Welcome to a special weekend edition of the world and everything in it. I'm Lindsay Mast. Today, a

discussion about committing to God, family, community, and country. Two years ago, Robert P. George

declared June to be Fidelity Month. It's designed to encourage Americans to re-commit to some

shared values. George is a Roman Catholic political philosopher and legal scholar. He serves as

Professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. Professor George, thank you for joining us.

Good morning. It's good to be with you, Lindsay. Tell me about when you first had the idea of Fidelity Month. Where were you? And what was going on at the time?

I was having breakfast. It was early in the spring of 2023. I was having my morning cup of tea and four biscotti cookies. That's my breakfast. And I was going through the various papers and websites that I look at in the morning.

And the Wall Street Journal happened that morning to be reporting on some recent survey data.

Respondents had been asked questions.

The general public, people from the general public had been asked questions about what they

thought was important in life.

These are questions that had been put to people by this survey organization for many years now.

And what was striking about those survey data was that it showed that Americans' belief in the importance of, for example, God and religion in their

lives had significantly diminished from where it was 10 or even five years ago. Similarly,

Americans' belief in the importance of marriage and the family had diminished. And finally,

it reported that Americans' belief in the importance of patriotism

and service to one's community or communities had also diminished. The one thing, the one value

that had seen an increase in Americans' belief in the importance of turned out to be money. Well, these data

alarmed me. Not that I think that money is unimportant, obviously, in a world like ours, you need

money in order to live, and I want everyone to be prosperous, and I want our society to be prosperous,

and I think paying attention to economic needs is very, very important.

But money is not as important as faith and family and patriotism and the things that are

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