The Solzhenitsyn Challenge: Restoring Public Courage

By Chuck Colson
11/4/2008

By the end of the day, we’ll know who our next President and Congress will be. My message today is directed at whoever wins. I want to echo the prophetic address Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn gave 30 years ago at Harvard. On that sunny June day, Solzhenitsyn warned that the West was losing its moral foundation.

“The Western world has lost its civic courage,” Solzhenitsyn said. And—to the outrage of his audience, Solzhenitsyn added: “Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite.” People and governments, he said, need the courage to do the right thing.

Our Founders would have cheered him on. They understood America to be a noble experiment in ordered liberty and self-government. But, as they warned, that experiment could succeed only if individuals exercised restraint in governing their own behavior. the rest