A Faith and Community Forum 

A Republic If You Can Keep It: Reflections On An America in Crisis 

Date | Sunday September 20, 2026
Time | 12:15 - 1:30 pm
Location | Heaton Hall
Speaker | Frye Gaillard
Topic | A Republic if You Can Keep It: Reflections on an America in Crisis

On September 17, 1787 in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, delegates officially ratified the Constitution of the United States. Benjamin Franklin was present throughout the months of deliberations and negotiations. Immediately after the ratification became official, Franklin was standing outside Independence Hall when he was approached by a prominent local civic leader named Penny Willing Powel. She asked “Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Franklin’s famous response was: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

This year is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and America stands at the threshold of losing its already eroded democracy to the authoritarian regime now in control of the federal government. There is literally no precedent in America’s history for what has happened since January 2021—the Constitution trammeled, federal laws violated, an extremist agenda foisted on ordinary Americans, and corruption and grift normalized. All enabled by a supine Republican-controlled Congress.

Journalist, historian, and author Frye Gaillard is returning to MPCOV to discuss his new book If You Can Keep It, co-written with author Cynthia Tucker.

Tucker and Gaillard were each young and very active in the Civil Rights movement during the 1960s. Gaillard witnessed Martin Luther King being arrested in Birmingham before being sent to jail. Later, as a student leader at Vanderbilt University, he invited Robert F. Kennedy to speak at the university—which he did, just months before he was assassinated in June 1968.

America was founded by great though flawed men who created a Constitution that enshrined slavery within it. Many of the founders were aware that this directly contradicted the spirit of the Declaration but recognized the new country would not have been formed without this compromise. Yet this new document, now the world’s oldest Constitution and its country the oldest democracy, has allowed for later generations to expand freedoms for all Americans on our way to becoming a more just society. The human progress America has fostered over the past two centuries has led the way in a world all too willing to trade away freedoms for promises of security.

Please join us for a thoughtful and enlightening discussion of our present social and political condition, and to learn of possible ways we can start to redeem America—as we face the opportunities and dangers of the fast-approaching mid-term elections. A light lunch will be available.