American Awakening

Eight Principles to Restore the Soul of America

John Kingston

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780310360759
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A healthy and united America--perhaps a country more united than it has ever been--is truly possible, and it starts with us. John Kingston draws on wisdom from history, science, faith, and culture, along with his own experiences, to offer eight principles for discovering purpose, meaning, and true community. 

We live in the greatest peace and prosperity that the world has ever known, but Americans are feeling more division, isolation, depression, and despair than ever before. These are issues of the soul. We seem unable to find purpose and meaning. We can't find "the life that is truly life"--a vibrant and purpose-filled way of living best experienced together.

From his youth, Kingston has always carried a vision for a free and united America. With an approachable and conversational style, as well as a dash of humor, Kingston draws on a diverse and compelling collection of wisdom--the parables of the Bible and the philosophy of Aristotle, the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, the songs of Bruce Springsteen and current studies from the best neuro and social scientists today--to remind us that there is no "them," there is only us, and we're in this together.

In American Awakening, Kingston offers eight timeless principles for breaking through this darkness and despair and cultivating a radical togetherness, both here in this country and around the globe. You'll discover the profound impact of:

• In-person connection
• Making more from less
• Discovering purpose
• Redeeming adversity
• Responding instead of reacting
• Finding your unique sense of belonging

Wherever you find yourself politically or spiritually, a healthy and united America starts with you. Join the Awakening movement and let's rediscover who we are--together.

CHAPTER 1

WE NEED TO REMEMBER

THE COST OF FORGETTING

Sometimes, as a culture, we forget.

The Romans came up with the perfect recipe for making concrete that enabled them to construct magnificent structures that have stood the test of time.¹ The Colosseum might look a little run-down, but you can forgive some of the deterioration when you realize the structure is almost two thousand years old. This concrete allowed builders to make beautiful homes that would impress even modern eyes. And the stunning remains of some of these structures still dot the Mediterranean landscape, including the Pantheon and Trajan’s Market.

Then something happened.

The Romans lost the recipe.

Why it wasn’t passed down from one generation to the next remains a mystery. Some speculate that the concrete recipe was a highly guarded trade secret, known only to stonemasons who died without passing down their knowledge. Others speculate the loss of the recipe was merely a mistake.

Whatever the case, the Romans somehow lost their ability to make the magic concrete, and they found themselves living in homes they no longer knew how to build. Though they enjoyed the benefits of houses built by their ancestors, their modern lives were precariously dependent on a successful recipe they could no longer re-create.

In America, we are in a similar place. Chances are, if you picked up this book, you don’t need to be convinced of how bad things have gotten in this country. You might have experienced—in yourself or your family—some of the many afflictions that plague our modern age: depression, addiction, abuse, or even suicide. You might even find yourself puzzled when you witness the inherent contradictions of modern life.

We are more connected than ever, but we’re still lonely.

According to a recent report from health insurance giant Cigna (with data generated ahead of the coronavirus crisis), almost half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone or left out. One in four rarely or never feel as though people really understand them. Two in five sometimes or always feel that their relationships aren’t meaningful and that they are isolated from others. One in five people report that they rarely or never feel close to people or feel like there are people they can talk to.²

Only half of us report having meaningful in-person social interactions on a daily basis.

Young adults (ages eighteen to twenty-two years old) report being the loneliest generation. This is surprising, especially for those of us who are far from the prime of our youth. They even claim to be in worse health than their older counterparts. Though it would be easy to blame this loneliness on the rise of social media, Cigna respondents who use social media all the time reported about the same level of loneliness of those who never do.

We have more access to healthier food, but we’re more obese.

Since there are a number of trendy diets, we can choose our specific diet strategy: carb cycling, paleo, intermittent fasting, ketogenic, Miami Beach, alkaline (also known as the Tom Brady diet). And most stores have plenty of healthy food options—from organic to “locavore” to vegan selections—but we’re fatter than ever.

In addition to facing a loneliness epidemic, we’re also in the throes of an obesity epidemic. Global obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. And of the people born between 1981 and 1996, 70 percent will be obese by the time they reach middle age.³ This means that obesity-related diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer will increase dramatically. New York University’s Marion Nestle, former chair of the department of nutrition and food studies, predicts that the costs of obesity-related illnesses will be “astronomical” in the future.⁴ The number of diabetes patients alone might increase enough to “break the bank of our healthcare system,” according to the director of the Center for Human Nutrition, Dr. James O. Hill.⁵

We have unimaginable wealth, but we think we’re poor.

In March 2019, Time magazine’s Charlotte Alter wrote a cover article on the youngest member of Congress. To promote it, the journalist tweeted that she and the congressmember—who were born the same year—had the same challenging economic experiences. “She was a Dunkaroos kid—I liked fruit roll-ups. People our age have never experienced American prosperity in our adult lives—which is why so many millennials are embracing Democratic socialism.”

Her tweet caused many people to immediately google “What are Dunkaroos and Fruit Roll-Ups?” (To save you the trouble, they are both snack foods that the reporter believed helpfully designated people below thirty.) Her tweet also caused many to scratch their heads in disbelief.

Though no nation or economic system is perfect, America has provided so much wealth, stability, and prosperity that people who grew up eating Dunkaroos are some of the richest, safest, and most privileged people ever to walk this planet. In the past decade, ahead of the coronavirus recession, this generation had known only steady economic growth, and unemployment rates were lower than any in recorded history. And the affordability of near-miracle products and services? Astounding. From inexpensive smartphones with remarkable functions (thank you, Samsung and Apple) to car services that arrive at the push of a button (looking at you, Uber and Lyft) to free navigation services around the planet (Waze and Google Maps), we all get so much more for our money now. As one observer noted, “Working adults before the 2000s understand how difficult it would be, for instance, to separately buy all the functions available on a simple smartphone. Wages have also grown . . . living standards have increased. Put this way, millennials live better than John D. Rockefeller.”⁶

We have an increasingly pain-free existence, but we’re medicating ourselves to death.

Holding aside the coronavirus pandemic, we live in a time of relative ease, where modern conveniences isolate us from the hardship of manual labor and diplomacy from the necessity of combat. Yet in spite of our peace and prosperity, we’re accidentally killing ourselves with drugs and alcohol at an unprecedented rate.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 770,000 people died from a drug overdose from 1999 to 2018.

In 2018 alone, 67,400 people overdosed; around 68 percent of those deaths involved an opioid—that’s six times the number of death-byopioid than occurred in 1999.⁷

Excessive alcohol use is responsible for about 88,000 deaths a year, including one in ten total deaths among working-age adults ages twenty to sixty-four years.⁸ This tragic trend shows little sign of abating.

We have comfortable lives, but we’re ending them prematurely.

Too frequently we turn on the news or check our Twitter feeds and see that another high-profile person has taken his or her own life: from Kate Spade to Anthony Bourdain to Robin Williams and so many others. Suicide is at a fifty-year peak. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study in 2016 revealing that suicide rates in the United States have risen nearly 30 percent since 1999.⁹ Since 2008, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death for all ages.¹⁰ In 2016 suicide became the second leading cause of death for ages ten to thirty-four and the fourth leading cause for ages thirty-five to fifty-four.¹¹ In the United States between 2007 and 2015, the number of children and teens who experienced suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts so strongly that they visited the emergency room doubled.¹² (Imagine how many didn’t go to the hospital.)

Nearly 150,000 suicides and drug- and alcohol-related deaths occur per year—an unprecedented and staggering number—and as a consequence, American life expectancy fell three of the past four years before COVID-19.

Source: Social Capital Project analyses of CDC data

We’re more educated, but we know less.

Today we take for granted technological advancement that would’ve stunned our predecessors. Compared with them, we are godlike in our immediate access to information. Also, more people are going to college than ever before in American history. In 1965, 5.9 million Americans enrolled in college. In 2018, that number was 20 million.¹³ Now almost 90 percent of students attend college within eight years of high school graduation, despite the skyrocketing cost of education.¹⁴

But even with all this education and access to information, we have less knowledge and seem to lack the basic reasoning skills of our predecessors. In fact, we’re in the middle of what some people have called a “disinformation age.”

Stanford historian Robert Proctor even created the term agnotology, derived from the Greek word agnosis, to describe “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.” He believes that ignorance is increasing, especially surrounding hot-button topics, because so many people are purposefully spreading incorrect information to suppress truth.¹⁵ That may very well be true, but it’s not hard to mislead people who are willing to be misled.

I’m sure you’ve seen one late-night talk show send someone out into the streets of New York to ask basic questions to pedestrians. Jimmy Kimmel most recently perfected the art of asking basic questions—about the world or government—only to reveal that people can’t name their congressman, the vice president, or whether or not the president released his tax returns. Though the idiot-on-the-streets schtick might be misleading, it might be funnier if it didn’t resonate so much with the reality of our failing public schools and general decline of knowledge.

We not only know less, we think less sharply. An examination of IQ scores of men born between 1962 and 1991 shows that IQ increased for men born between 1962 and 1975, but then began a steady decrease.¹⁶

If the biblical warning “people are destroyed from lack of knowledge” is true, we’re in bad shape.¹⁷ Because we’ve forgotten more than just the recipe for concrete. We’ve forgotten the basic principles of sound living.

We live in a culture that still benefits from the wisdom of those who went before us, and yet we are flailing and seemingly failing today because we’ve forgotten the recipe.

But there is a solution.

Over the course of history, scientists have tried to re-create the lost recipe of Roman concrete, and rumors abounded. Ancient builders in China added sticky rice to their concrete because they believed their staple food would make it stronger. Did the Romans include unexpected ingredients like milk? Blood? The knowledge was lost. The modern cement you can buy at a hardware store today—though strong and inexpensive—crumbles after several years. But what was it about the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by David Brooks and Anne Snyder
• Prologue: Restoring the Soul of America
• 1. We Need to Remember: The Cost of Forgetting
• Part 1: Who you Are
• Part 2: Who we Are
• Epilogue: Our Journey Continues
• Acknowledgments
• Notes