On the eve of September 11, 2006, nearly 150 Hillsdale College students gathered for a candlelight vigil on the campus quad in front of Central Hall. I expected perhaps a few dozen students to take time out of an already busy evening on campus for the occasion. But they kept coming, picking up candles, forming into the solemn huddle.

Having been asked to lead the vigil, I began the time with prayer, and then a student read a poem he had prepared, and then a singer led the group in the National Anthem. Several shared their thoughts-one girl’s brother was about to leave for Iraq, another’s boyfriend was readying for his assignment as a Marine. The latter Marine left Hillsdale last semester, called up suddenly for training; his words to me before he left remind me of what this war is: “America,” he said, “is rapidly approaching-or may have arrived at a physical, philosophical, and spiritual battle for her survival and, more importantly, a battle that will determine whether Western civilization will continue to exist to bring freedom to future generations of men.”

Thinking on these things, looking out on the crowd gathered that night, considering the flag as it furled overhead, I thought back to the second week of my junior year in high school, 9/11/01. Before that, only the Columbine shootings could really have been a shared memory for my peers and me. But as we watched the television and talked that day of freedom and terrorism and tragedy, something in us came together. By Friday that week, when the football team had its first game, the packed seats of Sparks Stadium looked like and sounded like America.

Much of that, we well know, has faded. Five years is an utterly long time for a democratic nation to practice its patience. We expect little wars and big peaces; we forget the realities of our nature.

But I saw the other night a vanguard waiting, praying, singing “God Bless America” with more genuine fervor than all of the Congress half a decade ago. I couldn’t help but think that God is preparing our generation for something great, something as crucial as the task of our Founding Fathers 230 years ago. Today, the “calling of our generation” is spiritual and religious. Leaders are needed.

The hate-driven enemy understands the value of leadership. Theirs is a religious war that relies not upon majorities to fight but upon small groups of warriors, little pockets of young men who will take up box cutters and airplanes. Then again, there is a role for majorities; if not the terrorists, at least the jihadists mean to populate the earth, focusing their energies at the moment in Europe, where native European energies wane funereal, and the West dies peacefully. Or they build their movement in other ways, as the youth of Europe, hopeless to find meaning in the rotten churches of the place, fall in with a terrorist gang in search of purpose. So it was with the English bottle-bomb plotters of August. They found their purpose, and were it not for last minute intelligence collaborations and the grace of God, the authorities would not have found them.

The war goes on in Iraq, and Iran is explosive, and Israel duels a score of enemies, and Syria hosts a foul legion, and rogue men inhabit various other lands from Indonesia to France, seeking whom they may devour.

What is our answer? Ronald Reagan had an answer: “No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.” Such will and moral courage lives on in the rising generation, small though the remnant may be. But I think the leaders among us, the young Christians among us, the missionaries whose fight is by friendship among us-there are more of them than we may have thought.

Ours is a Commission to freedom, the enemy’s a ji’had to terror. There are some, I know, who despair that freedom will lose, but they are wrong. Our generation is called by a voice echoing now in a million souls to a revival of spirit and truth. When it unfolds, our enemy-without and within-will learn that truth is the freeing thing.

Because the terrorists define it as a religious war. At a rally this week, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmedinejad declared, “On one side, it’s corrupt powers of the criminal U.S. and Britain and the Zionists.with modern bombs and planes. And on the other side is a group of pious youth relying on God.”

Ahmedinejad and his young thugs are men of faith. The Muslim devotees in England who would have blown up ten planes this week were young-ages 17 to 35-and they were faithful. One young man among the arrested terrorists gave up life as a slothful pothead to become a Muslim. These little groups of “pious youth” are are on a ji’had to take the West, and they will not stop because a postmodern, enlightened Westerner of the Left asks for tolerance and peace.

Islamic terrorists have the passion, energy, and determination to destroy America if they are given the chance. And Europe seems to be giving them more than a chance. So ultimately the question is, can the West survive the threat of Islamic terrorism? It is easy to have doubts about Europe, and it is easy to have doubts about the majority of young people in America.

But this is not about majorities. The terrorists understand that. For them, as for us, it is about a minority of people who understand their capacity to make a difference. Every social movement of any consequence in history has begun with a small group of people who coalesced around a central theme, recognized the urgency of advancing it, and devoted their lives together to winning some victory.

It is by appealing to the deepest spiritual impulses in the human spirit that a man or woman will respond and take up arms, or take up the pen, or teach, or preach. This war on Islamic terror will not be won merely by dint of weapons and security screenings. It pits a religion against our culture, and only by religion can we entirely respond and win.

But Burke’s Law is not necessarily true in reverse: evil will triumph when good men do nothing, but good will not always triumph when evil men do nothing. Sometimes, it is a reaction to the works of the evil that the good are brought to action. It is rare that men will act without a sense of emergency.

Though the nation is half asleep, there is hope, and we must build upon it.

Conservative Christians, it seems, have long sensed an emergency. They have been aware that the Left has strongholds in places of cultural influence, in the academy, and the media, and the law, and in much of the church. As a result, conservative Christians have prepared their children far better than liberals to fight the battles of our generation. Liberals, in fact, haven’t had many children. They’ve aborted too many. And out of the curse of abortion has come this blessing: the Left is losing demographically.

And even though in the final analysis it isn’t about numbers, it is about passion. The Left has failed to pass on the passion of the Sixties to the rising generation. There are many young liberals, of course, but they are not aspiring leaders. They are jaded. They are self-absorbed.

And so, we might fret about how the West, too, is losing demographically. But there is enough of a conservative impulse remaining in this country, enough of a sense that the values of popular culture and consumerism are insufficient to sustain soul and civilization. “Reality” is the buzzword of our time.

To deny the reality of the soul, and of the eternity of the soul, is to deny that the person of that soul exists. It is the height of disregard. That way of thinking is dead. It has failed the rising generation, and young people long for something more.

Young conservative Christians seek a more humane society, a return to the enduring things of our civilization. Few though they are in number, they are determined to fight the war of our time that will be fought not merely on the battlefields of Iraq and Iran, but on the battlefields of Hollywood and the university campus and the home and the Internet and the school classroom. If we are to defend against the invasion of a growing Islamic extremism, we must offend against the fortress of postmodernism.

And we too must have a “pious group of youth relying on God,” not Ahmedinejad’s merciless Allah, but on the Living God of the New Testament.

It is a time for young leaders. We cannot yield our civilization.

Brittany was ambitious as she grew up. She was a star on the swim team. She said in her speech that she was determined to be first place in every competition throughout junior high and high school. But she added that even first place was not enough; success was too small a shape to fit the emptiness she felt in her heart. She needed “Something more than me and what I do with my life, something more than my friends and what they do with their own lives.”

So Brittany quit the swim team, and she realized that God was the thing missing in her life. “This hole gapes as a wide-open trench when filled with swimming, with friends, with family, with dating, with shopping, with partying, with drinking, with anything but God. But His love fits. His love is ‘that something more’ we all desire. It’s unprejudiced, it’s merciful, it’s free, it’s real, it’s huge and it’s everlasting.”

Here the audience applauded. And here moved the ACLU.

Word moved along behind the scene, where salaries and administrative ladders and professional reputations hung in the balance. Unlike the Class of 2006, the career administrator, who tired quickly of the classroom and contented himself in the province of paperwork and social engineering in exchange of a raise, had still to contend with the ACLU.

“God’s love is so great that he gave His only son up.”

And the administrator, owing his allegiance to a higher power, pulled the plug.

That higher power, we know, is not God. The ACLU reigns today as the gilded god of the judiciary, and of the Boy Scouts meeting room, and of the classroom, and of the graduation ceremony. But it is not God.

It is reminiscent of old Babylon, where King Darius forbade prayer to anything but his own majesty. Daniel, caught praying to the Living God with his windows open, faced the lions and lived to chat with Darius about it.

Brittany, caught speaking about her faith in the God of Daniel at commencement service, faced the ACLU. Whatever the administrators and their backers in the ACLU (which did asseverate on the case after the microphone deadened) may still say about the impropriety of her speech, Brittany was clearly within the bounds of the First Amendment freedom of expression, and within the bounds of Christian character.

The frequent remark of secularists is that Christians are more likely to wear faith upon their sleeves than upon their hearts. If they are secularists of the religious sort, mainly of the mainline churches, they will quote the Sermon on the Mount: “Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them.” Also, “when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men.”

These are not altogether baseless quotations; they are, after all, from the Bible. And even if they are grossly misapplied by secular fundamentalists, they should temper our ambitions. At the least we should give a charitable hearing to the secular allegation, because it is not altogether baseless.There is a spiritual pride that card-carrying zealots of the Religious Right are particularly disposed toward. I think sometimes that the Religious Right deserves to be reminded of the Pharisees.

But Brittany McComb is no Pharisee. Hers were not the fighting words of a boaster or a condemner or a wager. It was the simple testimony of grace.

The Pharisees were not corrupt because they did their works in public. Jesus, after all, had a very public ministry. The Pharisaical fault is pride.

And the Christian virtue is humility.

It is of a Christian mind-a humble mind-that a young woman should attribute her success to her Savior. It is the sort of thing one would not expect of a generation tending to self-preoccupation.

And it is the indication of a power at work in our day against all of the best plotted efforts of the secularists and their legal enforcers in the ACLU. Brittany herself is the proof of the words they wouldn’t let her say, that man can “take part in something greater than himself. That something is God’s plan.” Call it youthful idealism. Call it a conspiracy. It is much more.

Well, whatever merits there may be in complaints over Mexican border hoppers and Chappaquiddick bridge hoppers, the rising generation offers more reasons for optimism than its alternative. There is a generation shift taking place in our moment, and we would be fools to miss out.

The late Sixties, as pessimistic conservatives are well aware, was the time of the last great generation shift. Since that time, an elite of Left-wing radicals has dominated the key posts of higher education, the media, mainline churches, and many government bureaucracies. Only now is another generation shift like that one taking place, only this shift is also unlike the Sixties.

It is like the Sixties because it is a generation shift of seismic proportions. It will change the course of this nation intensely. The numbers of the so-called Millennial Generation roughly parallel those of the Baby Boom Generation. The 30 million Millennials born when Ronald Reagan was president-now graduating from high school and college,–emerging in the work world, fighting on the ground in Iraq-are a completely different and in many ways opposite sort of generation from our parents’.

What I call Reagan’s Children are unlike the Baby Boomers because we are reacting to the Sixties rather than embracing its excesses. Reagan’s Children are not a homogenous blob, but we are not a divided generation like the Vietnam Generation. We are highly committed to the restoration of community; we are well-connected with friends and associates on the internet and in our daily lives. We work together to build solutions, and we find value in enduring truths that we have been told do not exist. Relativism is an insufficient explanation for the adventure of living before us. While many in our generation have yet to embrace truth fully, there is a recovery in the offing; reality is the keyword of our time.

Ours is the most aborted generation and yet the most pro-life. Teen sex is on the decline. Home-schooling is on the rise. Whether one visits a state university or a private Christian college, he will find a cohort clean-cut, ambitious, and remarkably respectable.

I decided to write Reagan’s Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill after President Reagan died about two years ago. It was clear at that time that young people, many too young to remember the Great Communicator as president, had yet been effected deeply by his legacy. Not only did Reagan profoundly shape the nation we’ve come to know, his example as a leader continues to stand out as the best of his generation. That generation has been called the “Greatest Generation.” And Reagan was the greatest of that generation.

When we speak of greatness, we do not mean that an entire generation is great. Humanity is sinful, and every generation has failures and mediocrities. But leadership-that quality rare among men and pivotal in the story of a generation-is a thing badly needed today. The Sixties generation ages, Generation X makes its independent contribution to the course of human events, and Reagan’s Children ride what some would call the long-last swing of a pendulum to the right. It is not just a political conservatism we see in the rising generation, though; it is a moral commitment to what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things.” It points out the pulse of Providence, which is the highest sort of leadership.

We witness now an emerging vanguard. If God would save a nation he would raise leaders. We must leave behind the shame of hippies and druggies, and seek again the “city on a hill.”

As retirement age nears for the Boomers, it is the decisive age for Reagan’s Children, and a transition is upon us. It is a movement worth joining. Americans of all ages can take part, by parenting, praying, writing, teaching, learning, discipling. Reagan’s Children who would be in the vanguard must seek especially careers that will impact the way Americans think. We must win the war of ideas.

I cannot know at this stage whether my book will make any difference in our generation. It becomes clear to me, however, that there are leaders in our generation, and they, by God’s grace, will make the difference.

Faith runs weak in the West. It is an age of postmodernism, which means that most people can’t figure out what to do with themselves. Those who settle on some direction find themselves headed no place in particular. There are many choices and many chances, but there is no truth and no meaning. We propose to murder a fetus, not because we are no longer useful to her, but because she is no longer useful to us. It was the same war on life that claimed the life of Jesus Christ two millennia ago.

So the angel speaks to our postmodern age: “Do not be afraid.” There is much that we could fear these days. We could fear terrorism, we could fear AIDS, we could fear government, we could fear technology, we could fear the future. In fear, we grope around for an ultimate Reality that can conquer our worst fears, a Truth that can overcome our most deceitful lies, and a path that can lead us to a sublime destiny.

And sometimes we set our eyes upon the empty tomb, but we have no faith in its message. We think, until the Word of God strikes our hearts otherwise, that Jesus is still lying there, dead because we killed Him. And the angel corrects us, “I know that you seek Jesus Who was crucified. He is not here.”

But something is in there, we reply. Some dead thing rests in the tomb. And all the while, it is only ourselves that we see lying dead there, dead in sin.

How rarely does it occur in our minds that the tomb may actually sit empty. The consequences of the fact of the resurrection being dramatic, there is a sinful aversion to believe in Easter. Sin is our plague, and to sin we gladly return.

But the angel invites us up out of the tomb with Christ, “for He is risen.” We can know that the tomb is truly empty when we ourselves get out of it and join the Savior on the side of life.

Alive in Christ, we can know Truth itself in a world that long ago gave up the search for Truth. Alive in Christ, we can experience Mercy in a world that knows none. Alive in Christ, “Mercy and Truth have met together; Righteousness and Peace have kissed. Truth shall spring out of the earth, and Righteousness shall look down from Heaven.” Jesus Christ – the Way, the Truth, the Life – has sprung out of the earth. Though his grave was deeper than any other man’s, for the sins he carried were heavier, Truth could not remain buried in the earth.

And now with new eyes, eyes of Truth, we can come see the place where the Lord lay. Death reigned there in that tomb, but Life broke forth into Light. As a great old hymn rejoices, “The strife is o’er, the battle done; / The victory of life is won; / The song of triumph has begun.”

How, upon beholding such a sight as the empty tomb, are we to sing our song of triumph? The next thing the angel said was, “Go quickly and tell.” There is urgency and immediacy in the message that matters. “You who make mention of the Lord, do not keep silent,” says Isaiah 62:6.

This is the task of our generation: to come see the place where the Lord lay, and then to go quickly and tell. If we look upon any other place or declare any other message, we will be the “perverse and crooked generation” of Deuteronomy 32, “children in whom is no faith,” or the cursing, vicious, self-righteous generation of Proverbs 30. But “the generation of the upright will be blessed” (Psalm 112:2).

This generation must be upright; we must stand tall before God; we must not grow slack in proclaiming His Good News. We are the posterity of Easter prophesied in Psalm 22. “A posterity shall serve Him. And it will be recounted of the Lord to the next generation, they will come and declare His righteousness to a people who will be born, that He has done this.”