Eric Metaxas. If You Can Keep It. Viking, 2016.

Students of American history may recognize the title from a famous quotation from Benjamin Franklin. After the United States Constitutional Convention passed the Constitution and the assembly was adjourning, a woman approached Franklin and asked him, “Well, doctor, what have we got?”

He answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Metaxas’ thesis resembles that of the late Ronald Reagan: We are always one generation away from losing our liberties. But this is not a political screed. He does not take sides on most issues, no alarms about Antifa or Proud Boys. Instead, he reminds us of our history and the need to be reminded of it.

I understand this. During the 1960s I was in junior high and high school. I attended a public school system that had a very good reputation. It was “progressive” to say the least. I studied the Communist Manifesto three times in five years. I never studied anything about the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The American History class I took in high school began with Reconstruction and ended with the Great Depression.

I am a reader, so I have read things by our founders since, and I am happy to teach the principles of the Declaration of Independence to my English classes. But I suspect many since the sixties have not been exposed to these things, or if they have, it is with a negative spin.

Metaxas notes the negative spin, too. Ultimately, he is an idealist. The principles enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the system provided in the Constitution, he claims, are worth preserving. No, we have not always followed them perfectly, no country has, but we can work towards them. Ideals are worth living up to even if we do not perfectly keep them.

If You Can Keep It emphasizes what Metaxas calls the miracle of self-government. The basic idea behind the American system is that good citizens are able to exercise self-control. They know what is best for themselves. They do not interfere with others’ rights and expect no one to interfere with theirs. This is has resulted in technological advances and creativity almost unparalled in history.

We note today that the more authoritarian governments, whether dictatorships or one-party rule, are derivative. What technological and personal advances they have made have been because they have imitated, borrowed, or even stolen practices and technology from the Western world, especially the United States.

Metaxas notes that in most cases, government is not meant to solve problems, but merely to provide justice and defense when needed. Very simply, as he puts it, “the government cannot force us to be good.” If there is a problem to be solved, “it must be the people—and the culture—that solves the problem.” (46) In the language of our founders, liberty works better than tyranny.

If You Can Keep It spends a good deal of time discussing George Whitefield, the itinerant evangelist who helped inspire the Great Awakening. Though Whitefield was an Englishman, he spent a lot of time going up and down the North American colonies. By the time he died in 1770, eighty percent of the colonial population had heard him speak. Though Franklin may have been coy about his own religious inclinations, Metaxas quotes the well-known passage from Franklin’s Autobiography about Whitefield and notes Franklin’s respect for what the Great Awakening accomplished.

The book reminds us of other American heroes, some well-known, others less so. We read about Washington, yes, but also Paul Revere and Nathan Hale. Why? Mostly so that we do not forget.

Metaxas spends a lot of time looking at Abraham Lincoln. He really set the tone when the country was brutally divided. We must look to “the better angels of our nature” and “the mystic chords of memory.” No, Washington and Lincoln were not perfect, but we can learn much from them. We can be grateful that we had them for leaders at critical times in our history. In other words, it is OK to have heroes.

Among other things, Metaxas cites an early speech by Lincoln, over twenty years before the Civil War, in which he said that all the armies of the world led by a Napoleon could not take a drink from the Ohio River unless we allowed them to. Let us be thankful for that and pray that it may never be.

Years ago I recall reading an article by P. J. O’Rourke. I believe it was in Rolling Stone magazine. He had visited Cuba and described life there. His conclusion was very simple: Nations into which people are trying to enter are superior to nations from which people are trying to emigrate. America may be shaking some, but it still offers hope and a model to the better angels of human nature.

Read this book. It recalls to this reviewer Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order, but it is shorter and more of a narrative. Consider the depth of what Metaxas shares. And pray, to paraphrase a review of De Tocqueville, that America will remain good. If so, it will remain great.