Americans may not agree on much, but they agree on this: we’re at a pivotal moment. Exactly how pivotal depends on who you ask. After all, our country’s had its share of challenges in its relatively young existence. We’ve survived a civil war, segregation, the Great Depression, two World Wars, presidential assassinations, natural disasters, national tragedies, terror attacks, a global pandemic, and so much more. Maybe that’s why so many people underestimate the gravity of this moment, Os Guinness says. But they shouldn’t.

“I wish people understood [this] moment,” the beloved intellectual told Joseph Backholm on the latest episode of “Outstanding.” “The whole of the West [is] in crisis,” he warned, calling it a “civilizational moment” for both the church and the American Republic. It’s different than what the divided nation faced under Abraham Lincoln, Guinness insisted. If radical Marxism prevails, “that’s as much a secession from the Republic as the South and its division from the North. We’re on the verge of America becoming unrecognizable,” and if we don’t address something as simple as the border crisis, the best-selling author wanted people to know, the country as we know it is “finished.” “President Biden’s policies are literally … suicidal,” he said somberly.

Of course, Joseph pointed out, we all hear that there’s “still so much more that unites us than divides us” — a platitude that Guinness called outright “rubbish.” “There’s a huge difference in the culture, say, of California and the culture of Alabama. And as many people point out, the only unity is Home Depot. But that isn’t what once united you. America as the world’s first new modern nation [adopted the] motto ‘E pluribus unum.’ You had to have a ‘unum’ because you had such incredible diversity.” Remember, he explained, the European nations already had linguistic or ethnic homogeneity. “They didn’t need any teaching of what united. They were united. America didn’t have that naturalist [advantage]. You had to teach it. So America is a nation by intention and by ideas. … People got to know what it is to be American, to balance all the diversity.”

Today, Os shook his head, that’s all gone. “It used to be taught in public schools, and that went out the door at the end of the ’60s. And then you had things like Howard Zinn’s America or the 1619 Project in America. So the public schools have been damaging enough, but the open border has just been the end.”

Is that a depressing thought? Absolutely, he conceded, but it’s also factual. “Have you heard any political leader in Washington defend the Republic” lately, Guinness asked? “Abraham Lincoln was a teacher of America. ... President Reagan, particularly in his General Electric speeches and so on, had an incredible grasp of the principles of freedom. Who’s doing that today? President Trump talks about making America great again. Joe Biden talks about restoring the soul of America. Neither of them say what the soul was or what made America great in the first place. It wasn’t [our] military. It wasn’t the economy. It was the American ideas, freedom, and so on.”

And what makes this country unique, dating back to the early Founders, Os explained, was the “great understanding” that freedom is only possible “if you have moral virtue and faith underlying it — because otherwise … it’ll wash away.” As Burke put it, “You’ve got to put chains on your appetites, otherwise freedom will go.” So it must be “ordered freedom,” Guinness explained. “The Bible’s way at Sinai was an ordered freedom. Freedom within the covenant. For America, freedom within the Constitution” — except now, he lamented, people are just throwing out the Constitution. “It’s madness.”

Much of it crystallized last year after the October 7 massacre in Israel. In that instant, Os pointed out, the world saw two things converging on American campuses: the long march of radical Marxism through our institutions and radical Islamism in the form of pro-Hamas protests. It’s no longer just hatred of Israel, Guinness cautioned. It’s hatred of America and the West as well. “We’ve reached a very serious stage,” he said. “If the elite universities of the world are in favor of ideas that undermine the West and the world, we really are in an extreme moment.”

That said, there is something we can do about it. The Bible adds something to the decline and fall we’ve seen of other nations, “which is exile and return. Even in exile, you can repent and return to the Lord, and He promises He will return to us. So in the church you have the story of revival. Again and again, the church has declined and become corrupt and heretical and apostate and being pathetic and awful, and then revival and reformation.” Remember, the Brit said, “England was turned around completely, and America could be again. So yes, decline is usually followed by fall and will be unless we have the hope of exile and return. Reformation. Revival. Renewal.”

Our belief in freedom should include the freedom to repent. “So nothing is inevitable.” But, Guinness was candid, it will be the fault of the church if America is lost forever. “Christians who disengage and drop out and refuse to vote or whatever, that’s a failure of discipleship as well as citizenship. And that’s appalling.” To turn this around, this “civilizational crisis,” we need a creative minority, Os implored. “Creative minorities inspire the rise of a civilization. They also prevent its fall if they’re active and powerful enough.”

But that means being faithful, he added. “We’ve got the answers.” It doesn’t matter if it looks like we’re losing at the ballot box or in the culture. “We can’t know the times in which we’re living. But we’ve got to serve God’s purpose in the generation he’s put us in. And the call is never to dominate or to win, but to be faithful. … You’ve got to understand the day we’re in and then say, ‘Lord, what’s Your purpose today?’ And do it with all our hearts.”

Guinness said he meets Christians all the time who misinterpret the times we’re living in and decide to keep their heads down like they believe the early church did. “That’s entirely the wrong parallel. The early Christians lived under a dictatorship,” he pointed out. “They had almost zero room to move. None politically, right? But they were faithful and they won. We live in a republic based on the Hebrew Republic, where everyone is responsible for the whole system. So every American is responsible for the American Republic. So for Christians to drop out, it’s a failure of discipleship as well as citizenship. It’s absolutely appalling.”

Even if you’re the last person left standing, “have confidence in the Lord, come what may.” The one thing we cannot do is be “pulled into [the] wilderness and accepting what the world around us thinks.”

As for the here and now, the great thinker concluded, “I’m English, and so I’m non-partisan here. I can’t vote. I hope one side wins, but I would say to all those who support that side, probably all of our listeners, if he wins, he’s only a placeholder. The real task remains to be done in the next four years — to restore and rebuild the Republic. …[I]f the side we want to win wins, that isn’t the end of it,” Guinness warned. “It’s the beginning of the real task.” May we all be ready for it.