USA as Superman: The Kryptonite

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.

Psalm 20:7

The last essay made the case that America is Superman. The military we have built is without parallel on earth. We project force to any corner of the globe, independently, without asking permission, and without losing a soldier to enemy fire in Venezuela or a pilot to Iranian air defenses. The case for American military supremacy is not rhetoric. It is documented fact.

Now I want to make a harder argument.

Superman has Kryptonite. And America does not have one Kryptonite. It has five. They look different on the surface. They are the same thing wearing different masks.

Before I name them, I want to say this plainly: I am writing as a Christian pastor and as an American. I believe both of those identities are relevant here. I am not writing a policy paper. I am writing a diagnosis. And the diagnosis begins where honest diagnoses always begin, not with enemies abroad, but with the man in the mirror.

The First Kryptonite: A Military That Stopped Believing in What It Was Built to Defend

There has been a genuine debate in this country about what happened to our military over the last decade. Some people dismiss that debate. I will not dismiss it.

Friends of mine who are veterans, men who served in combat and earned the right to opinions on this subject, have described a period in which the institution they loved was systematically distracted from warfighting by ideological priorities that had nothing to do with killing the enemy and bringing soldiers home alive. They use words I will not repeat here. The sentiment underneath those words is serious and deserves a serious response.

The problem is not that the military changed its demographics. It is that a deliberate ideological project attempted to make the military's primary purpose something other than military excellence. Diversity as an end in itself, rather than as the natural byproduct of recruiting the best warfighters from every zip code in America, is not a military value. It is a political one. When political values are inserted into military institutions as primary objectives, military excellence suffers. That is not an opinion. That is what happens in every institution in human history when the thing the institution exists to do gets subordinated to the thing the people running it want to say.

The good news, if there is good news here, is that the current administration has moved aggressively to reverse this. The results in Venezuela and in the Iran campaign suggest the reversal is working. But the damage done over years is not undone in months. And the deeper problem, the one underneath the ideological capture of our institutions, is a problem no executive order can fix.

The Second Kryptonite: A Nation That Has Stopped Believing It Is Worth Reproducing

This is where I will say things that people do not want to hear.

America has a demographic crisis. We are not replacing ourselves. The fertility rate has fallen below replacement level and has been falling for years. We are not alone in this. Most of the developed world faces the same problem. But we are the nation that has historically understood itself as a special project, a new order for the ages, a city on a hill. Nations that stop believing they are worth passing on stop passing themselves on.

I want to name three distinct causes, because they are distinct even if they share a common root.

The first is what I will call oikophobia, which is the fear or hatred of the home, the family, and rootedness. This is not a new phenomenon but it has been systematically amplified by cultural institutions that treat marriage as an outdated arrangement, children as a burden to be calculated against career and comfort, and the domestic vocation as something small people settle for. A generation raised to believe that building a home and raising children is less meaningful than building a personal brand will produce fewer children. We are seeing the result.

The second cause is the climate ideology that, whatever one believes about the underlying science, has produced a subclass of Americans who have been told that having children is an act of ecological harm. I am not making this up. Look it up. Young people, particularly young women, are stating in surveys and in their own words that fear about climate change is a significant factor in their decision not to have children. This is what happens when propaganda displaces wisdom. The creation mandate, the command to be fruitful and multiply and to steward the earth, has been replaced by a counsel of despair that tells young people the world they would bring children into is not worth bringing children into.

The third cause is what happens when a civilization rejects the structure of the family as God designed it. I believe strongly in soul freedom. I believe in freedom of conscience. I am not arguing for mandatory Christianity or state enforcement of religious conviction. But I am willing to say plainly what our cultural institutions will not say: the rejection of complementary male and female design, the systematic dismantling of any stable definition of what a man and a woman are and what they are for, produces demographic consequences. You cannot simultaneously tell people that gender is arbitrary, that children do not need both a mother and a father, that every family arrangement is equally sufficient, and then be surprised when the arrangements that produce children are chosen less frequently.

A nation that cannot or will not replace itself cannot sustain a military, a tax base, or a civilization. Chariots require drivers.

The Third Kryptonite: The Idol of Prosperity Devouring Its Mother

Cotton Mather said it before we were a country. The Puritan minister who preached in Boston when America was still a collection of British colonies looked around at the prosperity his people had built and issued a warning that has never stopped being relevant: "Godliness hath begat prosperity, and the daughter hath devoured the mother." He said that in the seventeenth century. We had not yet declared independence. We had not yet fought a revolution or written a constitution or expanded across a continent or won two world wars or put a man on the moon. And already he could see the pattern forming.

But here is what Cotton Mather could not have fully seen, and what I want American readers to hold onto: this is not the first time. America has gotten rich and drunk and debauched before. We did it in the 1720s and God sent George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and the First Great Awakening swept the colonies. We did it again in the early 1800s and the Second Great Awakening produced prison reform, the abolition movement, and a moral reconstitution of American life from the ground up. We did it in the Gilded Age, in the Roaring Twenties, in the moral confusion of the 1960s and 1970s. Every single time, repentance and revival changed the course of American history. The pattern Mather identified is real. It is also not the whole pattern. The daughter devours the mother, and then sometimes, by grace, the mother is raised again. I believe that is possible now. I am not certain it is inevitable. History does not run on autopilot. But I am certain that it has happened before, that it happened here, and that writing off America's capacity for moral renewal because the current moment looks dark is a failure of historical memory.

Alexis de Tocqueville saw this in 1835. He traveled through America and tried to explain to Europeans why this strange democratic republic worked when every other democracy had collapsed. His answer was not primarily political. It was moral. The Americans he met believed that liberty required virtue, that virtue required religion, and that religion required the habits of family, community, and restraint. Democracy in America did not work because Americans were smart or lucky. It worked because Americans were formed by institutions, churches, families, voluntary associations, that taught them to govern themselves before asking to govern their country.

We are currently dismantling every one of those institutions.

Church attendance has collapsed. Marriage rates have collapsed. The voluntary associations that Tocqueville marveled at have been replaced by social media networks that produce outrage without community and engagement without responsibility. We have inherited a civilization built by people who feared God and we are spending the inheritance on things that would have horrified the people who built it.

I am not calling for a theocracy. I believe profoundly in soul freedom and the First Amendment. But there is a difference between the state not establishing a religion and a nation pretending that the moral and religious foundations of ordered liberty are optional extras that can be discarded without consequence. They are not optional. They are load-bearing walls. You can take them out. The house will stand for a while. Then it will not stand.

We do not yet have the euthanasia rates of Canada, where assisted suicide has become a solution offered to the poor and the mentally ill as a cost-saving measure. But the same logic is advancing here. When a civilization stops believing that life is a gift from God and starts treating it as a resource to be optimized, the weakest members of that civilization are the first to pay the price. Canada did not become a place that offers death to its disabled citizens overnight. It became that place one small, reasonable-sounding step at a time.

The Fourth Kryptonite: Fiscal Collapse and the Chariot Without a Driver

We can project force to Venezuela. We cannot project solvency.

The national debt is a number so large that it has ceased to feel real to most Americans. That is part of the problem. When numbers stop feeling real, the decisions that produce those numbers stop feeling serious. But the debt is real. The interest payments on the debt now exceed the defense budget. We are spending more to service the cost of past decisions than we are spending to defend the country against future threats. That is not sustainable. It is not even close to sustainable.

No enemy needs to defeat our military if our monetary system does the job for them. Rome did not fall because the Visigoths were stronger than the legions. Rome fell because the legions could not be paid, because the currency had been debased, because the fiscal structure that funded everything else had collapsed under the weight of obligations the empire had made to itself that it could not keep.

I want to make a proposal that sounds unusual but deserves serious consideration. We have an entitlement problem. We also have something no other generation in human history has had in quite the same way: a world that is, in many places, genuinely affordable for American retirees living on American dollars.

Medicare costs roughly fourteen thousand dollars per enrollee per year in the United States. Healthcare in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and much of Central and South America costs a fraction of that for comparable care. An American retiree whose Social Security check is adequate for a modest life in Kansas City can live quite well in many parts of the world on that same check. We could offer Americans who choose to retire abroad a direct cash transfer, an HSA equivalent, rather than full Medicare and Medicaid enrollment. It would cost the government substantially less. It would give those retirees a substantially higher standard of living. And it would begin to address, in a creative and humane way, a fiscal problem that cannot be solved by austerity alone.

This is what American power and American creativity, applied with wisdom and humility, could produce. Not taking Greenland. Not annexing Canada. Creative solutions that make American power serve American people and, in doing so, make the world a better place.

The Fifth Kryptonite: A Nation That No Longer Agrees on What a Nation Is

There is a version of the immigration debate that is a policy argument. How many people should we admit? Through what process? With what skills? That is a legitimate argument and Americans of good faith disagree about it.

This is not that argument.

What I want to name here is something distinct and more dangerous than a policy disagreement. It is the deliberate admission and cultivation of people whose foundational commitments are not compatible with American citizenship, not because of where they came from, not because of the language they speak or the food they eat or the God they worship, but because of what they believe and what they intend.

Citizenship has never been merely a legal status. It has always carried content. The oath a naturalized citizen takes is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a declaration of transferred allegiance. It means something. And the question of whether the people taking that oath mean it, whether the people who never took it but live here act as though they owe it, is not a question about culture. It is a question about the survival of the republic.

Let me be direct about what I mean, because I have no interest in being understood to mean something I do not mean.

A man who believes his religion entitles him to take a nine-year-old wife is not holding an opinion that falls within the range of conscience that American liberty protects. His conviction is not a heterodox theology. It is the sexual abuse of a child, dressed in religious language, and no free exercise claim reaches that far. The Constitution protects belief. It does not protect conduct that destroys children. A person who arrives in this country, or who is born here and radicalized into believing, that prepubescent girls are available for marriage is not a person whose worldview can be accommodated by tolerance and time. He is incompatible with American civilization. Full stop.

A person who believes slavery is a legitimate social arrangement, whether that belief comes from a particular reading of religious law, from ethnic supremacy, or from any other source, is not holding a minority political opinion. Slavery was the central moral catastrophe of American history. We fought the bloodiest war in our national story to settle that question. Three amendments to the Constitution sealed it. A civilization that cannot say plainly that someone who supports the ownership of human beings is not welcome to import that conviction here is not a civilization exercising ordered liberty. It is a civilization that has lost the ability to defend its own premises.

And a person who enters this country, accepts its welfare, uses its infrastructure, claims its protections, and then sends money to foreign powers, organizes on behalf of foreign governments, celebrates when Americans are killed, and cheers for the enemies of the republic is not an immigrant. He is an occupier with a visa. The distinction matters. America has always absorbed people who loved other places. It has never been obligated to absorb people who hate this one.

I am not describing edge cases. I am describing patterns that are documented, visible, and growing. I am describing the predictable result of a generation of immigration policy that treated the content of the people we were admitting as irrelevant and the volume of the people we were admitting as a metric of virtue. You can absorb enormous diversity of origin, language, religion, and culture. What you cannot absorb is diversity of foundational commitment to the civilization itself. A body politic that cannot distinguish between citizens who disagree about policy and people who reject the premises of the republic is not exercising tolerance. It is committing slow suicide while congratulating itself on its open-mindedness.

Tocqueville understood that American democracy required a particular kind of citizen. Not ethnically homogeneous. Not religiously uniform. But formed by shared commitments to self-governance, ordered liberty, and the dignity of every human being. Those commitments can be learned. They can be passed on. They can be embraced by people born anywhere on earth. But they have to actually be embraced. Proximity to America does not confer the civic character that America requires. Neither does paperwork.

The Kryptonite is not immigration. Immigration, rightly ordered, has been one of America's great sources of strength. The men who built this country included immigrants who believed in it more fiercely than many people born here. The Kryptonite is the refusal to say that citizenship carries obligations, that those obligations include basic fidelity to the civilization, and that there are people whose convictions place them permanently outside the boundaries of what that civilization can accommodate.

We built a nation on the idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. That idea has content. It excludes, by its own logic, the men who would enslave other men, the men who would abuse children, and the men who would undermine the republic while consuming its benefits. Saying so is not nativism. It is honesty.

The Real Kryptonite

I told you that America has five Kryptonites. I also told you they are the same thing wearing different masks.

Here is what they have in common.

Every single one of them is a failure of belief.

The ideological capture of our military is a failure to believe that military excellence is the point. Oikophobia and demographic collapse are a failure to believe that the future is worth having children for. Climate despair is a failure to believe that the world God made is worth stewarding rather than abandoning. Fiscal collapse is a failure to believe that we have obligations to generations we will never meet. The incompatible worldview crisis is a failure to believe that citizenship means anything, that the civilization has content, that some things are true and some things are wrong and a republic is allowed to say so.

I believe American politicians should care about Americans first. I reject globalism as an ideology. The purpose of the American government is to serve the American people, and any politician who forgets that is doing the wrong job.

But I am also a Christian. And I cannot reconcile America First with America Alone.

We just demonstrated that we can capture a dictator who was starving his people without losing a single soldier. We demonstrated that we can degrade Iran's ability to terrorize its neighbors and the world without asking Europe's permission. We have the power to end threats and to free people in ways that no other nation on earth can match. The question is not whether we have the power. The question is whether we have the wisdom and the moral framework to use it well.

That means not taking Greenland. Both Greenland and Canada have natural resources that would benefit us. Neither could stop us from taking them. Taking them would be deeply immoral. It would make us the thing we have always stood against. A nation that uses its overwhelming military advantage to seize the territory of democratic neighbors is not a superpower exercising restraint. It is an empire behaving badly. We should say so plainly.

It also means caring about people who are suffering even when they cannot help us back. We cannot be the world's policeman. But we have demonstrated, twice in two months, that we can end specific, targeted threats with precision and with minimal cost in American lives. The world's most powerful military should be used with wisdom. It should not be holstered entirely.

Some trust in chariots. Some trust in horses.

We built the finest chariots in the history of the world. The question is not whether we can build them. The question is whether we still believe in the God who gave us the capacity to build them, and whether we believe that the civilization those chariots are supposed to defend is worth defending.

I believe it is. I believe America, at its best, has been a force for ordered liberty and human dignity in a broken world. I believe the prosperity we have inherited is a gift we did not earn and are in danger of squandering. I believe that One Nation Under God does not mean a state church or coerced belief. It means a people humble enough to know they did not build this alone and honest enough to admit what happens when they pretend they did.

We are not in decline because our enemies are strong.

We are in danger because we are forgetting what we are for.

A B-2 Spirit can take off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, fly to the other side of the world, strike a target no radar detected it approaching, and land back in Missouri before breakfast. No other nation can do that. Not one.

The civilization that built that plane is worth defending.

The question is whether we still believe that.

Clayton Wood is an attorney, pastor, and writer.