The Religious Humbling of America

The decline of religion in America is not a private matter of belief; it is a public crisis of character. In 2025, a study revealed that the percentage of Americans who consider religion personally important fell below 50 percent for the first time. Tocqueville saw religion as the secret of American democracy. Yet this secret is being dismantled and disregarded, and religion has acquired a bad name. Opponents often level accusations of hypocrisy against the religious: “You say you are religious, but you still do this?” But the accusation is itself an affirmation of religion’s values, even if religious people don’t always live up to them. The recognition of hypocrisy confirms the original principle. Religions, in general, have certain ideas about how to treat others and live a morally upstanding life. And these ideas are deep, complex, and interesting — not simply “be nice.”

It is tragic to see religion wane in America at a moment when we desperately need it. Even as Americans insist on meaning, they are steadily abandoning the institutions that it has long flowed through. Much of what ails us in this country is an impoverishment of the ideas that religion nourishes and promotes. Understanding and recovering those central values would help lead our society back from the ill feeling and ill will that have so powerfully gripped us.

The core religious ideas to which I refer — the dignity of every human being, gratitude, purpose as necessary to a well-lived life, humility, decency, the importance of community — have their source in belief in God. But we don’t need to enter a theological argument to identify such values. Most people remain, in some deep sense, religious beings: believing in something that is greater than ourselves, intuiting a world that has a mystery at its heart, yearning for a direction to our dreams. Even if we reject traditional religion, a large majority of us still affirm that decency, goodness, humility, and justice aren’t simple whims but essential for the stability of the social order, of our nation and our world. But along the path of progress — social, technological, financial — we have lost the art of practicing, or at times even recognizing, such values.

Having spent so much of my life in religious institutions, I am keenly aware that what religious people say and what they do can often be radically different. When I was a pulpit rabbi and something at the synagogue was upsetting a congregant, the offended person would invariably say, “How, in a religious institution . . . ?!” As with anti-religious accusations of hypocrisy, they were highlighting religion’s moral core. Whether they were in the right or the wrong, they were correct in using the term religious and not the fashionable spiritual. Spirituality is generally about how one feels, and religion is what one does with that feeling. Americans have not become secular; they have become spiritual in exactly the way that costs nothing, reinforced by spurious gurus and pabulum-stuffed bestsellers.

In the absence of religion, people are drawn to spiritual teachers who promise a sort of automatic change in the world — that everything responds to what you “put out there.” If you act a certain way, wallets and hearts and opportunities will magically open to you, as if the world will conform to your whim. The difference between spirituality and religion can be illustrated by the wise words of a 17th-century rabbi, Leon Modena. He observed that if you saw a man pulling a boat to the shore from some distance away, you might think he was pulling the shore to the boat. In prayer, Modena taught, we are not pulling God toward us, toward our whims and wishes, but rather we are pulling ourselves closer to God. You must change yourself to change the world, and that means how you act, not merely what you feel. Religion is about actions, the limbs rather than the emotions. It is a call to actualized spirituality.

The absence of religious sensibility is palpable in America today. The absence makes itself known in our failure to listen to one another, our preference for entertainment over information, and in our disregard for those outside of our ideological camp. A religious attitude toward life takes other human beings — and one’s own soul — seriously. It has strength of conviction but also flexibility in listening to and learning from others and from the past. It sees the world as enchanted and our lives as drawing meaning from what is greater than our impulses or desires. Important and precious as the material world is, it is not all. A life lived with balance and values is a better life than one lived in extremes and nihilism.

America, champion of political and economic freedom, contains within it seeds of both greatness and greed. Consider Ayn Rand, one of the most influential thinkers on the American scene in the past century; her signature philosophy of objectivism holds that people owe nothing to others, including family members. Rand believed that people should act in their own self-interest and that altruism is destructive. She argued that self-interest is the only moral foundation. People should help others only if they want to, if they want to see others become happy and productive.

I once was invited to debate at an objectivist conference, and I asked my opponent: If a child was literally starving in front of you, would you have an obligation to give him food? His answer was that he might well give the child food, but not out of obligation.

That self-centeredness filters through our society, taking the form of exhortations to rid ourselves of people who are “suppressive” or “toxic” or who, in one way or another, make onerous demands on us. Paradoxically, in a society where advertising seeks to create and then fill needs, we are advised that other people’s needs are not our concern. Self-reliance is the call of the day, and if someone falters in that sphere, helping her is too often conflated with enabling her failure. Non-interference is the overarching principle, and the only mandate toward others is not to force, mistreat, or harm them.

Yet concern for others, and solicitude about their feelings, is a deeply religious impulse. Manners and civility demonstrate to others that we share the world, that our own place in it requires an accommodation to others. Honking your horn in a residential neighborhood violates simple derech eretz (consideration of othersor, more specifically, hezek shemi’ah, damage through noise). More broadly, it reflects a solipsism that does not see others as genuine kin, as fellow images of God.

When I was growing up, if anyone spiked a football, much less danced in the end zone, it was considered crass. It was an insult to your opponent and unsportsmanlike. Humiliating the losing side was not a triumph but a cause for shame. Now, one of the only public displays of faith is thanking God in the end zone for defeating the other team, as though God has a stake in the game. What does that reflect? Is God a fan of yours? In everything from music to public life, we are subjected to a steady stream of people’s celebration of themselves.

Humility is a fundamental religious value, and it is the only characteristic that the Torah felt compelled to identify in Moses: “Now Moses was very humble, more so than any man on earth” (Numbers 12:3). Humility begins with recognizing how little of what we have is our own doing. When people compliment you on your intelligence, it may feel nice, but you did not earn IQ points or mental capacities. They were a gift from God. You were born with them or perhaps born into an environment that encouraged their development — another gift. You were lucky. The same is true of appearance, physical prowess, and all sorts of skills that people were born with but nonetheless take pride in as though they were an accomplishment. It’s true that you can sharpen what you were given; you can work hard. But even the conditions that permit hard work were given to you. Had you been born in a relocation camp in sub-Saharan Africa, you couldn’t have aced that calculus test, because the test and the means of studying for it wouldn’t be part of your life experience. If you are lucky, you were born not only with a capacity for work but in a country or a civilization where that work might be rewarded.

Abraham Lincoln declared in 1859, “I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” and in a letter in 1860 wrote that he was not “a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.” How far we have come from that America. In a world that promotes self-esteem and discourages self-doubt, who speaks this way anymore in public life? Still, surrounded by people convinced that they’re good, do we not yearn for a leader of outstanding merit who believes that he is not good enough? The reality that our greatest president could speak humbly in a way that might disqualify him from public life today reminds us that humility and achievement are not incompatible; they are simply unfashionable. That both Moses and Lincoln were distinguished by their humility reminds us how often that attribute is paired with greatness.

Humility is cousin to gratitude. Many times people have come to me when something difficult has befallen them and asked, “Why me?” Rarely does someone come into my office and say, “I have always had a home and a full belly — why me?” Or, “I grew up with parents who loved me and cared for me — why me?” Our good fortune seems natural and inevitable — only our misfortunes require explanation. Gratitude is related to humility because it requires admitting that something good was done for me, something I did not create or perhaps earn but that nonetheless enriches my life. When I was growing up, the exemplar of America was the speech that Lou Gehrig, dying from ALS, gave in his final appearance at Yankee Stadium: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” The recognition of blessing was once a central part of our humanity and of being an American. Only the humble can recognize blessing for what it truly is, and it makes the blessing so much sweeter.

Treasuring these values does not negate the real injustices of the world, the necessity to fight evil, or the recognition that certain situations and individuals diminish one’s life rather than enhance it. But these values are, for religious traditions, the baseline. In the Torah, God does not pronounce the world perfect, just “good.”

Gratitude and humility remind us how much of our world was shaped by the sacrifice of others whom we will never know. The closing lines of the greatest English novel, Middlemarch, reinforce this lesson:

Saying that America needs more religion means that we are deeply in need of these godly qualities. We owe it to one another to act with decency, and we owe it to ourselves to temper ego with humility, and we owe it to God and country to live in gratitude.