Os Guinness, A Prophet in Our Time

Book Review, America Agonistes: America’s 250^th and the Restoration of a Nation in Conflict with Itself and Its Past

Across five decades, Os Guinness has been one of the most compelling and persuasive voices in the Western world. Over his long career and more than 30 books, he has demonstrated time and again that he stands among the most thoughtful and articulate social critics, thinkers, and Christian apologists in our time.

He set the stage in 1973 with his very first book, Dust of Death, in which he dissected the counterculture revolution of the 1960s and the introduction of radical, violent Marxist politics into the public square, combined with the promotion of Eastern religions, psychedelic drugs, and the coming of a “new age of humanism.”

“Underneath the efforts of a generation, lay dust,” he wrote. Indeed, the years have proved just how accurate that claim was.   

The counterculture was failing and would continue to do so, he reasoned, because its façade of idealism and struggle for communal freedom – free from the consequences of responsibility and accountability – concealed a growing disillusionment and loss of meaning in the West, including the US.

At its core, the revolution was a deliberate effort to replace Christian faith, history, and eternal truths with humanistic dogma.

Only a reinvigorated biblical understanding offered a foundation for ideas, truth, and beauty, Dr. Guinness would argue, as the “way” forward. Yet, sadly, he would report, the universal church emerged from the revolution itself compromised, having abandoned historic truths and choosing a path of social compromise and doctrinal ambiguity.

(See Os Guinnss’s 15-minute speech, The Hope of Return, to the ARC conference in London in 2025 here.)

 In 2025, Dr. Guinness, like a radar scope following the flight path of writing that chronicles the decades past, has updated that trajectory of the United States in his new book, America Agonistes: America’s 250th and the Restoration of a Nation in Conflict with Itself and Its Past.

[Agonistes, the great inner struggle, perhaps originated with the poem by John Milton, Samson Agonistes, published along with Milton’s Paradise Regained in 1671.]

America Agonistes follows Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (2024) – the first of this four-part series of books – in which Mr. Guinness scrutinized the broader predicament of the US and the West as a collective civilization with shared roots. He looks at it as one would a Midwestern ice storm on a crowded freeway, with cars and trucks careening into each other, unable to steer or stop, even though they can see the mayhem ahead.

In America Agonistes, his approach is a narrower appraisal of the internal, self-destructive fights and brawls that play out across media platforms, national news outlets, academia, and the political canvas in the US. At the same time, the collapse of the written word for the one-minute sound bite pushes immediate answers to complex problems that took decades to create. They pit American against American, and against a past – a past that can’t be undone. It is a time when what was is disdained, regardless of its success.  

“The plates are shifting,” Mr. Guinness writes. In the post-WWII world, when American dominance was unchallenged, even by the Evil Empire. This new century has brought the US to an abrupt and challenging place. We are challenged by the communist Chinese, who, after somewhere near 42 internal civil wars over the centuries, are pining for a worldwide Hun empire. We are challenged by radical Islam, still engorged with death lust, after centuries. And we are challenged internally, having lost the centrality of our Constitutional system that allowed our greatness in the first instance.

Os Guinness sees a great nation – he is a transplanted Brit who has lived on these shores since the 1980s – that did not become great because of circumstances, but because of the ideals of our Founding and the wisdom of the covenantal Constitution, whose authority is not man-made but ordained from the creation. Human freedom is God’s promise, not man’s.

He fears that the very concepts that made this American experiment great, powerful, peaceful, and wealthy, no longer resonate – even among so-called conservatives. “[The] heart of America’s crisis lies deeper still. If America had become great primarily through economic and military means, then a successful restoration of the economy and the military might be enough to make America great again. But that is not how it happened.”

“Man does not live by bread alone” is the reminder of both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4), he contends, “Neither economic prosperity nor national security are ends in themselves. Unless they serve a higher human end, they will only generate animosity against themselves, as the troubling trend towards socialism shows currently. But if, as the history of America’s Founding surely shows, the secret of America’s freedom and greatness was spiritual, moral, cultural, and constitutional in character too, then the crisis must be addressed accordingly.”

“In truth,” Dr. Guinness writes, “the success or failure of the movement to Make America Great Again will pivot on its success or failure in recognizing and restoring what made America great in the first place— the politics and culture of covenantal freedom that lies at the heart of the American Republic. The decisive issue for America today is the restoration of the American Republic and of citizenship, and the vision of freedom that this means.”

However, Dr. Guinness, as always, is an optimist about America. Even while lamenting the issues at hand and their confounding difficulty, he sees the American experiment as the unique intellectual achievement it is, while he acknowledges its failures from the beginning. Dr. Guinness notes that, “rightly understood, the freedom of the American Republic is a vision of freedom like no other. It stands as the world’s most powerful alternative to the authoritarian forces in the world.”

So, for Dr. Guinness, what will make a golden age possible “requires profound renewal of the meaning and responsibilities of citizenship among all Americans of every persuasion.” He is surely right, the return of civic virtue, self-restraint, moral integrity, and rightful citizenship are not accidents – they are imperatives for a free people. “We are a nation by intention and by ideas.”

In the end, Os Guinness posits, “I will argue strongly for the necessity and possibility of renewal, and therefore for hope, but Americans should take the possibility of decline seriously.” In the end, free citizens are responsible for our Republic. They must re-learn and report that the things that made the nation the workhorse of freedom and success weren’t a matter of luck, but a matter of God’s people, committed to His gracious gift of freedom, and tending the rich land.