This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mola, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

in Louisville, Kentucky.

Wilford McClay is the GT and Libby Blankenship chair in the history of of Oklahoma where he is also director of the Center for the

History of Liberty. Over the past year he's also served as the Ronald Reagan

professor of public policy at Pepperdine University in California.

Dr. McClay earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is a renowned historian

and award-winning author. His first major book was The Masterless, Self and Society in Modern America, which won the

Merle Kurdy Award of the Organization of American Historians.

It was recognized then as the best book of the year in American intellectual history.

His most recent book is Land of Hope, an invitation to the Great American Story, which has already

won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Conservative Book of the Year Award.

In addition to his academic work, Dr. McClay

currently serves on the US Commission on the semi-Quincontennial,

that is, the 250th anniversary of the United States.

That will come in the year 2026.

Professor Wilford McClay, welcome to thinking in public.

Dr. McClay for several decades now,

scholarship and public influence as well as teaching

you've been in one way or another telling the American story but in one sense to

even to say the word story much less the American story is to enter into an

...