Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.—John Adams

David Brooks used that quotation in his New York Times opinion article, We Need to Think Straight About God and Politics, in today’s New York Times. It got me thinking about the need for new forms of spiritual faith to bring the United States and other Western nations from the political brink.

As a first-generation American, I think of my country in aspirational terms. The people who wrote the Constitution aspired to create something new—a republic based on 18th-century Enlightenment values. Immigrants, like my father and many before and after him, aspired to build better lives for themselves and their children than was possible in the lands they left behind.

Neither the nation nor its immigrants always succeeded, and we’re acutely well aware of the ways in which the nation still hasn’t achieved all of its goals, but the attitude—at least since the Civil War—has been one of returning to the core founding aspirations. That’s what Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address proclaimed and why it has been remembered.

For the first time since Lincoln’s day, the aspirational values on which the nation was founded are being seriously threatened. As a Buddhist, my equanimity informs me that shit happens, but my relative bodhicitta (the desire to reduce suffering in worldly as well as spiritual ways) suggests that I should work to preserve what’s good about my country....

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