Is the idea of a Christian nation the definition of “absolute absurdity”? According to one Christian magazine, the answer is yes.

Earlier this month, the supposedly thoughtful Plough magazine published a breathtaking exercise in intellectual cowardice, dismissing the very foundation of Western civilization as “absolute absurdity.” The essay in question tackles the subject of Christian nationhood, but it reads like a surrender document, abandoning two millennia of proven governance for faddish defeatism.

To deny the role of Christian truth in Western greatness is like denying oxygen’s role in breathing.

What lunacy drives this thinking?

The greatest civilizations in human history — medieval England’s common law, America’s founding principles, Wilberforce’s abolition movement — all emerged from Christian bedrock. These weren’t theocratic nightmares but flourishing societies that elevated human dignity precisely because they recognized divine authority above earthly empires.

History is a series of patterns, and one of them keeps repeating in America.

Forged in faith

In the 1700s, the colonies rose against the monarchy not for the sake of godless liberty, but because they believed their rights were God-given, written into creation itself. Sermons rang from meeting-houses declaring that no king could overrule the King of kings.

In the 1800s, churches formed the backbone of abolition and reform. Preachers thundered that slavery was a sin before heaven. Abolitionists carried Bibles alongside petitions. And hymns like “Amazing Grace” became anthems of emancipation.

Their message was simple: Every man was equal because every soul bore the image of God.

In the 1900s, Martin Luther King Jr. stood in that same tradition, speaking from pulpits with scripture as his shield. His call for justice was never detached from his faith. He quoted Amos and Isaiah as readily as the founders, grounding civil rights in the authority of the Almighty.

Every advance in American freedom came wrapped in Christian conviction.

Wings, not shackles

But today we’re told these foundations are obsolete, that “Christian nation” is a dirty phrase, and that the values that guided our forefathers must be disavowed like toxic waste. The elites sneer that faith in the public square is “exclusionary,” as if the alternative — soulless secularism — has produced anything but despair, drugs, gender-bending, and fractured families.

But the truth couldn’t be any clearer.

Christian ideals were never shackles; they’re wings. Justice tempered by mercy. Individual worth regardless of station. Care for the vulnerable, not because it wins votes, but because it reflects the imago Dei. Moral accountability to a higher law that no king, no president, and no bureaucrat can erase.

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These principles are humanity’s highest aspirations. They built cathedrals that still tower when kingdoms fall. They gave birth to parliaments instead of pogroms, hospitals instead of hangings, and constitutions instead of cults. The entire Western canon — from Augustine’s “City of God” to Aquinas’ natural law, from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights — rests on this sacred scaffolding.

Every liberty we prize today was planted in soil first tilled by faith.

Secularism’s harvest

This is what the Plough party misses. If America forsakes its Christian roots, it doesn’t drift into neutrality. It falls into the hands of new lawgivers, those who craft commandments for commerce — not for conscience.

Already we see this counterfeit creed: Banks cancel customers for thought crimes, corporations peddle ESG as ersatz salvation, Silicon Valley preaches virtue while addicting children and dismantling families, algorithms determine who can speak, credit scores determine who can buy, bureaucrats determine whose children are taught what is right and what is wrong.

From there, the descent is undeniable. When a boy is told he can become a girl by fiat, when schools scrub scripture but sanctify drag shows, when fentanyl fells more Americans than any war ever fought — this is the harvest of secular rule. A culture that once exalted discipline and faith now exalts indulgence and self-invention, producing generations unmoored, medicated, and utterly miserable.

Of course, critics will raise straw men.

“Do you want to stone adulterers?”Is this an attempt to ban other religions?””Are you trying to enforce Levitical law?”

No serious Christian makes such claims. The point isn’t theocracy. It’s renewal.

The true absurdity

A society shaped by Christian morality has always been freer than one governed by the cold calculus of power. The founders knew it. John Adams said it plainly, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Remove the moral compass, and the machinery of liberty grinds into tyranny. Without Christian restraint, power consolidates, rights vanish, and man becomes a cog in someone else’s machine.

Plough may shrug and call that “absolute absurdity.” But the absurdity is Plough’s.

To deny the role of Christian truth in Western greatness is like denying oxygen’s role in breathing. We can’t cut out the heart and expect the body to live. Every triumph of the West was animated by Christian conviction. To sneer at that inheritance is to sneer at the very civilization that grants these critics the freedom to sneer in the first place.

The blood of martyrs and the ink of reformers didn’t flow so we could trade a living faith for lifeless ideologies that serve only the state and the market.

America’s survival depends not on importing ideologies from Davos or Silicon Valley, but on returning to the well that never runs dry.

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In Sugar Land, Texas, a giant statue depicting the monkey-faced Hindu deity Hanuman was erected in August 2024. Officially titled “Statue of Union,” many Texans and Americans elsewhere have found this monument to be an aberration. For some, it is the aesthetic unsightliness. For others, it is a religious aversion to having a pagan idol being raised to such heights. And for others, it is a demonstration of just how many foreigners now live in Texas.

I see each of these points as pins on a board that, when connected, reveal a fault line in American civic life: We are divided culturally — and the divide is widening.

If citizenship is only a piece of paper that protects you from deportation and allows you access to our material goods and services, then we have devalued it to the point of being worthless.

America is not an abstract, universal idea that anyone can adopt, as a former Obama-appointed global citizen opined recently in his chiding of Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award dinner this summer. America requires Americans. No, we don’t all need to look and sound identical, but we do need to be specific about what makes an American an American.

American culture, with its Christian civil religion, is required to maintain this union of states and their self-governing peoples. You cannot take people from any other civic, commercial, or cultural context, drop them within American borders, and expect that you will get the same results as from those who are fully assimilated to our country’s historic way of life.

Indians are from an old civilization that is distinct from the one built in Europe, globalized by Britain and Spain, that America currently is an inheritor and torchbearer of. While many Indians have successfully adopted the Western way of life, many more carry an apprehension toward American culture.

Many of the Hindu Indians I live around in the suburbs north of Dallas will freely admit that they moved here merely for higher-paying jobs and the availability of nice things they were unable to obtain in India. “We had a farm. I was happy. But my son wanted a better job,” one sweet matron told my wife with a resigned sadness. “My family is here, so I must be here.” Another has remarked how she loves to sit at her window and watch my six children playing outside, as she only has one grandchild who has been raised in America — and her children want no more, as it would interfere with their work.

I feel a certain sympathy with these immigrants who are struggling with culture shock. They may have nicer homes in America — but they are not at home. This is a strange land to them, just as India would be to me if I lived there. And the American is a stranger to them. They do not consider themselves Americans, and they are worried that their children and descendants will become like the strangers they live among.

The Sugar Land statue, or “murti,” along with other religious displays such as celebrations of Diwali, are not simple public practices of faith; they are cultural statements meant to pacify fears among Hindus that their native culture and its religion will be lost to America’s material excesses and its Christian religion. Large numbers of Hindu Indians living in proximity to each other enable them to speak their native language, eat their traditional foods, and practice their religion.

In essence, Indian culture is kept intact, and Indians remain insulated from and unassimilated to American culture. Many do not become American — they remain Indians who just happen to live in America.

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I regret that I must use Indian immigrants as my example of unassimilated America. They are merely responding to what has become commonplace in America, England, Canada, and the West more broadly — and therefore what they believe to be the norm.

English is unwritten and unspoken in increasing numbers of our cities and towns, with residents unable to speak our nation’s language and being offered the choice to vote for a foreign-born Marxist in New York City. Dueling demonstrations carrying Palestinian and Israeli flags have become almost commonplace in our streets, just as residents of California wave Mexican flags in protest of their forthcoming deportations.

Somalis in Minnesota celebrate their native country’s independence day en masse together with local officials — then vote them out in favor of alternatives they consider their own. When I asked one recently naturalized immigrant from Colombia if she considered herself an American now that she is a citizen, she said bluntly, “No. I am Colombian.”

What would have been thought of as egregious foreign incursions a hundred years ago is the message America now sends: Becoming an American is not akin to living in America or being a citizen of America. It is completely optional. If citizenship is only a piece of paper that protects you from deportation and allows you access to our material goods and services, then we have devalued it to the point of being worthless.

No hyphenated Americans

When thinking of small ethno-religious minorities in America like Hassidic Jews (180,000) or the Amish (395,000) who have historically kept mostly to themselves, this point may seem trite. But it is consequential when the sheer number of Hindus — and the potential for many, many more — is truly understood.

The last U.S. census posits that over 450,000 Hindus reside in Texas alone, doubled from a decade ago. In 2022, Indians composed the largest share of international homebuyers in Central Texas, according to an Austin Board of Realtors report. Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has gone to India twice on diplomatic missions, touting mutually beneficial financial arrangements and “common values of family, faith, compassion, and hard work.”

Economics aside, these are supposed cultural values that the governor is identifying. While all the words Governor Abbott used are perhaps debatable, the biggest equivocation is “faith.” Quite obviously in contradiction to the governor, the historic faith of Texans, Christianity, is not held in common with the vast majority of Indians, who are Hindu.

Though I have no flat objection to the arrival of specific individuals from elsewhere in the world who wish to become unhyphenated Americans in order to better themselves and the United States, the construction of a foreign idol by a rapidly expanding minority population of newcomers underscores the loss of what used to be a requirement to live in America: assimilation into its culture, of which its civil religion — Christianity — is a cornerstone.

In a post for the Institute of Religion and Democracy’s blog “Juicy Ecumenism,” Mark Tooley rebuked me and others for expressing the desire for a shared American culture and dismay at literal pagan idols being raised in our homeland. Tooley asks what “Christian nationalists” (a label I’ve rejected as an inaccurate pejorative used by militant anti-Christians) think the government should do in this matter?

We can debate specific proposals, but my wish is for those in government and our nation’s institutions to be conscious of the part a homogenous culture plays in a stable, civilized society. The thought that “government might do something!” to curate or protect the dominant and preferred culture of its historic people is apparently beyond the comprehension of some. So to help fire the imagination, let us look at another people who came to America — and to Texas: the German people.

German assimilation

In his book, “Turning Germans into Texans: World War I and the Assimilation and Survival of German Culture in Texas, 1900-1930,” Matthew D. Tippens offers an instructive case study in assimilation and the formation of civic identity. He traces the journey of German immigrants who arrived in Texas in the mid-19th century, with their own language, customs, religion, and ethos.

Lutheran, Catholic, or freethinking, these settlers had formed a broad but still insular group, slow to integrate into the already established fabric of American and regional Texan life. Tippens’ narrative is sympathetic (as am I) to the losses of ethnic distinctiveness, but it provides a compelling portrait of how cultural assimilation, often aided by state policy, forged a cohesive national character.

A nation’s people and their governing bodies have both the right and the duty to demand that newcomers conform to the nation’s cultural and religious norms.

Germans in Texas preserved their linguistic and institutional separateness into the 20th century. They published German-language newspapers, conducted German-speaking services in German churches, maintained German schools that taught in the German tongue, and established community halls and festivals that reinforced their communal boundaries. Tippens documents this with care, noting how these practices kept the “German-Texan” identity distinct from the “Anglo-Texan” majority. But the arrival of World War I marked a decisive rupture.

Amid rising national insecurity over split loyalties among the public, the government of the state of Texas, and in some cases the federal government in Washington, moved swiftly to eliminate internal doubts. The German language was prohibited in public schools. Pastors were pressured to preach in English. Local officials even began treating private speech in German as potentially seditious. In short, the state, backed by public sentiment, enforced a program of assimilation with remarkable efficiency. Tippens, while critical of its harshness, acknowledges its efficacy: Within a generation, German cultural institutions in Texas collapsed.

But the German people did not. They endured — not as a separate ethnos, but as Americans. They married across ethnic lines, adapted to prevailing civic norms, and ceased to think of themselves as Germans first. In place of a hyphenated identity, they adopted a national one.

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This transformation of Germans into Americans may have been jarring while it was taking place, but it stands as a triumph of political formation and moral cohesion. It demonstrated that assimilation is not merely possible, but necessary, and that cultural inheritance need not be lost in the midst of it — it can be transformed and incorporated into a higher unity.

Tippens and some Americans of German descent still feel a sense of sadness over the loss of their distinct traditions and language inherited from the old country — but not a single one would prefer to go back to Europe or transform America into Germany. They are Americans. Not German-Americans. Just Americans. America is their home. And they love it. Though they may hold aspects of their peculiar subculture near and dear in food, songs, and stories, they have submitted that culture to this land’s particular culture, the American culture.

Is the history of this forced assimilation a tragedy? Perhaps, to a degree. But it was politically and morally justified. And those who care for national unity should view it as a welcome precedent.

A nation’s people and their governing bodies have both the right and the duty to demand that newcomers conform to the nation’s cultural and religious norms. Without a shared group identity, no nation can survive. The American nation, particularly in moments of strain, has always exercised this prerogative. It was this principled assertiveness that transformed a continent of European colonists and later immigrants into a single people.

In our present moment, we have reversed that logic. To insist that immigrants adopt our language, mores, and civic ideals is now seen not as patriotic, but as prejudicial. Not only do we not hold recent immigrants to this standard, but we’ve reversed course on historical minorities who were on their way to full assimilation by decrying “whiteness” (another word for American cultural norms) as something that should be scorned, rejected, and outright rebelled against — the invisible hand of bigotry and oppression we all must condemn without reservation. You could say, “It is not enough to not be an American; you must be anti-American.”

Without a unifying identity — what makes the “pluribus” an “unum” — pluralism will rapidly dissolve into tribalism. Americans less than a hundred years ago understood this. Why should we play dumb now?

Refusing to worship the ideal of another

The present-day case of Sugar Land, Texas, where a towering Hindu idol has been erected, should be unacceptable to Americans (especially Christians), and doubly so to those of Indian heritage who see this land as their own and this people as their people.

Unlike a German store or Lutheran school of the 19th century, which could be and were quickly subordinated to American norms, a monument to a god from a distinctly foreign civilization proclaims a parallel order that makes no pretense of assimilation. It is not a gesture of integration, but of presence — and an intention of permanence. This goes for any statue, temple, campus, mural, or other declarations of occupation.

What you elevate in the public eye is what you encourage the people to idealize in their hearts. Do we want immigrants to be looking backward at what they left? Or looking forward to what they now are privileged to inherit?

Tooley says this is simply the cost of pluralism. But pluralism is not an end in itself. It is the fruit of a Christian order that’s confident enough to tolerate minority views, because it assumes its own cultural hegemony. If that majority is disregarded and that confidence eroded, pluralism becomes its opposite: a Babel of conflicting gods and moralities, doomed to be abandoned and fall.

Without a shared group identity, no nation can survive.

No one is advocating deliberate government persecution of American citizens who observe certain religious tenets or have recent ancestors from foreign nations. The First Amendment guarantees religious liberty. But let’s be honest about our founders’ intentions: The purpose of that liberty was to protect dissenting Christian sects within a Christian moral framework — not to permit the importation of rival civilizational orders.

The crux of the issue is not that there exists private practice of Hinduism in some form, or even simply that an offensive statue to one of the Hindu deities stands against the Texas sky. The statue itself is a public manifestation of an under-examined reality: that unassimilated cultures exist in America.

Beyond that, it is a declaration of intent to remain unassimilated. For the idol to be excused and dismissed shows a resignation to this reality and a toleration for this intention — and it is this nihilism that is unprecedented in our history and fundamentally un-American, not my protestations or the protestations of anyone who would refuse to bow to it.

RELATED: New immigrants struggle to assimilate — and we all pay for it

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As Kevin D. Williamson recently noted, America is a Christian nation not by legal fiat but by cultural fact — just as it is an English-speaking nation without a statute requiring it. Christianity shaped our institutions, our conception of law and liberty, our ethos of charity, and our traditions of self-rule. The civic peace that Tooley praises is not sustained by diversity for the sake of itself, but by the cultural cohesion that Christian norms and people who valued that culture once ensured.

The deeper question, then, is not whether non-Christian Americans have a right to worship, or if immigrants can hold to elements of their historic culture, but whether Americans retain the right to shape their own nation’s future. Are we permitted to determine whether the foundation we build upon remains a distinctly Western, Christian civilization that assimilates outsiders into its mold? Or is becoming a polyglot holding pen for mutually exclusive, competing cultures the only acceptable answer?

This land is our land

Germans were made into Americans not because they were coerced by mobs. The government prevented such unrest by heeding the concerns of the citizenry. By understanding the requirements of cohesion and acting decisively to incentivize the transformation, America avoided the dangers of sectarian strife when international affairs came to the forefront.

Through intentional public policy and community expression of displeasure, clear expectations were conveyed that immigrants were required to become Americans. And the Germans, to their credit, responded. They quite rapidly entered the civic mainstream after years of delay.

If the United States of America is to endure, we must raise our expectations for citizenship, which is a precious thing.

What we face now is more intractable. The newest arrivals — not only Indians but many others as well — are coming in greater numbers than any prior groups and do not believe they need to change for America. To the contrary, America must change for them.

They establish communities that replicate the political and cultural norms of their homelands. They vote as blocs. They see the issues of their native countries as taking pre-eminence over their present states. And they raise monuments to foreign gods — not in private devotion, but in public affirmation of the lands, lives, and loyalties they were supposed to have left behind.

This is not assimilation. It is colonization. And it is too often encouraged by Americans who have lost the sense of what this country is and ought to be. In an insipid diatribe railing against Vance and the pro-American tone of the government, a blogger for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “I learned in high school that people come here not because of how Americans live, but because they have the freedom to live however they want.” He speaks truthfully, as this lie is taught in our education system and preached by formerly elite institutions. The message is loud and clear: Come to America, live in America — but do not become an American.

If a distinctly American identity undergirded by a Christian civilization is no longer asserted, what shall replace it? A thousand shrines? A hundred languages? No common law, no common culture, no shared moral grammar?

Is this what you want for America? Perhaps you do, or you do not care. But for those of us who love it, we want an America that holds to its roots and maintains our constitutional order and our civilization. To do so, we must not shy away from reasserting a distinctly American identity and setting the conditions for acceptance into its culture, not just our borders.

Regaining the ‘Leitkultur’

Pluralism rests on the center trunk of a dominant culture, a Leitkultur, not the absence of one. Subcultures can be preserved when there is a monoculture that all can live in accordance with.

We must find again the will to expect — not merely invite — assimilation from any and all who wish to call this land their home. And we must recognize that the choice before us is not a specter of the “Christian nationalism” of secularist smear campaigns versus perfect tolerance, but a distinctly American nation built on a Christian civilization versus fractious, tribal chaos.

If the United States of America is to endure as one indivisible nation under God, we must take these signs seriously and raise our expectations for citizenship, which is a precious thing. It should not be portrayed as just a piece of paper awarded for correctly answering multiple-choice questions on a test and meeting some material preconditions. It must resolve the question of loyalty. It must involve a pledge of allegiance to the republic. For it is a sacred oath that symbolizes the bond with your fellow citizens.

It is as a baptism, where the old man and his old loyalties to his old nation and its old laws, his old people, and their old gods die with him. But a new, better man rises. One who gives loyalty to a better nation, with better laws, a better people, and a better God.

Editor’s note: This article was published originally at the American Mind.

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Atheists believe the universe is made up of only physical material. Souls, spirits, divinity, the afterlife — it’s all fiction.

But how do they reckon with phenomena — those hair-raising moments that shatter physics and turn our brains inside out? How do they make sense of miracles, like the terminal cancer patient who’s healed after prayer or the clinically dead person who wakes up with knowledge impossible for him to have?

The hardened skeptics will clutch their materialist beliefs even tighter, insisting there must be some scientific explanation. The more curious ones who allow themselves to venture down mystical rabbit holes, however, often find themselves in the position where disavowing the supernatural takes more effort than acknowledging its existence.

That was Lee Strobel — famous Christian apologist and author of the beloved book “The Case for Christ.” He set out to debunk Christianity, but his rigorous investigation into miracles and the veracity of biblical claims shattered his atheist beliefs and led him to the feet of Jesus.

In this fascinating interview with Glenn Beck, Lee shares several documented cases of miracles and wild stories that will challenge even the most committed atheist.

Proof of the soul

“There are 900 scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals over the last 40 years on the topic of near-death experiences. These are cases where a person is clinically dead — generally, no brain waves, no respiration, no heartbeat. Some of them have been on the way to the morgue. … But then they’re revived,” Lee says.

“And when they come back, they say, ‘I was conscious the whole time. I was watching them try to resuscitate my body in the hospital.”’

Glenn and Lee revisit the spine-chilling story of a Hispanic woman named Maria, who suffered a severe heart attack in the 1970s and was resuscitated at a hospital in Seattle. When she regained consciousness, Maria reported having an out-of-body experience, claiming her spirit floated around the emergency room while she was being operated on.

Skeptics dismissed her initially, but then Maria told them there was a sticker on the top of the ceiling fan blade in her hospital room — a detail invisible from the ground. Hospital staff brought in a ladder and beheld the sticker exactly as Maria had described it.

Lee shares another story of a young girl who drowned in a YMCA swimming pool.

“[The doctors] just were keeping her body basically alive until they figured out what to do,” he says.

But three days later, she was miraculously revived. She told hospital staff that she was “conscious the whole time,” Lee recounts. But they scoffed at the girl until she began sharing confirmed details about what her parents were doing at home while she was clinically dead in the hospital.

The girl knew that her mother made chicken and rice for dinner; she knew what specific clothes her family was wearing and that her little brother had played with his G.I. Joe toys while alone in his room — “things she could not have known unless her body, unless her spirit really did follow them home.”

Documented miracles

In his recent book “Seeing the Supernatural,” Lee shares the story of a woman who was blind from birth due to an incurable condition.

“She married a pastor. And one night they’re getting ready to go to bed, and he comes over. … He puts his hand on her shoulder, and he begins to cry and begins to pray, and he says, ‘God, I know you can heal my wife. I know you can do it, and I pray you do it tonight.’ And with that, she opened her eyes with perfect eyesight,” Lee says, adding that her vision was perfect for the remainder of her life.

“How do you explain that?” he asks.

He then shares another “well-documented case” of a woman named Doris, who had a deathbed vision.

“She sees the heavens open up, and she sees angelic beings, and she sees her father, who had died a couple years earlier. … And then she gets this puzzled look on her face, and she said, ‘Wait a minute. What’s Vita doing there?”’ Lee recounts.

Vita was Doris’ sister, who had died a couple of weeks earlier. However, Doris’ family hadn’t told her the news for fear that it would worsen her waning condition.

Doris is one of many documented cases of people who “see something in the realm to come that they could not have known about.”

Radical redemption

Evel Knievel — the American daredevil and stunt performer famous for his death-defying motorcycle jumps in the 1960s and 1970s — radically encountered God at the very end of his life.

“He was a drunk. He was a womanizer and once beat up a business associate with a baseball bat and went to jail for assault,” Lee says, retelling the icon’s incredible conversion story.

Just a few months before his death, Knievel was “on the beach in Florida, and God spoke to him and said, ‘Robert … I’ve saved you more times than you’ll ever know. Now, you need to come to me through my son, Jesus.”’

Freaked out by this profound spiritual encounter, Knievel called Frank Gifford, a renowned sportscaster and Christian, to ask about Jesus and Christianity. Gifford pointed him to Lee’s famous book “The Case for Christ,” and he came to faith in Jesus after reading it.

Knievel had a “180-degree change — more than anybody I’d ever seen in my life,” Lee says, noting that he and Knievel became friends as a result.

He was baptized in California’s Crystal Cathedral, and after he gave his powerful testimony, roughly 700 people spontaneously came forward to be baptized during the same service.

Angelic and demonic encounters

Well-known psychiatrist Dr. Richard Gallagher, who’s also a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and a psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia University, has a hair-raising story about his first demon encounter that set him on a 25-year journey of studying the demonic.

He and his wife had two cats, who had never had an issue getting along with one another. One night, however, they randomly began to savagely attack each other, shocking Gallagher and his wife, who had to put the cats in separate rooms to stop the fighting.

The very next morning, Dr. Gallagher had an appointment to psychiatrically examine a woman named Julia, who claimed to be the high priestess of a satanic cult.

“She looks up at him, and she sneers, and she says, ‘How’d you like those cats last night?’” Lee says.

Later that day, Dr. Gallagher was speaking to a Catholic priest about Julia on the phone, and during their call, a “satanic voice” interrupted and said, “You let her go. She’s ours.”

After years of studying the demonic, Dr. Gallagher has accumulated many terrifying stories of demon possession. He’s documented a case where “a petite woman … picked up a 217-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across a room” and a case where “eight eyewitnesses saw a demon-possessed person levitate off a bed for half an hour.”

But there are just as many stories of angelic encounters too. One, which was documented in a doctoral dissertation, tells the story of a young girl in the hospital asking her mother if she could see the angels. “They’re so beautiful. Listen to their singing,” she told her mother, who was skeptical but played along.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I see them. Look at their big wings,” she told her daughter, who confusedly responded, “Oh Mommy, you don’t have to lie. They don’t have big wings.”

“She went on to describe these angels in great detail. You would think if this was just something coming from the subconscious mind of a little kid, they would imagine what an angel would look like to them from a cartoon,” Lee says, but “that’s not what they see.”

To hear more documented cases of miraculous occurrences, as well as Glenn and Lee’s personal experiences with the supernatural, watch the interview above.

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Every August, California’s Monterey Peninsula becomes the heartbeat of the automotive world. For one week, collectors, manufacturers, historians, and enthusiasts gather to celebrate the past, present, and future of the automobile.

Monterey Car Week isn’t just another car show — it’s the most prestigious stage in the automotive calendar, capped by the legendary Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

What makes the story remarkable is that Lauren raced this Cobra while pregnant with Paul Fix III. Few cars carry such a direct family connection to both racing and legacy.

It’s an event where everything matters: the way cars are presented, the records set at the auctions, the new models unveiled by global brands, and even the charitable contributions that flow back into the local community.

But beyond the headlines and the glamour, this year carried a special personal moment. We went to Monterey Car Week to see one car — a Shelby Cobra with a family story unlike any other.

Something for everyone

The week is structured around multiple events that together define the global automotive scene.

Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance: The crown jewel, where the rarest and most historically significant automobiles in the world are judged with meticulous detail.Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion: Historic racing at Laguna Seca, where legendary cars aren’t just displayed — they compete at speed.Exotics on Broadway: A massive public showcase of modern supercars that turns the streets into rolling sculpture galleries.Motorlux: The kickoff celebration at the Monterey Jet Center, blending elite hospitality with a major collector car auction.

Each of these events appeals to a different audience, but together they define what Monterey Car Week has become: part automotive history lesson, part marketplace, and part celebration of innovation. This is the world’s largest car week.

Revving up with Motorlux

Motorlux is the kind of event that sets the tone for the week. Hosted at the Monterey Jet Center, it combines high-stakes auctions with an immersive cultural experience.

The curated displays this year were divided into four themes:

200 MPH Club – From the Ferrari F40 to the new Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale.From Stuttgart with Love – A Porsche showcase anchored by the unique Penske 963 RSP prototype.America’s Wild Horse – Sixty years of the Mustang, ranging from early fastbacks to the all-new 2025 Mustang GTD.The Mercedes Maestro – A tribute to designer Bruno Sacco, with cars like the iconic 190E 2.3-16.

But Motorlux is also about hospitality. Guests were treated to culinary offerings from Michelin-starred chefs, regional wine houses, and luxury spirit tastings. It’s as much about lifestyle as it is about horsepower, a signal of how broad the appeal of Monterey Car Week has become.

It also hosts the Broad Arrow Auctions, which features some of the finest assemblies of collector cars across virtually every niche of collecting within the grounds of the Monterey Jet Center kicking off Monterey Car Week in grand style.

New kids in town

Carmakers have realized that Monterey offers a unique mix: prestige, media attention, and a passionate audience. So what better place to debut some of their biggest new models?

Acura RSX: Revived as an electric crossover coupe, a departure from the affordable sports coupe that earned a loyal following decades ago.Rolls-Royce Phantom Centenary: All eight generations of the Phantom displayed together for the first time, marking 100 years of the model.Mercedes-Benz “Stargaze Theatre”: The U.S. premiere of the Concept AMG GT XX, Vision V luxury limousine concept, and a special-edition Maybach.BMW Heritage Debuts: The 2026 BMW 8-Series M Heritage edition (limited to 500 units) and the 2026 M2CS, a compact performance car boasting 523 horsepower.

These debuts highlight how Monterey has become as critical to automakers as traditional international auto shows.

Auctions: Ferrari races ahead

The auctions are more than just sales — they are a live barometer of the collector car market. In 2025, combined totals from all auction houses reached $414.2 million by Saturday, with an average sale price over $515,000 per car.

Once again, Ferrari dominated. The top sale was a 2025 Ferrari Daytona SP3 Coupe charity lot that sold for $26 million through RM Sotheby’s. A 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Competizione brought in over $25 million at Gooding Christie’s. Ferrari claimed eight of the top 10 sales across all auctions.

Highlights by auction house

Mecum: $45 million overall; top sale was a 1969 Lamborghini Miura P400 S Coupe at $1.98 million.Broad Arrow: $49.8 million, highlighted by a 2005 Maserati MC12 Spyder at $5.2 million.Bonhams: $44.2 million; standout was a 2020 Bugatti Divo Coupe at $8.55 million.RM Sotheby’s: Nearly $111 million in sales, led by the 2025 Ferrari Daytona SP3 Coupe charity lot at $26 million, a 1993 Ferrari F40 LM GTC Coupe at $11 million, and a 1995 Ferrari F50 at $9.2 million.Gooding Christie’s: $163.8 million, with multiple world records, including the $25 million Ferrari California Spider Competizione.

These results confirm two things: Ferraris remain the most desirable investment cars, and modern supercars are beginning to command nearly the same attention as classics.

Overall top 10 auction sales (through Saturday)

2025 Ferrari Daytona SP3 Coupe – $26,000,000
(RM Sotheby’s, charity lot)1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Competizione Alloy Spider – $25,305,000
(Gooding Christie’s)1993 Ferrari F40 LM GTC Coupe – $11,005,000
(RM Sotheby’s)1995 Ferrari F50 Coupe – $9,245,000
(RM Sotheby’s)2020 Bugatti Divo Coupe – $8,557,500
(Bonhams)1973 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Competizione – $8,145,000
(Gooding Christie’s)1957 Ferrari 250 California Spider – $7,265,000
(Gooding Christie’s)2017 Ferrari LaFerrari Aperta Spider – $6,715,000
(RM Sotheby’s)1935 Mercedes-Benz 500K Sindelfingen Special Roadster – $5,340,000
(RM Sotheby’s)2015 Ferrari LaFerrari Coupe – $5,230,000
(RM Sotheby’s)

Torpedo takes Pebble Beach

The 74th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance delivered its trademark blend of elegance and precision. The Best of Show went to a 1924 Hispano-Suiza H6C Nieuport-Astra Torpedo, a car that represents the artistry of early coach-built automobiles.

This year’s field included 229 cars, with 55 international entries from 22 countries. I had the honor of judging the 427 Cobra class, a category that resonates deeply with me both professionally and personally.

Yet, Pebble Beach isn’t only about recognition. It raised more than $4 million this year for nearly 100 nonprofits focused on youth education, directly benefiting over 10,000 children in Monterey County.

RELATED: 9 reasons we (still) love America — and you should too

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The one car that brought us back

For all the prestige of Pebble Beach, the spectacle of the auctions, and the global debuts, there was one car that drew us to Monterey more than any other: the Shelby Cobra CSX2051.

This particular Cobra has a history intertwined with our own. It was displayed at SAAC-18 at Watkins Glen in July 1993 and then raced by Lauren Fix at the Lime Rock Fall Vintage Festival in 1993. That same year, the car earned an SVRA Historic Medallion, recognizing its authenticity and period correctness.

What makes the story remarkable is that Lauren raced this Cobra while pregnant with Paul Fix III. Few cars carry such a direct family connection to both racing and legacy.

After 32 years, we were reunited with CSX2051 at Pebble Beach. It wasn’t just a reunion with a historic Shelby — it was a reunion with a moment in our own lives, one that made history and even found its way into the rule books.

Monterey Car Week 2025 once again proved why it is the pinnacle of the automotive world. It’s where collectors measure markets, automakers reveal the future, and enthusiasts celebrate the past.

For most attendees, the highlights were the record-setting Ferraris, the global debuts, or the Best of Show Hispano-Suiza. But for us, it was something more personal — the return of the Shelby Cobra CSX2051, a car that connected past and present in a way no auction result ever could.

It was a reminder that at the heart of Monterey Car Week are not just machines, but the stories they carry and the people they connect.

For the full story behind this remarkable Cobra and how it became part of racing history, listen to our latest podcast where we share the details firsthand.

​Monterey car show, Shelby, Ferrari, Classic cars, Align cars 

Cooler cars at better prices? America’s new trade deal with the EU could mean just that.

Traditionally, manufacturers have had to produce two different versions of the same vehicle to meet U.S. and European requirements. Even small differences in pedestrian safety regulations, emissions rules, or lighting standards have required costly redesigns, duplicate testing, and extensive certification processes. These expenses are ultimately passed down to consumers.

Billions of dollars in development, certification, and testing costs could be avoided, allowing automakers to focus on innovation, quality, and design.

But in July 2025, the United States and the European Union unveiled a landmark trade framework that could reshape how vehicles are manufactured, certified, and sold on both continents.

Meeting halfway

At the heart of the agreement is mutual recognition of vehicle safety and emissions standards, a policy shift that promises to simplify cross-Atlantic auto sales and significantly cut costs for manufacturers.

For drivers and car enthusiasts, the deal has the potential to expand choices and lower prices for the EU and the U.S. Yet behind the exciting headlines lie complex questions about market dynamics, regulatory oversight, and the long-term implications for American automakers.

By aligning standards, the agreement allows a vehicle certified in Europe to be sold in the U.S. without additional modification, and vice versa. The economic potential of this alignment is substantial, offering billions in savings across the auto industry.

Tariff relief

Here’s why this could be a game changer. Tariffs were a significant factor in the negotiation with the EU. The U.S. had previously threatened duties of up to 30% on European vehicles, which could have dramatically increased costs for consumers and disrupted supply chains.

The framework caps tariffs at 15%, contingent upon reciprocal reductions on U.S. exports. In addition, Europe has agreed to expand energy imports from the United States, including LNG and oil, while committing to purchase U.S.-made AI chips and other strategic products. These provisions illustrate that the deal is as much about geopolitical and industrial strategy as it is about cars.

RELATED: Tariffs vs. free trade: Which is BETTER for the American auto industry?

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Monster trucks in Paris?

Consumers could see tangible benefits quickly. European models, which were previously unavailable or expensive due to regulatory barriers, could enter U.S. showrooms at more competitive prices.

Conversely, American trucks and SUVs could gain greater access to European markets, potentially increasing competition and variety. Automakers are poised to save significant amounts on development and testing costs, which could also be passed on to buyers.

Different safety standards have been a major issue for decades. European critics initially raised concerns that this “mutual recognition” could end up lowering European safety standards, which tend to be stricter. However, a joint U.S.-EU statement pledges that the agreement requires the alignment of standards rather than a lowering of them — and that both parties “intend to accept and provide mutual recognition to each other’s standards.”

Cars sold in Europe must meet U.S. safety rules, and vehicles sold in the U.S. must comply with EU requirements. In practice, this likely means that more advanced safety technologies, such as automated emergency braking, intelligent speed assistance, laser headlights, and pedestrian detection systems, could become more widely available in the U.S.

Where there’s smog

Environmental standards are another issue to be sorted out. Europe has long pursued stricter emissions regulations, including the Euro 7 standards targeting exhaust emissions and particulate matter from brakes and tires.

The U.S. enforces its own rigorous emissions frameworks, though they differ from European rules in focus and measurement. Mutual recognition does not lower environmental standards. This needs to be sorted out. Automakers will need to maintain compliance with both U.S. and EU protocols, which could encourage innovation in cleaner technologies and more efficient designs.

This is concerning to me because it could increase costs for all vehicles.

Unintended consequences

Despite these assurances, the deal is not without potential challenges. American automakers must remain competitive while meeting both sets of regulations, and smaller manufacturers could struggle to adapt to a more integrated market.

Consumers could also see unintended consequences if automakers prioritize efficiency and cost savings over other vehicle features or options. The political landscape adds another layer of complexity, as both regions must maintain regulatory cooperation while navigating domestic pressures. This could potentially end the deal if they can’t come to an agreement.

From an economic perspective, the deal offers a rare opportunity to reduce redundancy in the global automotive market. Billions of dollars in development, certification, and testing costs could be avoided, allowing automakers to focus on innovation, quality, and design.

A win for consumers

For consumers, this means more models to choose from, potentially lower prices, and access to vehicles equipped with the latest safety and emissions technologies. The competitive environment may shift as European manufacturers expand into U.S. markets and American companies seek to gain market share in Europe.

The historical context is important. Past trade initiatives, such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, often stalled over regulatory disputes. This agreement, by contrast, represents a concrete framework with enforceable mutual recognition of standards, making it a landmark step in global automotive trade. Industry observers and consumer advocates will likely scrutinize compliance, safety, and environmental outcomes.

More than cars

Ultimately, this deal is about far more than cars. It is a test case for whether two major economic powers can harmonize regulations in a way that benefits manufacturers, consumers, and the broader economy without compromising safety, environmental integrity, or market sovereignty.

Drivers may enjoy greater freedom and lower prices at the dealership, but the long-term implications for regulatory alignment, labor markets, and competitive dynamics remain significant.

As this agreement moves from framework to full implementation, the stakes for automakers, policymakers, and consumers are high. Its success will be measured not just in economic efficiency but in the ability to maintain rigorous standards for safety and emissions while navigating a more integrated transatlantic market.

For Americans and Europeans alike, the coming years will reveal whether this deal truly delivers on its promise of choice, affordability, and innovation — or whether it introduces unforeseen challenges in one of the world’s most critical industries.

​Align cars, Eu