In this article, the author states that because people are willing to kill us just for being Americans, we ought at least to know what being American is. Yet many of our students have been taught painfully little about our nation's history, purposes, or achievements. In America's original founding narrative, faith and reason work together. Both point to liberty as the bright red thread of human history. The author contends that Americans today have lost this intellectual synthesis. It lies broken in fragments upon the ground, like a great mosaic that has fallen from what was once a towering arch above us. That is why the relativism around us has mushroomed. We can no longer defend the truths our founders took to be self-evident, since we have given up the ground our founders stood upon. The author calls for a reckoning as the new century has begun. He states that four lessons were learned during the horrors of the century past, and two of them are especially important for our purposes today: (1) Truth matters. Better than cowardice is fidelity to truth; (2) Vulgar relativism so undermines the culture of liberty that free institutions cannot long survive; (3) The boast of the dictators that dictatorship is better for the people than "decadent democracy" proved to be empty; and (4) The boast that socialism is morally superior to capitalism, and better for the poor, was also empty.