For most of American history, the argument goes, the idea that there are good and bad ways to live was treated as common sense. A new essay in American Thinker by J.B. Shurk argues that this consensus collapsed during the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s — and that the country has been paying the price ever since.
Shurk’s piece, published September 12, 2026, makes two central claims. First, that individual Americans will not find happiness unless they recommit to what he calls virtuous lives. Second, that the nation itself will not endure unless its leaders abandon “moral equivocation” in favor of what he describes as righteous truth-telling.
The argument for personal virtue
Shurk traces what he sees as a sixty-year slide toward “nihilism, self-gratification, cynicism, amorality, emptiness, listlessness, and existential dread” back to a specific shift: society’s decision to stop treating morality as a guide to behavior and start treating it as an outdated system of social control. In the past, he writes, poor decisions brought social stigmatization, which produced shame, which in turn encouraged reflection and self-correction. After the cultural upheavals of the mid-twentieth century, he argues, institutions — churches included — came to treat the very act of extolling virtue and condemning sin as an impermissible sin of its own.
The consequences, in his telling, are visible on any American street. By treating addiction as a psychological condition beyond the reach of moral judgment, he contends, society absolved addicts of moral agency — and now “tolerates” neighborhoods where vagrants publicly drink, use drugs, and defecate. He notes that recreational marijuana is legal in much of the country and that, in his view, it has become politically incorrect to judge those who depend on cocaine, heroin, and other opiates to function.
He also links a steady decline in regular church attendance to a steady rise in mental health treatment, arguing that because medical professionals were taught there is a pharmacological therapy for every illness, patients now spend decades of their lives on pharmaceutical drugs. In his framing, social consciousness is hazy because members of society do not think clearly.
Family, marriage, and the loneliness epidemic
A natural outgrowth of that toleration, Shurk writes, has been the normalization of broken families. He argues that the Sexual Revolution ushered in an era of libertinism that the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision supercharged, decoupling sex from procreation and displacing chastity with promiscuity. In a society that glorifies pleasure over sacrifice, he says, marriage has become an object of derision while divorce is celebrated as an act of liberation.
From there he draws a direct line to what he calls an epidemic of loneliness. Many women who chose sexual liberation, he writes, sacrificed the support of a husband and the blessings of motherhood for a party that gets less fun after forty. Many men who gave up on marriage sacrificed a wife’s support and the sense of purpose a family provides. And many children, who had no choice in the matter, grew up dysfunctional — or, in his words, menaces to society — because they received too little discipline, direction, or love. His conclusion: “It turns out that life without family or God is detrimental to one’s mental health.”
A critique of leadership and ‘fake virtue’
The essay’s second half turns from personal conduct to political leadership, and here Shurk’s argument becomes an indictment of contemporary progressive priorities. A society that demonizes hard work, skill, and merit as forms of “white supremacy” while granting special privileges based on skin color, he writes, replaces true virtue with fake virtue. Societies that celebrate victimhood manufacture victims, and nations filled with victims, in his formulation, can never be victorious.
He lists what he considers virtues — diligence, temperance, patience, humility — and contrasts them with what he considers imitations: political correctness, racial grievance, “transgenderism,” sexual fetishization, and unlawful residence in the United States. Until America’s leaders acknowledge that distinction, he warns, the country will deprive each generation of the skills needed to succeed.
Shurk anticipates the obvious objection — that American leaders never tell the truth — and answers it with a litany of grievances. He writes that high-ranking FBI and CIA officials lied about President Trump colluding with Russia, that fifty-one members of the intelligence community lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop being a Russian information operation, that the federal government has lied about border security for fifty years, that election officials continue to lie about vote fraud, and that public health officials lied about COVID’s origins, the efficacy of masks, the need for closures, and the safety of the vaccines. He also points to record-low trust in corporate news media, claims that “fake Christians” celebrate Pride Month and even political assassination, and cites polling indicating that a record 89% of Americans believe government corruption is widespread.
That level of public distrust, he argues, is unsurvivable for American institutions. Leaders, in his view, cannot reclaim moral authority while embracing vice — cannot inspire courage by being cowards, or build a strong society atop cultural weakness.
An old argument in a new moment
Shurk’s essay is less a policy brief than a moral sermon, and it wears that identity openly. Its closing line — “For America to be great again, Americans must first remember how to be good” — restates a thesis that social conservatives have advanced for generations, though rarely with this sweeping a catalogue of alleged institutional lies attached.
What makes the piece notable is not the novelty of its diagnosis but the breadth of its indictment. Shurk is not merely arguing that America has lost its moral compass; he is arguing that the loss is total — spanning family life, medicine, media, public health, elections, and the clergy — and that no political program can repair it without a prior spiritual and cultural renewal.
Whether one accepts that framing or rejects it, the essay reflects a durable strain of American thought: the conviction that a republic depends on the character of its citizens, and that no amount of institutional reform can substitute for virtue. Shurk’s contribution is to state that conviction without apology, and to insist that the alternative — a society that refuses to distinguish between good and bad ways to live — leads, in his words, to a place that looks a great deal like Hell.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/virtue-matters/