Fidelity as a Psychological Foundation: What Robert George's Initiative Reveals About Human Flourishing

A Wall Street Journal poll published in 2023 showed a generational decline in religious belief, patriotism, and family values among Americans. Princeton University professor Robert P. George described the findings as genuinely alarming and launched Fidelity Month in response — a grassroots initiative dedicated each June to renewing commitments to God, family, community, and country. At a June 17 event hosted by the Advancing American Freedom Foundation, George articulated what the erosion of those commitments actually costs.

The conversation belongs as much to psychology and anthropology as to politics. When fidelity to foundational commitments weakens, something structural in the human person weakens with it.

What the data shows

The Wall Street Journal poll found that fewer Americans report religion, patriotism, community involvement, and family as central to their personal identity than at any prior point in the survey's history. George attributed this to what he called 'a loss of faith' and a failure of gratitude toward the country's founding inheritance.

The numbers matter, but the mechanism behind them matters more. Commitment structures — to a spouse, a faith community, a nation, or a moral tradition — function as identity anchors. They provide stable referents against which a person measures growth, failure, recovery, and purpose. When those anchors erode across a population simultaneously, the result is a measurable increase in anomie, the condition Emile Durkheim identified as the psychological and social consequence of normlessness.

George's concern is precisely this. 'So what binds us together?' he asked at the June event. His answer pointed to shared constitutional principles, but he was careful to note that legal frameworks alone have never been sufficient. 'That has never been the whole story,' he said, 'and by itself, it has never been enough.'

The Catholic meta-model and the architecture of commitment

The Catholic Christian understanding of the human person offers a framework for why that insufficiency is structural rather than incidental. The person is not a bundle of preferences or a carrier of rights. The person is a relational being, constituted by love, oriented toward transcendence, and fulfilled through self-gift. Vitz, Nordling, and Titus describe this orientation as a deep existential longing — one that remains active even when concealed by disability, distorted by addiction, or masked by atheistic claims, because the need for genuine flourishing is the basis for any serious therapeutic or formative intervention.[^1] Fidelity, within this framework, is not a lifestyle choice. It is a description of how the human person is meant to operate.

George made a parallel point at the June event, noting that commitment to God and to marriage and family are 'not a distinctively or uniquely Christian thing.' The anthropological claim is broader than any single tradition. Commitment, constancy, and faithfulness correspond to something real in the structure of persons — what Augustine captured when he wrote that the human heart is restless until it rests in God.[^2]

Positive psychology research conducted over the past three decades consistently identifies committed relationships, participation in religious communities, and civic engagement as among the strongest predictors of subjective wellbeing and meaning. Both depend, structurally, on the kind of fidelity George is describing.

What Fidelity Month is actually asking

The initiative is, in practical form, deliberately modest. George encouraged those at the June 17 event to share articles on social media promoting fidelity to God, family, and country; to ask religious leaders to address faithfulness from the pulpit; and to engage in ordinary conversations about why these commitments matter. The goal is not legislative. It is cultural and personal.

This reflects a sound understanding of how cultural change occurs. Norms shift through repeated exposure, through modeling, through the slow accumulation of visible examples that make certain behaviors legible and admirable. George's initiative asks participants to become those examples — to make fidelity publicly visible in their own communities during a month that has, in recent years, been associated with very different messaging about identity and commitment.

The timing is deliberate. June 2026 approaches America's 250th anniversary, a moment George has identified as an opportunity for reflection and renewal. 'Americans across the racial spectrum, across the ideological or the ethnic spectrum, across the religious divides, have all shared a commitment to the principles of the Declaration,' he said, pointing toward a unity that does not require uniformity but does require shared fidelity to something larger than individual preference.

The person before the culture

What George's analysis identifies, and what Catholic psychology affirms, is that cultural renewal begins at the level of the person. The decline in the Wall Street Journal data did not happen because of one policy failure. It happened through millions of individual decisions to treat commitments as conditional, to exit when remaining became costly, to prioritize self-expression over self-gift.

Reversal follows the same logic. It begins with persons choosing, concretely and repeatedly, to honor their commitments. The research on meaning-making consistently shows that people who maintain commitments through difficulty report higher long-term flourishing than those who do not. The Catholic tradition understands this not as coincidence but as anthropological truth: the person who gives himself or herself faithfully — to God, to a vocation, to a community — is not diminished by that gift. The person is constituted and enlarged by it. Fidelity is the condition of human freedom fully exercised, not its opposite.

As America moves toward its 250th anniversary, the question George raises becomes more urgent. What holds a pluralistic democracy together when the cultural infrastructure of shared commitment erodes? The legal answer is necessary but, as George insists, insufficient. The fuller answer has always involved the commitments people make in private — in families, in congregations, in communities — commitments that no legislature can mandate but that remain the true load-bearing structures of a free society.

Source: EWTN News, 'Fidelity Month event explores what binds Americans together ahead of 250th anniversary,' June 17, 2026.

References

[^1]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., McWhorter, M., & Gross, C. (2020). Fulfilled in virtue. In P. C. Vitz, W. J. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice (pp. 249–305). Divine Mercy University Press.

[^2]: Augustine (401/2007), Confessions (I.1.2), as cited in Titus et al. (2020), p. 258.