Resilience is returning to our national character

It may be tenuous to give a nation of over 340 million people a personality all its own, but one can sometimes look past mere policy to see trends developing in the country’s mood. 

Notwithstanding the Left’s protests and ever-expanding radicalism, there are reasons for hope that a resilient trait is inculcating itself again in America.

When it comes to faith, we see its increasing influence on the republic which can bear abundant fruit. 

According to a Gallup Poll released on June 11 this year, 34 percent of U.S. adults “believe religion is increasing its influence in American life.” 

While still a minority view, this is up from 20 percent who answered the same a year ago.  

According to the American Bible Society, the millennial age group reported a 29 percent increase in Bible use from 2024 to 2025, and with men an increase of 19 percent. 

What do religion and resilience have in common?  Broadly stated, religion has a virtue in looking beyond oneself, binding a person with responsibilities to both others and a higher being transcending the temporal.  This creates resilience, knowing that one’s hardships (and successes) have a shelf life that do not wholly define a person. 

To know there is God is to know one’s innate worth, and with that inevitably comes both strength and duty.  Contained within the word resilience there is the root Latin verb ‘salire’ meaning “to jump, leap.”  Surely increased religious influence can mean a culture that leaps beyond itself to the eternal.

There is also an increasingly resilient American economy on the horizon. 

Investment in American manufacturing and security, which is a projection of future economic vitality, is growing.  On Oct. 15, the White House highlighted added investments in America by Stellantis, Whirlpool, and GE Aerospace Foundation which combined total over $13.3 billion.  This is already on top of investments totaling in the trillions which companies as varied as Apple and John Deere have announced. 

And on Oct. 14, International Monetary Fund chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said that the “tariff shock itself is smaller than initially feared,” signifying a resilience in business activity that seemed unlikely when tariff policy moved energetically earlier this year. 

Free market proponents champion capital investment and private business, but what else springs forth from them?  Surely macroeconomics is not condensed down to only calculations and press releases. 

Indeed, hard work and achievement in business can include room for improvement of one’s character.   

An opportunity to better oneself in a job or career is a chance to not only gain skills but discover talents within that were unknown. 

This has immeasurable positive effects both locally and nationally.  Economists may call it self-sufficiency but a resilience of both soul and mind, confirmed by regular effort in a vocation, also describes a virtuous citizen.

Then there are the intangibles which only free people can decide and act on.   

At what point does a culture that reminiscences also realize that nostalgia can be reality? 

Based on President Trump’s election (twice), an increasing number of diverse Americans decided to not just ponder the past but thrive in the future. 

Indeed, earlier this year Vice President Vance said that those in the West “are a hell of a lot more resilient than our elites give them credit for.”  Vance went on to remind us to have “the courage to live the truth.”   

This is not an esoteric line but practical instruction.  Resilience is not only a high-minded goal but instead a daily life lived, a solemn choice. 

It is not waiting for the perfect moment to run for office, engage with work, speak up or go to a house of worship. 

American resilience resolves itself to move forward in search of betterment in both the material and incorporeal. 

Our politics would be wiser in organizing these notions to sustain certain ways of life.  A government attuned to what is needed for a resilient citizenry would be prudential.

The British author Alain de Botton noted that “A good half of the art of living is resilience.” 

To persistent and optimistic Americans, that means our national cup is at least half full.  And more Americans wish it topped to the brim.  There are hopeful signs that the United States is realizing its resilience is capable of ascent.

Alan Loncar is an attorney in Macomb County, Michigan.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License