Now in its third year, the Fidelity Month movement calls for a nationwide recommitment during the month of June to America’s historic sources of unity and strength: our shared fidelity to God, our spouses and families, our local communities, and our country. The widespread sharing of these basic values has long constituted a foundational aspect of our nation’s identity and are what has long enabled us to come together as Americans despite our differences in race, color, ethnicity, and creed.
While Fidelity Month is not alone among movements seeking to challenge the expressive individualism and feelings-based morality that has become pervasive in our modern culture, it does adopt a distinctively positive and forward-looking approach by directing our attention toward the many opportunities to unite in pursuit of cultural renewal. As Robert P. George, Fidelity Month’s founder, has said:
Our movement is not a reactionary one; on the contrary, we are lighting a candle rather than merely cursing the darkness. Of course, there are people who do not share our beliefs and values—there are no doubt some who might object to Fidelity Month and promote beliefs and values that run directly contrary to its mission. But instead of simply reacting to their errors, we are joyously proclaiming an alternative (and timeless) vision of the true, the good and the beautiful.
Carl Trueman has written that the Western self is “plastic,” with nature bent to the will of the individual. Traditional principles of morality are discarded in favor of identitarian ideologies. But human flourishing and authentic freedom are not realized in spite of traditional moral norms and conceptions of the human person—rather, they are realized through them.
Those principles take form in what Yuval Levin has called “formative institutions,” which function as engines of character formation. Levin writes that “all of us have roles to play in some institutions we care about, be they familial or communal, educational or professional, civic, political, cultural or economic. Rebuilding trust in those institutions will require the people within them—that is, each of us—to be more trustworthy.” In other words, we must seek to practice the virtue of fidelity, which calls us to be faithful to our moral responsibilities—especially in our roles as members of families and communities.
Fidelity Month affirms that this vision of human freedom and the human person is also what underpins America’s constitutional principles—principles to which we citizens must rededicate ourselves for our country to flourish.
This is why polling data, such as that from The Wall Street Journal in 2023, which inspired Fidelity Month, should deeply concern us and call us to action. When our traditional sources of unity and strength—faith and religious community, marriage and family, personal integrity, patriotism and love of country—crumble at the institutional level and become unimportant to increasing numbers of Americans, we are in big trouble.
But, as Prof. George noted, rather than merely react, Fidelity Month avoids identitarian and ideological approaches and instead cultivates grassroots efforts to inspire fidelity at the local level. This strategy is what is best able to build common ground in our pluralistic society, because it recognizes fundamental principles of fidelity that we have historically held in common.
Fidelity to God reminds us that, despite our creedal differences, we share a common understanding of the Creator as the ultimate source of our rights and duties. The great documents and speeches of our nation’s history—the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, for example—give voice to this conviction. But far from being a call for established religion in America, renewing fidelity to God is simply to recognize the harmony between religion and public life that Alexis de Tocqueville drew particular attention to in Democracy in America, which he described as “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.” While religion has certainly suffered decline in American public life in recent decades, there are signs that may be changing. At a personal level, fidelity to God calls us to reorient our lives toward prayer, study, and active participation in the life of one’s faith community. Any lasting cultural renewal will necessarily begin here.
Fidelity to spouses and families is crucial to the health of the cornerstone of human society. As University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has reported, faithful devotion to one’s spouse and children is the most successful and happy life choice that most people can make. Children who grow up in a stable home led by a mother and a father have immense advantages. Despite widespread falsehoods about the futility of pursuing marriage and parenthood, the timeless truth of the beauty of marriage and family life endures. Indeed, the sensibilities of Gen Z may perhaps provide an opportunity to teach these truths again.
Speaking about Fidelity to Communities and Country during a 2024 Fidelity Month webinar, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said, “The greatest act of patriotism is something we can do every day […] start, initiate, or rekindle friendships with people with whom we might disagree.” Roberts’s point is that institutions must be rebuilt at the local-community level—a process that will involve cooperation with our neighbors of diverse backgrounds and worldviews.
The process of rebuilding institutions isn’t something that happens on a real high level, on the board of directors and the chief executive officers. It’s something that we do as individuals. … If we want people to believe more in newspapers and the military and law enforcement and the Supreme Court, etc., we have to go about our own daily lives in a way that’s trustworthy [and] faithful.
Through legislative resolutions, speaking events, written publications, promotional campaigns, and myriad additional resources, Fidelity Month provides us with an annual opportunity to recommit ourselves and our communities to the exercise of ordered liberty through these habits of faithfulness. Despite our many differences, this June should be an opportunity for all of us to remember those ideals and institutions that give America its unity and strength from our nation’s beginning—and to seek to renew them now.
