In 2010, the well-known pastor and author David Platt published his book, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. The book’s endorsements echoed the subtitle’s popular critique.1 Christians should “trade in the false values rooted in the American Dream” and embrace God’s global purpose instead; young leaders should “surrender the American Dream” for a bigger dream—the Great Commission; as a “skilled seductress” the American Dream is an “enemy of authentic Christianity” from which we need a way of escape; the “so-called American Dream” is an “idol of our culture” influencing us whether we want it to or not; Jesus’ call says, “follow me,” but the American Dream leads elsewhere.
1. See the landing page for the book: Penguin Random House, “Radical by David Platt.”
What is the American Dream? It sounds terrible.
Enter another influential pastor, J. D. Greear, that same year: “The definition of the American Dream, I think, is that money is essential and the optimal way to security and to pleasure.”2 Is that the American Dream?
2. Greear is quoted in Justin Taylor, “Jesus vs. the American Dream,” The Gospel Coalition, May 21, 2010. The original article is J. D. Greear, “Why Many of Us Can’t Live ‘Radically’ with Abandon in Pursuit of the Great Commission,” J. D. Greear Ministries, May 20, 2010.
That was 2010. Rewind ten years and John Piper’s famous seashell sermon at the OneDay conference established the American Dream as a preaching theme for a generation. In his sermon, titled, “Boasting Only in the Cross,” Piper proclaimed:
The American Dream: a nice house, a nice car, a nice job, a nice family, a nice retirement, collecting shells as the last chapter before you stand before the Creator of the universe to give an account of what you did: “Here it is Lord — my shell collection! …” Don’t waste your life; don’t waste it.3
3. The following quote is from John Piper, “‘Don’t Waste Your Life’: Seven Minutes That Moved a Generation,” Desiring God, May 19, 2017.
We praise God for Piper’s emphatic call to self-denial. How could we not? This sermon compelled a generation to take up their crosses and follow Christ, to boast in him alone, and to go to the nations for the sake of his name.4
4. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, “How John Piper’s Seashells Swept Over a Generation,” The Gospel Coalition, March 20, 2017.
But with some historical distance, we have learned something: one man’s rhetorical strategy must not become a generation’s all-encompassing vision.5 Let’s not waste our lives. But also, let’s not waste God’s gifts in our cultural and national inheritance. A pendulum can swing too far in both directions.
5. Joe Rigney, a former student and colleague of Piper’s, went a different direction than David Platt, exploring the ordering of loves under the banner of Piper’s call for radical self-sacrifice. John Piper wrote the foreword to Rigney’s book, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015). Trevin Wax puts Piper’s theme in context in his piece, “John Piper Is Not Anti-Seashell,” The Gospel Coalition, May 20, 2013: “Piper’s sermon on a wasted life is powerful because it exposes the tragedy of living only for this world. But countless other sermons from Piper are powerful because they show the joy and wonder of living in this world.”
6. Platt is an exception, continuing this theme to the present. In a 2023 podcast with Russell Moore for Christianity Today, Platt said, “I am convinced that it’s not just an American Dream that has been consuming our lives. There’s actually an American gospel that’s hijacked our hearts.” David Platt, “David Platt Wasn’t Radical Enough,” The Russell Moore Show, Christianity Today, April 19, 2023.
Within the circles I travel, there has been a positive vibe shift in attitudes toward America. The fashionable critique epitomized in Platt’s Radical is out.6 I don’t believe the book’s endorsements would fly today. From my perusal of prominent evangelical websites, the basic cynical posture toward the American Dream is there but in a slow drip. That’s an improvement.
Let’s go further.
On this occasion of our nation’s 250th birthday, let’s thank God for the American Dream.
In what follows, this article contributes to an encouraging recovery of the ordo amoris—the ordering of our loves.7 A Christian can—even must—love his family, his country, and his Lord in honorable, distinctive, and properly ordered ways.8 Love of country and the Great Commission are not mutually exclusive. It is the contention of this article that not only are they not in contradiction, rightly defined, they are self-reinforcing and consistent.
To adapt a famous line, for us as Americans, what comes into our minds when we think about the American Dream is a most important thing about us.9 So, what is it?
What is the American Dream?
7. See Alex Kocman, “The Order of Love and a Defense of Biblical Patriotism,” Christ Over All, July 13, 2026.
8. The Christian must also be willing when necessary to forsake all for Christ (Luke 14:26; Eph. 5:22–6:3).
9. A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 1. Tozer wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
For the evangelical critics above, the American Dream is a placeholder for self-reliance, crass materialism, or something closer to the comfortable life. For these critics, the American Dream is an enemy of the Christian faith, for its working assumptions and its fruits oppose the economy of salvation by grace, a mission as big as the world, and a kingdom not of this world.10
At the same time, the expression’s older sense is still widely used, including use in an important conversation about the nation’s health.11 That conversation is longstanding and Christians need to be part of it. So, what is that older sense?
10. In Radical, Platt makes some clarifications and caveats in his book. He commends hard work and aspiration as Scriptural and good (45). In the final chapter, he expresses thanks for America’s freedoms and resources for spreading the gospel (214). However, the force of his argument rings clear: the American Dream with its “unbiblical foundations . . . values, ideals, and assumptions” contradicts God’s Word and collides with the Christian mission (214, 215).
11. For example, the one session in a year-long series marking America’s 250th anniversary: Hoover Institution, “Can America Still Deliver the American Dream?,” May 12, 2026.
We live in affluent times. But the expression emerged in response to very different circumstances.
The expression “American Dream” was popularized in the 1930s during the Great Depression in historian James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America. Adams helped Americans draw on the resources of their national and cultural inheritance at a time when this story was badly needed:
The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
The American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtless counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. And that dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves.12
12. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), 404–5. Between these two paragraphs, Adams personalizes the American Dream with this anecdote: “I once had an intelligent young Frenchman as guest in New York, and after a few days I asked him what struck him most among his new impressions. Without hesitation he replied, ‘The way that everyone of every sort looks you right in the eye, without a thought of inequality. Some time ago a foreigner who used to do some work for me, and who had picked up a very fair education, used occasionally to sit and chat with me in my study after he had finished his work. One day he said that such a relationship was the great difference between America and his homeland. There, he said, “I would do my work and might get a pleasant word, but I could never sit and talk like this. There is a difference there between social grades which cannot be got over. I would not talk to you there as man to man, but as my employer.”’”
The American Dream refers to our national ethos. It includes upward mobility, but more—the dream unique to America was and is a way of seeing ourselves and one another—a dream of a certain social order. It’s not a guarantee; it’s an ideal. It sees a future and prioritizes working for it. In popular usage it may refer to a nice house with a white picket fence, but in America that vision is the reward of real labors and that house is home to a household—a family together, supported, and safe.
The idea of an American “dream” predates Adams’s book, associated early on with frontier life. He may be credited with coining the term, but the phenomenon it captured was well known. He shined the light on America’s unique character, which, in turn, lit the path forward in those dark years. Times have changed—in no small part due to the American Dream—but the expression holds up because the experience persists.
It holds up in yet another way.
Medicine for the Materialist and a Bulwark Against Tyrants
What about its association with materialism? Counterintuitive to modern ears, Adams wrote to combat a danger of material success as an end in itself. University of London professor Sarah Churchwell writes,
Adams set out to make sense of the crisis of the Great Depression, which in 1931 was both an economic crisis and a looming political crisis. Authoritarianism in Europe was on the rise, and many Americans were concerned that similar “despotic” energies would support the fabled “man on horseback” who might become an American tyrant. Adams concluded that America had lost its way by prizing material success above all other values.13
13. Sarah Churchwell, “A Brief History of the American Dream,” The Catalyst, no. 21 (Winter 2021).
Historically understood, the American Dream offers self-reliance as an alternative to dependence on a despot. The American Dream offers a way of relating to wealth as a dignifying reward for our labors rather than merely the class into which we were born. In this way, it repudiates a preoccupation with material success even as it calls Americans up from a resignation to the circumstances of one’s birth. The light shone by Adams’s illuminating phrase protected the country from dangers that persist to this day.
Piper preached to college students in an affluent age. Adams wrote to a generation in desperate times. Both had a problem relating to the material world. Both, in my estimation, need what Adams called the American Dream. Understood in this way, the American Dream answers the excesses we’ve come to associate with it.
Another Level to the Dream
We’ve explored the history of the expression. But what explains the phenomena Adams observed? The American Dream is an ideal made possible by a combination of uniquely American cultural and civic commitments. We should all be familiar with them:
- Equal rights under the law. “Justice is blind” and no respecter of persons. In America, our heredity is not our destiny.
- Unalienable rights, self-evident and endowed by our Creator. In America, we believe that our rights are from our Creator, not from the state. Granted by God, these rights precede the state and the state secures them. They are inherent to our humanity and plain in nature.
- Limited government for ordered liberty. In America, individual freedom is secured by a system of checks and balances and a civic framework of ordered liberty that restrains human sin, including the sin of those with state power.
Christians with ears to hear will recognize the biblical roots in this national inheritance with its elevated view of every human life, even roots in the Protestant Reformation in a work-ethic derived from the elevation of everyday work.14 Islam, secularism, Marxism, and Eastern mysticism do not give you this foundation for civilization.15 Christianity alone does. America, in this way, is truly exceptional; not because she is a new “Chosen People,” but because she humbly acknowledged God at her founding and structured her civic life accordingly.16 American exceptionalism rooted in Christianity is the explanation for the American Dream.
14. For three recent treatments on the occasion of the nation’s 250th, see Rod D. Martin, “The Christian Worldview of ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,’” The Rod Martin Report, July 4, 2026; David Schrock, “The Genius of the American System,” American Reformer, July 15, 2026; and Ryan Helfenbein, “Providence, Protestantism, and the Classroom: The Christianity of America’s Founding and Only Future,” Christ Over All, July 27, 2026.
15. Two recent articles make this point in connection with the growing threat of Islam: Mark Coppenger, “Islam’s Hostility Toward First Amendment Rights,” Christ Over All, July 17, 2026; John D. Wilsey, “Religious Pluralism, Sharia Supremacy, and the Constitution,” Christ Over All, July 10, 2026.
16. The Mayflower Compact was an unambiguous Christian document describing the exact reason for founding a new nation: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, “The Mayflower Compact.”
From South Africa to SpaceX
If this is the American Dream, then the American Dream is good. And because it is aimed at human flourishing, we might even pronounce it as “very good.” Even a fruit of Christian faith. It’s good because it promotes hard work over entitlement, competition over envy, long-term investment over immediate gratification, risk-taking (with its reward and failure) over mediocrity, and taking responsibility for oneself over dependence on the state. Above all, it promotes family and a rich heritage for future generations over selfish individual interests. As Adams wrote, this is much more than “a dream of merely material plenty.”
The American Dream is why so many immigrants want to come here.17 The American Dream explains Andrew Carnegie, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk—Musk, born in South Africa, who co-founded PayPal and sold his stake to go on and build Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. It’s why rags-to-riches stories play well on the campaign trail. Americans love these stories because they prove our national character. To be frank, the American Dream also accounts for shortsighted pastors who decry the American Dream as soul-corrupting self-reliance, comfort, and crass materialism—they see the excess and miss the essence.18 Abuse does not negate proper use. These authors miss the true goodness in these uniquely American possibilities.
17. At least in the past. Today, social services and welfare attract many immigrants rather than the opportunity to work and do well for oneself and one’s family.
18. To clarify, those who are shortsighted have at least partially missed the point that Piper made in 2000. Piper’s point is that God is glorified in our sacrifice and self-denial, rather than vain earthly indulgence—and he’s right. But shortsighted pastors have mistaken his call to righteous self-sacrifice for a call to denounce all earthly pleasures as worldly pleasures, when many of these pleasures are actually God’s blessings and the intended fruit of diligent labor (see, e.g., Prov. 13:11; 14:4; 15:6; 21:20; 1 Tim. 6:17).
Therefore, for all the goods bound up in our national ethos, we should stop using the American Dream as a whipping boy for the sin of materialism or any other sin common to man. Using the expression this way fosters a subtle ingratitude for our nation. Materialism is a sin to be confronted, but it is not the fault of the American Dream; it’s the fault of mankind and shows up in any economic context. Ultimately, America deserves credit for channeling our desire for money toward the common good through laws that restrain our worst impulses. As for self-reliance and taking credit for one’s work, the apostle Paul did not repudiate the principle of wages-for-work when he defined justification for Roman Christians (Rom. 4:4–5). He drew a contrast. Salvation is not by works, yet salvation is unto good works, which includes working with our own hands and providing for our own families (Eph. 2:8–10; 4:28; 1 Tim. 5:8).
Those who see only materialism mistake excess for the essence of our national ethos. Those who decry its call to self-reliance confuse the economy of everyday life for that of eternal life—both are sacred but in different ways.
Redeeming the phrase from its shortsighted accusations will perhaps spark a new generation to grow up and love their country. It will bolster them to work hard, build families, and leave a rich heritage for their children—a truly radical thought (Prov. 13:22).
But there is more to say. We must not miss that the subtle ingratitude of a common swipe at our country can lead to a very dark place.
The American Dream vs. the Collectivist Nightmare
A common critique goes something like this: “The American Dream is not working for everyone. There are haves and have-nots. There’s the 1 percent and then the rest of us. Unequal outcomes prove the injustice of the system.” Their answer? Redistributive policies—every time. These are policies that reward laziness, reduce innovation, and demotivate hard work.19 Such an answer turns the American Dream into a Marxist nightmare—the very foe that James Truslow Adams was seeking to combat by popularizing the older term.
19. See Trent Hunter, “Socialism and the Twisted Legacy of Slavery: A Cautionary Tale from the ‘Great Society,’” Christ Over All, December 11, 2023.
The American Dream is consistent with a state that secures our negative rights: rights that delineate what others cannot do to us. The American Dream, however, is not consistent with the American Left’s insistence on a state that secures certain positive “rights.” These “rights” require others to do something for us. Examples of negative rights include the right to life or the right to your own property. As in, the right not to be murdered or stolen from. These rights follow from Scriptural commands and they are natural, indeed might I say, self-evident. The “right” to a job, health care, abortion, “affordable housing,” a certain standard of living, or to have what someone else has are examples of positive “rights.” These require state coercion of citizens. But the American Dream is not a legal right to a specific future arbitrated by the force of the United States government.
The coercive policies required for equal outcomes would destroy the American Dream just as those policies have destroyed every nation where they have been implemented: Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Venezuela, Somalia, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and more.20 Such policies also foster rank materialism since they reduce us to our possessions. Therefore, we must insist: socialism and communism are not only un-American, but fundamentally anti-American. If anything, they are an American nightmare.
20. See James R. Otteson, “The Death and Rise of Socialism,” Wheaton Center for Faith, Politics & Economics, Wheaton College, 2020. For some encouraging stories, see Lee Edwards, “Three Nations That Tried Socialism and Rejected It,” The Heritage Foundation, October 16, 2019.
The Reason Stalin Hated America
This is proven true by socialism’s difficulty—historically—in taking root here versus other countries. Norman Podhoretz makes the point in a most fascinating way, tracing the origin of that related phrase—“American exceptionalism”:
In the 20th century, social scientists began speculating as to why America was the only country in the developed world where socialism had failed to take root. As it happens, I myself first came upon the term “American exceptionalism” not in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where it has mistakenly been thought to have originated, but in a book by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who used it in connection with the absence in America of a strong socialist party. More recently I have discovered that the term may actually have originated with Joseph Stalin, of all people, who coined the term in the same connection but only in order to dismiss it. Thus, when an American Communist leader informed him that American workers had no intention of playing the role Marx had assigned to the worldwide proletariat as the vanguard of the coming socialist revolution, Stalin reputedly shouted something like, “Away with this heresy of American exceptionalism!”21
21. Norman Podhoretz, “Is America Exceptional?” Imprimis 41, no. 10 (October 2012).
America has been exceptional for its possibilities, but also for its impossibilities.
Yet, today there are growing numbers of anti-American Americans among us. Enough apparently in our nation’s most prominent city to elect an Islamo-Marxist mayor.22 Truly, the American Dream is already dead for everyone who has accepted an ideal outcome that is something other than the opportunity to work to achieve one’s full potential. This is the biggest threat to the American Dream today: not its uneven outcomes, but those who mean to use the government to solve this supposed problem. Those who use the American Dream as a Trojan horse for redistributive policies would tax the American Dream to death by its destruction of the incentives and culture required for the creation of wealth.
22. “Zohran Mamdani Wins Historic New York City Mayoral Race,” NPR, November 5, 2025.
For those at the levers of power, this is not just a matter of well-meaning confusion. Advocates along this stream hate the exceptional freedoms that make the American Dream possible.23 They purport to love the disadvantaged but promote policies that only widen the gap between rich and poor. Instead of rewarding risk and tolerating failure, they weaken the American Dream by punishing risk-takers and normalizing failure—achieving what they promise, equal albeit poor outcomes. Their centralized planning promises everything and takes even more . . . and they know it.
23. United States Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), who ran as Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential candidate in 2016, said at a Senate hearing in 2025: “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes.” Tim Kaine, Foreign Relations Committee, Nomination Hearing, Transcripts (September 3, 2025). For an exposition of the pernicious designs of Marxists in their dream to dismantle America, see Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It, Special Report No. 262 (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, November 14, 2022).
The One Percent for One Year
The American Dream rests on a different way of seeing the world and ordering civilization. It’s a vision that assumes disparate outcomes are inherently good because humans are inherently diverse. It’s what you get when you treat uneven people equally. It’s also natural to a culture that rewards risk-taking. Some win and some lose. Most who work honestly also win a little more over time. In America, today’s middle class becomes tomorrow’s 1 percent and vice versa. Amazingly, it’s not a static class in the American system.24 As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated, “In the course of a decade, most of the people in the top 1 percent will be there one year only.”25 The American Dream does not promise the best possible life. Instead, it offers the real possibility of a good life, even a better life for us and our children through hard work and creativity—the pursuit of happiness. The American Dream promises opportunity through equal protection under the law, not equal outcomes for all.
24. Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011), chap. 5, “Income Facts and Fallacies.” Thomas Sowell explores how the people in the top 1 percent and 10 percent change over time in this video: Hoover Institution, “Facts and Fallacies with Thomas Sowell,” Uncommon Knowledge, YouTube, May 19, 2011.
25. Jim Henry, “Thomas Sowell on the Root Causes of Income Inequality,” WORLD, December 30, 2014.
True Americans work for their dreams. Marxists steal them.
If this all sounds too abstracted, check your Facebook feed. There you’ll find old friends who have left the faith, a move that began when they embraced a political ideology with a worldview hostile to Christianity. Even before that, they embraced a basic cynicism. When some preachers pitted the American Dream against our faith, they sowed seeds of ingratitude and primed their hearers to despise their nation. In time, the well-intentioned-but-misguided calls for radical discipleship led many to fall prey to the thinly veiled Marxist revolutionaries that peaked in our feeds in the summer of 2020, ten years after Platt’s New York Times bestselling book Radical—a mark of his influence and the market for his argument. Tragically, many who were taught to reject seashells were now picking up banners and marching to a different drummer. That’s on them, not famous preachers. Yet from a certain distance, socialist critiques of capitalism sound eerily similar to many vaguely defined, and preachy, evangelical critiques of the American Dream.
As the saying goes, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.” Piper and Platt preached in good times. But those good times have made weak men.26 Today, we need to recapture a proper appreciation for our nation’s exceptional character as God’s gift, a gift that makes the American Dream possible.
26. See G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain, The New World 7 (self-published, 2016). An observation: Piper’s sermon at OneDay in 2000 held out, “a nice house, a nice car, a nice job, a nice family, a nice retirement,” almost as givens. Every sermon has its context and moment. Clearly, that generation of young people both expected all this and wanted more—spiritually speaking—than what the “American Dream,” so defined, could offer. Today, this ideal is harder to achieve due to political, economic, and cultural realities. Additionally, our own moment calls for a different emphasis: to call a generation to actually work in a godly way for a house, a car, a job, a family, even retirement.
A Good Dream for a Great Commission
While James Truslow Adams popularized the American Dream in The Epic of America, Rush Limbaugh expounded its roots and fruit for a new generation of Americans from behind his golden Excellence in Broadcasting microphone:
Have you ever wondered how a population of fewer than 300 million people created the highest standard of living and the greatest economic, political, and educational progress in human history? Other civilizations have been the standard-bearers of their eras, but none compare to this nation.
Our DNA is no different from any other population on Earth. Yet, this collection of citizens has done more good for the world than any other—feeding the hungry, welcoming immigrants, providing disaster relief, defending global freedom, and liberating hundreds of millions from the bonds of slavery and of tyranny.
What made this possible? It was a unique codification: a system designed for ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things—not the smartest, the brightest, the well-born, or the wealthiest, but ordinary people. This country became the greatest nation in history because it was founded on a singular, foundational truth: our rights and our freedom come from God, not from the government.27
27. This is an edited version of a segment from the Official Rush USA (@OfficialRushUSA). “Rush Limbaugh Show (2009).” X, October 13, 2023.
Though not without her flaws, what’s special about America is all the good she has done for her own and for the world. But the greater good America has done for the world goes beyond what Rush understood.
No, the American Dream is not the Great Commission. Properly understood, neither is the American Dream in competition with the glorious call Jesus has placed on his Church to go to the nations.28
28. Again, Platt: “If people are dying and going to hell without ever knowing there is a gospel, then we clearly have no time to waste our lives on an American Dream.” Radical, 143.
But the American Dream has played its part. The American Dream has offered a context in which everyday Christian disciples in America work out their faith, work for the food they eat, build families, and worship their God in peace. Less obvious (but crucial), the American Dream has nurtured the kind of people most likely to find the Great Commission compelling and worth it: a people given to hard work, sowing and reaping, building and managing households, taking risks, taking responsibility, long-term investment, and working for the good of their neighbors. Fueled by a foundational belief in God-given rights, the American Dream has also uniquely enabled the United States to fund and advance the Great Commission on an unprecedented scale as the number one sender of missionaries.29
29. “Lausanne Report: Most Missionaries Are Reaching the Reached,” Christianity Today, September 25, 2024. The underlying figures—135,000 missionaries sent and 38,000 received by the United States—are from the World Christian Database (2020), reported in Lausanne Movement, State of the Great Commission (2024).
James reminds us, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” (Jas. 1:17). The good news is perfect. But America is a good gift.
On this, her 250th birthday, we give God our thanks.
After all, if we’re to make disciples of all nations, shouldn’t we be good and grateful citizens of our own? And shouldn’t we teach disciples among all nations to do the same?
Radical, I know.
