Faithless American Public Life

The crisis in American public life is our own doing. The underlying power of truth is unaffected. The manifestations of the crisis are that Americans now lack faith in everything. We feel the universe does not care about our purposes, so we lose confidence in purpose itself. We cannot justify being good without God. We do not trust expertise. We lack faith in the future. We lack faith in the disciplines. In law, Arthur Leff’s writing shows the depth of our lack of faith. Even religion and science are undermined. Our lack of faith is both internal—participants in these endeavors have lost faith in them—and external—the public has lost faith in these endeavors.