American have forgotten their first loves. A recent Wall Street Journal- NORC poll found an unexpected drop in the number of Americans between 1998 and now who find patriotism, religion, having children, and community involvement “very important” to them. For example, only 38% highly value patriotism today as opposed to 70% just 25 years ago. Religion went from 62% then to 39% now.

These values form the bedrock of a healthy political community. Their erosion, therefore, rightly has caused immediate public concern. Moreover, what has replaced them only adds to the problem. Among the matters Americans have found of increased importance was making money, which went from 31% to 43%.

The shifts this poll displayed point to a lack of civic virtue among “We, the People.” The American founders saw such virtue as essential to making successful our experiment in self-government.

In diagnosing our lack of virtue, we must be careful to understand the underlying problem. While some of the issue concerns the head, the more fundamental issues pertain to the heart. Virtue’s core involves love that is rightly ordered. In other words, virtue consists of loving the right persons and things in the right way and in the proper proportion.

Patriotism is the civic virtue grounded in the love of one's country. Such love is good for Americans in two ways. First, patriotism helps foster a sense of belonging and commitment. Through the love of one's country, we see our duty to work together and sacrifice for each other’s good. We see ourselves as a community bound together by cords of memory as well as geography.

But for Americans, patriotism also reinforces the belief that our country is great — that it is something worth defending and even dying for. This recognition does not deny our flaws and the injustices that have and do accompany those flaws. However, it does rejoice in America’s self-definition according to the principles of human liberty and equality. That rejoicing, that love, then cultivates a commitment to preserving those principles and better realizing them for ourselves and our neighbors. This virtue of patriotism forms an important ground for community involvement. The more we see our common bonds, the more we invest in each other for the greater good.

Religion, too, is a public good, and practicing it is a virtue. Atheism and agnosticism have become far too common in society today, including among some believers who think faith is private or something to be confined to the walls of their houses of worship. But America’s founders largely rejected those positions, and we have generally lived by another standard. We see in faith a ground for our principles of liberty and equality. We see the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” as our North Star in political and social action. Faith also teaches us humility as well as commits us to religious liberty under the providence of a benevolent God.

Children, finally, instill the virtues particular to family life. Americans always have highly valued the family as the building block of civilization. Structuring our lives around our families helps fight our human temptation to selfishness. It creates habits of serving others, thinking of their good, and seeing our own benefit in those pursuits. Moreover, children tie the generations of citizens together and present the opportunity to continue the country we love, for the reasons we love it, into perpetuity.

To undermine and ignore these loves leaves our polity much poorer in spirit. To replace it with a love of money might make us richer in our bank accounts (though that is questionable given current economic conditions), but it will ultimately do damage to the more important, fundamental, and good loves we need as humans and our country needs in its citizens. It feeds our selfishness, our isolation, and various other vices.

This poll should be a call to action. We must find our first loves again as persons and as Americans. We must knit ourselves anew together as families, believers, and citizens. That renewal, more than any particular election or policy, will heal the many wounds we suffer and the divisions we see. It would be, as President Abraham Lincoln said in another time of conflict, a “new birth of freedom.”

Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.