Last week in my freshman geography seminar, I assigned a book I deeply admire: Ray Suarez’s “We Are Home,” a collection of oral histories from recent immigrants about the American Dream. Suarez asks new Americans to tell the story of how they came to our shores — not just geographically, but morally and generationally. Who came before you? What did they endure? What did they build?
I wanted to ask the same question of all my first-year students, as they are at the beginning of adulthood. Many are away from home for the first time, and I assumed that they would have stories that would captivate the entire seminar.
So I began with what seemed like the most basic kind of geography question. I looked around the room. Some of my students are from the Midwest. Others from Chicago. Others from California or Texas. And I asked: Why there? What brought your family to that place? What is the path that led you and your family — specifically — to where you are now?
The room went strangely quiet. Not defensive. Not hostile. Just blank, as if I had asked a question from another century.
I can happily tell you why I’m from the Philadelphia area. I can trace the moves, the jobs, the migrations, the history, and the pressures and opportunities that shaped my family’s story over generations from Europe to the United States. But many of my students could not answer even that first question.
I know where I come from. And because of that, I know more clearly what I owe this nation.
To my shock, most students had no real idea why their families were living in the state they did. They did not know what brought their parents there, the details of their grandparents’ lives, and what forces — economic, cultural, personal, religious — had shaped the trajectory of their lives.
It was not that they were uninterested. It was that the story was missing.
When it was my turn, I shared what I could: my family’s heritage, the journey from Hungary, Poland and Russia, the generations of striving and upheaval that eventually brought us to the United States. I talked about antisemitism and the Holocaust and can trace this story back four generations. I know names, places, hardships, professions. I know what America represented to them — not perfection, but possibility. Not ease, but refuge. Not entitlement, but gratitude.
And I realized, speaking aloud, how much of my own civic identity is built on that knowledge. I know where I come from. And because of that, I know more clearly what I owe this nation.
That moment has stayed with me because it points to something larger than one classroom discussion and explains why our civic life feels so brittle.
We spend endless time analyzing polarization, protest culture, ideological extremism and institutional distrust. But we often miss the deeper condition beneath it all: a generation that is deeply unrooted.
So many young people today are not merely politically confused; many are existentially ungrounded. They do not know where they come from. They do not feel anchored in family narratives, religious traditions, inherited communities or thick forms of belonging. They are, in Durkheim’s sense, increasingly untethered.
Durkheim warned long ago that societies cannot survive on individual autonomy alone. Human beings require moral frameworks, shared rituals and collective meaning. When those weaken, what follows is not liberation but anomie: a restless, disoriented condition in which people grasp for identity wherever they can find it.
A society without roots produces citizens without ballast. And the results are everywhere around us.
Students arrive on campus with extraordinary access to information but little sense of inheritance. They have opinions but few stories. They have vocabulary but not grounding. They have constant digital connection but often lack the deeper forms of belonging that come from family, faith and place.
For decades, we have stopped asking students to locate themselves inside a shared civic narrative. History is too often taught as critique rather than inheritance, civics as procedure rather than gratitude. A generation ago, students were still asked to learn how the country they inhabited came to exist — not as mythology, but as a chain of obligation linking past to present. That expectation has largely vanished.
The result is that many young Americans reach adulthood with little sense that they belong to a long national story of striving, sacrifice and responsibility. When the past is experienced only as indictment, it becomes difficult to feel an obligation toward the future.
One of the quiet losses beneath this rootlessness is religious and communal. For much of American history, people did not only inherit family stories — they inherited congregations, rituals and responsibilities. They grew up inside institutions that reminded them, week after week, that life was not merely self-expression but stewardship.
Pew Research Center data confirms what anyone on a college campus already senses: Young adults are far less religiously connected than their parents or grandparents were at the same age.
Human beings require moral frameworks, shared rituals and collective meaning. When those weaken, what follows is not liberation but anomie
Faith communities, at their best, did not erase individuality; they grounded it. They offered young people a vocabulary of gratitude, humility and obligation; a sense that the self is not a solo project but part of something enduring.
In many parts of the country — and especially in communities where congregational life still shapes daily rhythms — young people are reminded that belonging is not invented but received.
When those thick communities weaken, the hunger does not disappear. It simply migrates. The desire for meaning, for moral seriousness, for belonging reappears in politics — where movements promise identity, purpose and redemption, but without the patience, mercy or depth that real communities require.
Instead of family stories, many students now have algorithmic scripts. Instead of intergenerational memory, viral outrage. Instead of inherited obligation, performative politics. The smartphone becomes the substitute for the village. The slogan becomes the substitute for the story.
This is why so much contemporary activism feels detached from history, complexity and gratitude. It is not merely political. It is spiritual.
A student who does not know the sacrifices that built their life is more likely to view America only as oppression. A student without a rooted identity is more likely to confuse disruption for meaning.
The tragedy is that many of these young people are not cynical. They are searching. But what they are searching for cannot be found in hashtags or encampments. It can only be found in the slow, human work of inheritance: family, faith, friendship, memory, responsibility.
How can we give young Americans a rooted identity?
We should not respond to this condition by mocking students or dismissing them. We should respond by rebuilding the institutions and practices that root human beings in something larger than themselves.
Ask your parents about their childhood. Learn the names of your great-grandparents. Learn and then write down the story before it vanishes.
Rebuild community. Join institutions that teach gratitude and obligation. Share meals. Build friendships that are not mediated by screens.
And restore forms of education that take inheritance seriously — making family history, local memory and civic belonging part of formation again, not as nostalgia but as moral grounding.
We have told young people for decades that freedom means autonomy: the ability to invent oneself from scratch. But no one invents themselves from scratch. We are formed by inheritance, obligation, memory and love.
The American Dream was never simply economic. It was generational. It was a story of people who knew where they came from and therefore understood where they hoped to go.
A society that forgets its roots will not remain whole for long. But a society that remembers — that teaches its children where they come from, and therefore what they owe — can still renew the American dream.
Because the American dream cannot survive without the American memory.