A Timely and Hopeful Call to Recover America’s Moral Foundations
Book review of One Nation Divided by God & Our Longing for a Better Country by James Cunningham
By Steven Childers
In One Nation Divided by God: Our Longing for a Better Country, James Cunningham offers a compelling diagnosis of America’s deepening national division—and a thoughtful, hopeful path forward. His central argument is as memorable as it is sobering: if America was once understood to be “one nation under God,” it has increasingly become “one nation divided by God.”
Cunningham contends that our deepest divisions are not primarily political. They are spiritual, philosophical, and moral. Americans may continue to use the same cherished words—truth, equality, liberty, justice, rights, and human dignity—but we increasingly assign radically different meanings to them because we no longer share the convictions that once gave those words coherence. We inhabit what might be called competing moral universes.
At the center of Cunningham’s argument is the Declaration of Independence, which he presents not merely as a historic document but as America’s national creed. Its affirmations of self-evident truth, human equality, a Creator, and unalienable rights rest upon moral and theological foundations. Rights are inherent because they are endowed by God, not granted by government. Human equality is grounded in the conviction that every person bears the image of God. Liberty is therefore more than freedom from restraint; it is freedom ordered toward truth, virtue, and human flourishing.
One of the book’s great strengths is its clear progression. Cunningham first identifies seven foundational pillars of America’s creed. He then examines the anatomy of our present conflict, returns to the nation’s founding vision, draws wisdom from Abraham Lincoln’s response to an earlier crisis, and finally offers a path forward.
Cunningham does not pretend that America has ever perfectly embodied its creed. Our history of slavery, racial injustice, civil war, and other failures proves otherwise. Yet the creed supplied the moral standard by which those failures could be exposed and challenged. Its principles helped reformers such as Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. call the nation to become more faithful to its own highest convictions.
This is not, however, simply a work of political history or cultural criticism. Cunningham insists that there are no merely political solutions to fundamentally spiritual problems. Elections, laws, and policies matter, but they cannot heal the human heart. The battle for the soul of the nation must ultimately become a battle for the hearts of its people.
The final chapters are therefore deeply personal and pastoral. Cunningham calls readers away from hatred, self-righteousness, and the temptation to regard political opponents as enemies. He reminds Christians that all people stand on level ground before God and that genuine national renewal must begin with humility, repentance, prayer, and renewed faith. The book ends not merely with an appeal to recover America’s creed, but with an invitation to reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ.
For years, I have appreciated Cunningham’s guest columns in the Orlando Sentinel, in which he has addressed many of these same themes with clarity, conviction, and concern for the common good. I am thrilled that he has now gathered and developed many of those important ideas in this book, making them available to a much wider audience.
One Nation Divided by God is concise, accessible, historically informed, and spiritually searching. It will challenge readers across the political spectrum to look beneath our public conflicts to the deeper convictions shaping them. More importantly, it reminds us that the way toward a better country begins not simply by defeating our opponents, but by recovering truth, loving our neighbors, humbling ourselves before God, and allowing renewal to begin within us.
Dr. Steven L. Childers
President & CEO, Pathway Learning, Former Associate Professor of Practical Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary–Orlando (1995–2017), Co-author with John M. Frame of Renewing Your Hope with the Lord's Prayer: Learning from Jesus How to Pray
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