Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, has written an important and timely book. Although he writes as a Democratic politician, his central concern transcends party politics. He asks why in America, by most standards the wealthiest and most technically advanced country in history, we have become lonelier and less connected, and why our concern for the common good has steadily eroded.
He pleads for a beautiful America.
But instead, Murphy sees a disfigured America that will not be quickly repaired. He argues that “our nation would make a grave error if we believed we could repair what is broken within us simply by defeating Trump—or his successor—at the ballot box.” He says, “a deeper rot festers in the American soul: a callousness toward our neighbors, a me-first selfishness, a relentless focus on ‘getting mine’ even if it leaves others behind.”
Murphy organizes the book around what he defines as six “cults,” which he defines as “false idols that promised freedom and meaning but delivered loneliness, that offered abundance but left us feeling empty.” Those “cults” are:
- Profit (placing wealth before the common good)
- Everywhere (detaching from place, destroying community)
- Technology (making technology a master rather than servant)
- Consumption (forming identity around acquiring and consuming)
- Credentialism (measuring status by educational credentials)
- Corruption (making self-serving leadership the norm)
One of the strengths of Crisis of the Common Good is Murphy’s insistence that our deepest problems cannot be explained fully by elections, economic inequality, or partisan conflict. His language of “false idols,” “spiritual collapse,” and “cults” recognizes that Americans have misplaced their ultimate loyalties. His diagnosis reaches beneath policy debates to the realm of meaning, belonging, purpose, and morality.
“America,” Murphy writes, “has constructed its own golden calves. Over the past fifty years, we have become a wealthier and more just country in many ways, but we have also retreated from shared prosperity, social contracts, and strong communities, building altars instead to profit, efficiency, consumer culture, technology, elite credentialism, and a winner-takes-all politics that consecrates corruption.”
Throughout the book, Murphy uses the language of religion and theology in his diagnosis, making the case that our crisis is spiritual, not merely political. So far, so good. But it didn’t take me long to grow uncomfortable because he uses theological language metaphorically without developing an account of what these terms actually mean. For instance, he says we are experiencing a “spiritual collapse” without defining what spiritual health requires or how it is restored.
A theologian might ask whether Murphy’s “cults” are merely unhealthy social conditions. And as I got deep into the book, I found myself thinking that if the language of theology is apt, the conditions Murphy indicts are better understood not as cults but as idolatries: finite goods treated as though they could provide meaning, identity, even salvation.
A New Values Offensive?
Murphy is not alone among Democratic politicians in using moral and spiritual language today. Writing in the New York Times, EJ Dione notes that many of the Democratic frontrunners for the 2028 presidential run—he mentions Pete Buttigieg, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, and Corey Booker, in addition to Murphy—are using “religiously inflected” language to describe the travails we face. Dionne calls Murphy’s book “The closest thing to a manifesto for the Democrats’ new values offensive.”
If this is true, I worry a bit.
I am generally comfortable with words like spiritual and use the term “spiritual despair” in my own book to describe the consequences of the forces that trouble our country. (See my take in the graphic below.) My concern is not with Murphy's diagnosis but with a theology-laden account of America’s crisis that ultimately points to remedies that are almost entirely policy-driven (and oddly, are presented in an Appendix).
A question kept arising as I read this book: Can politics heal a spiritual crisis? And another: If what we face really is a spiritual crisis, should we be looking to politicians or political parties to save us?
These questions also reveal where my own work diverges from Murphy’s. In my book, also addressed to America’s promise, I argue that citizenship is not simply one remedy among many. The active exercise of citizenship is our core formative practice. When this recedes, democracy stumbles and we get what we have today.
One way of accounting for our troubles as a country—the one I present in my book—is to acknowledge that we have forgotten how to be citizens. We have come to think of citizenship as a passive role and of government as something we consume. Yet, the founders called us to be co-creators of our government and to work together across differences to build and maintain agency, trust, purpose, and hope. In their telling, citizenship is anything but passive. I don’t think Murphy would disagree with this, but he looks primarily to political leadership and public policy to fix what is wrong. I don’t.
Three Systems
While reading Murphy’s book, I also read Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, published in 2016. Both authors describe the essence of our problems similarly: the transition of America from a “WE” culture to an “I” culture.
Sacks, a theologian as well as a philosopher, observes that all societies are composed of three systems: the political system, the economic system, and the moral system. Markets create wealth. Governments distribute power. Moral institutions teach people to restrain self-interest for the sake of the common good. When the moral system doesn’t work, Sacks observes, it is impossible for the other two systems to work in ways that build the common good.
Murphy sees this problem, too. He says the six cults have affected a transition “from a we America to a me America.”
Criticisms about the clumsy use of religious terms aside, my concern with Murphy’s framework is not so much his diagnosis, but his theory of change, i.e., exactly what needs to change and how that will come about.
In my book, I, too, see a spiritual problem in our “I” culture. But I look first to shared meaning, community, and citizenship—the moral system—to address it. My claim is that democracy flourishes only when people practice the habits of reciprocity, restraint, and shared responsibility, all habits that fall into Sacks’ moral realm.
As a United States senator, Murphy naturally imagines politics playing the leading role. My argument is that our history repeatedly shows that democratic renewal begins not with elected officials but with citizens who rise up and say, “No more. This way instead.” Politicians generally ratify such movements; they seldom create them.
Murphy concludes his book saying that to set things right, Americans must “build something beautiful.” I wholeheartedly agree. My question is: Who will build it? And my answer is: We the People.
Throughout American history, our greatest movements for the common good—abolition, women’s suffrage, labor laws, civil rights—have begun not with elected officials but with ordinary people who recovered the habits of trust, responsibility, sacrifice, and shared purpose that self-government requires, and the moral institutions that support these habits: religious institutions, nonprofits, service organizations, and others. Political leaders are essential in the change process, but they rarely create it.
That is why I remain convinced that the future of American democracy depends less on electing better politicians or on formulating better policy than on our becoming better citizens. When this happens, as the title of my book suggests, the leaders will follow.
In the end, Chris Murphy has done us a service. He has challenged the comforting fiction that America’s problems will be solved when Democrats win the next election or pass the next corrective law. He reminds us that democracy is ultimately about the kind of people we become and the kind of society we choose to build together. Whether one agrees with his prescriptions or not, he has made an important contribution to an essential conversation about the common good. For that, I am grateful. I hope his book is widely read—not because it settles the debate, but because it invites the deeper understanding our country desperately needs.
Let’s join with Sen. Murphy and build a beautiful America.
Who Will Make America Beautiful? was first published by Light Many Fires and was republished with permission.
Richard McKnight, PhD, is the author of When We The People Lead, The Leaders Will Follow.
