If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty

What an amazing read this was. It just brings back to you why this great country was established. The work and the love put into building America as the shining city on top of the hill by our forefathers is really amazing to read. I personally feel that every child in high school should be required to not only read this but needs to recite the final words of Nathan Hale, the last sentence of Lincolns first inauguration speech, or George Washington's and Ben Franklin's address' to delegates who drafted the Constitution or they do not graduate. We need to get back to not only love America, but be open to its good, bad, and ugly past. Not destroy it! And, not despise others for their thoughts that don't agree with ours. God Bless America!

Eric Metaxas can s a brilliant writer, he speaks from the very soul of conviction.

Metaxas talks a good talk: he is a superb radio host. This book reads like one of the radio show conversations, witty, imploring, conservative, (insert oxford comma) and intelligent. Occasionally he sneaks a twenty dollar word into his uncomplicated prose - trying to stretch the vocabulary of the unwashed masses. It’s a forgivable flaw given his unassuming radio persona and fluid writing.The book exhorts us that if we want to keep our liberty, we have to keep it. See what I did there — Metaxas style — I used the book title and played on the two meanings of keep. If we want to have liberty, we have to tend it.He guides us to the work of the founders who were knew experientially that liberty is a fragile. Licence subverts liberty. Freedom depends on self-control. Or as he puts it in the book, freedom requires virtue and virtue needs faith. He makes the case for, at minimum, pietas.Eric’s call to return the American hero to the pedestal is a voice crying in the Empire State Building. And it’s a welcome voice. For too long, 50 years according to Metaxas, Americans have ceased looking up to heroes. And he’s raisin’ ‘em back up! George Whitfield, John Wesly, Nathan Hale, Ben Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere, John F Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the others he mentions are worthy of honor.Not one among them was close to perfect, but all met challenge with courage. Their character should inspire us, but only if we know of their virtue - even if it's a singular virtue. It’s not that we must hide their sins, but neither must we magnify them to pandemonius proportions. These were real men with dirt under their fingernails and some with ugly bones in their closets, but they chose the difficult path, at least some of the time, for the good of the country. Can we at least honour heroic acts if we cannot honour heroic men?Metaxas ends with a call to love America, not as a perfect country, but as our country. A country we must hold up to its ideals. He writes about the need for ritual, which is essential for patriotism. (See James K. A. Smith’s You are What You Love for more on how ritual, which he calls liturgy, shapes our loves). But the power of lost rituals cannot easily be conjured up, making the preservation of the rituals we have pivotal to the patriotism of the next generation. Hence his encouragement to engage the power of poetry to stir love of country in children.Eric tries to balance whitewashing American history and viewing America as the source of the world’s problems. I don't think these two irreconcilable views are the problem. The problem is the not hatred of America by the fringe, but the indifference of the masses. The growing idea among the technocracy that nations and patriotism are a relic of the past is the biggest threat to love of country. Love of country is as antiquated as wearing bloomers, to the trans-national tech companies like Google and Apple whose interest lie in spurning America rather than loving America. This book is a valuable corrective to the apathy to America wafting from urbane elites.The book stuffs in too many long quotes, a forgivable offence because they are quotes that should be known to Americans. Maybe this book will change that.In summary, not a weighty work of research or a spellbinding work of art, but a sensible lesson in why America is great and why we need to love her and help others to love her. And we need to help each other be better people if we truly want to Make America Great Again — registered trademark, all rights reserved — for the people...BoldlyAssertedGot a free review copy in exchange for an unbiased review.

History is being re-written. Rather that looking at what this country accomplished in the light of the 17th and 18th centuries, it is being judged by today's social justice. Our cynical society looks past the good, the honorable, and the true in a concerted effort to "find the dirt" on our founding fathers. Teachers love to point out that Jefferson and Washington were slave owners -- and when viewed in the light of today's understanding, this builds impenetrable emotional barriers that prevents students from even considering these men as heroes who dedicated their lives to the creation of the most exceptional experiment in political history; the idea that people could govern themselves.Eric Metaxas reopens the doors to examine the people who helped to found our country and he challenges us to, instead, examine the good, the moral, and the heroic -- both then and now. Eric is a prolific storyteller that weaves connections between the visions of our forefathers and how we, as a county, continue to be looked upon by the rest of world as the ones who always will come to the rescue.I teach history. I found myself cheering at finding new material to present to my students and creative ways to help them examine the honorable in who we were and who continue to be. Media sources of all sorts bombard our kids with messages of what selfish xenophobes Americans are. In the chapter Venerating Our Heroes, Eric states that one of the very reasons he wrote this book was that "...by ceasing to tell these mythic and heroic stories of our history, we had in fact lost touch with ourselves..." He continues, "We are more than political ideas. We are a people who live those ideas out in common." I began to create curriculum that encourages my students to research and write some of those very stories: Lessons from American Heroes.Another thoughtful application from the chapter The Idea of America, is to have students research some of the benevolent organizations founded here in America and how they are reaching around the world to bring aid and comfort. I will ask the question, how have we, as a nation, promoted that which is charitable?Finally, Eric challenges us to look at the morality of our leaders. This is where I can freely admit to being extremely cynical over my lifetime — one that has been filled with leaders whose grab for greed and power has only been equalled by their sexual improprieties. Never was there a more important plea than his call for "leaders who themselves love the country and the freedoms of this country more than they love themselves and their own career or reputations or 'legacies'." (p. 153)As we continue our self examination of who "we the people" really are in the light of the of ever-present violence and hate that permeates this world, If You Can Keep It offers a reassuring hope that we so desperately need at this time.

This is an important book; in fact I would go so far to say that this is the best and most important book I have read this year. I would encourage all Americans to read this, and even for American parents to get their high-school-age children to read it. It’s actually remarkably easy reading, and I will be reading it again very soon.“If You Can Keep It,” is sub-titled “The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty,” and it gets its title from an encounter at the close of the American Constitutional Convention in 1787, when Benjamin Franklin emerged from the arduous but yet successful negotiations to be confronted by a woman who asked him what kind of government they were getting – a monarchy or a republic? “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” was the reply.His words carried both satisfaction and warning. And the bulk of this book is unpacking the reasons for both of these sentiments. We are so used to hearing that America is a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” that the words don’t resonate the way they did at the Founding of the nation. The idea that people would actually govern themselves, and not be governed by others, was entirely new on the stage of history. Even ancient Greece, which introduced the idea of democracy, was not a true forebear of this experiment because those governments did not extend beyond the level of city-states, and by being sheer democracies could not guarantee liberty and justice for all, but only for the majority.The magnitude of Benjamin Franklin’s concern that from the outset, American liberty hung in the balance and could so easily be lost is far from obvious to us, as it was to Metaxas himself, until he learned as an adult the concept that was common currency at the time of the Founding, but in our day has all but disappeared from our conceptual frameworks and thus from our classrooms. This is the concept of “The Golden Triangle of Freedom, which goes like this: Freedom requires Virtue, Virtue requires Religion, and Religion requires Freedom.” You have a triangle with all three sides requiring the others to be sustained. If any one of them is lost or compromised, none of them can be sustained.Lest we think that this is nonsense, since we have freedom but have without harm jettisoned virtue and religion from the public square, we need to be reminded that freedom as understood by the Founders, is not licence. It is not the ability to do whatever you want, but the ability to do what you ought.If America really does require this “Golden Triangle of Freedom,” and if Freedom, Virtue, and Religion are nowhere to be found in contemporary culture, at least in the public square, then Metaxas is right to sound the alarm that America is in trouble.He reminds us that America and the ideals it embodies are not just for the benefit of Americans, but are for the benefit of the world. And so if they are lost, and America fundamentally changes into something unrecognizable to the Founders, everybody loses.It has become fashionable in the last fifty or so years to become critical of America while portraying patriotism as unsophisticated jingoism. But acknowledgement of America’s shortcomings, Metaxas argues, does not require viewing the country as irredeemable. And love of country need not, and indeed ought not, be uncritical. To love the good in someone encourages the object of that love to strive to be better. And to love the good in America encourages her to repent of her sins and strive harder to live up to her founding ideals.In America we have a republic if we can keep it. It is worth preserving, correcting, loving, and nurturing. It’s future hangs in the balance but Metaxas exudes the confidence that one by one, her citizens can recover the vision of Washington, Franklin, and the other Founders who left such a treasure as a trust to future generations.

Gives a very clear exposition of what America was meant to be and, the document that created the United States of America, The Constitution. It is truly unique. Any one who truly loves and values liberty and freedom should read this even if they are not an American. Every American has a grave responsibility to keep this “republic” if they value liberty and freedom.

Brilliant! Must Read

This book opened my eyes to America’s true history and her founding and why it truly is the greatest country in the world. This book should be required reading for all high school students everywhere!!

Everyone concerned about a free and democratic society needs to read this.