the room, are problems of habit and love and community more than problems of policy. We are never just one new law away from healing a culture. The things that really shape a good person and a good citizen, wisdom, self-control and a moral compass, are not things any government can bestow on others. They are taught in the home. 

The most important institution in the country, he said, is not Congress and it is not the courts. It is the family, the place where a person's character is first formed. 

The thing that worried him most was not war, but comfort. A country does not work, he said, if its people decide that being comfortable is the highest thing to achieve. We did not go to the moon, the way President Kennedy put it, because it was easy. We went because it was hard. Being an American has always asked for us to work with grit, patience, and a willingness to be inconvenienced.

Sasse then gave the room four plain habits to push back against the drift of our country.

1. Read real books and read them aloud to your children. 

2. Teach your children to work, with little jobs that grow into bigger ones, because a person needs to know how to do hard work. 

3. Keep a day of rest and put the devices away, especially at dinner, so the people sitting right in front of you get the best of your attention. 

4. Travel a bit. Not for the luxury of it but for the good kind of inconvenience, the kind that stretches a child and teaches them the difference between what they truly need and what they want. 

For years I have been telling anybody who would listen that the table shapes the home, the home shapes the family, and families shape society. I have built my life around the idea that a set table and a shared meal are not little things, but the very soil from which good people grow. And here was a senator, speaking with conviction, telling a room full of accomplished strangers the same thing in his own words. Put the phones away. Sit down together. Give your attention to the people around your table as you break bread together. 

The early church broke bread together in their homes and ate with glad and generous hearts (Acts 2:46). Most of Jesus’ ministry was done around food and the table. 

Sasse reminded the room of something we tend to forget. We picture the founders as old men in powdered wigs, but most of them were young. Hamilton was twenty-one the year of the Declaration. Madison was twenty-five, Jefferson was thirty-three, and “old” John Adams was just forty. They were young and ambitious and far from perfect, but they understood that the country they were building would stand or fall on the character of the people in it. A republic is not preserved by policies out of Washington. It is preserved by normal people shaping the character of their families, in their homes, one ordinary meal at a time. Scripture says righteousness lifts a nation up while sin drags a people down (Proverbs 14:34).

This year our country turns 250. There will be parties and parades and more backyard BBQs than we can count. But the most patriotic thing many of us will do this year will not happen at a podium or a polling place. It will happen at home, when we set the table, call everybody in, put the phones away, and give the people we love our full attention. Benjamin Franklin told us we had a republic if we could keep it. I believe to the depths of my soul, that keeping our republic begins at home. 

Together with you,

Lisa Lou

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