Fatherhood Quote by David O. McKay

A “crying need” is not a policy memo; it’s a pulpit alarm. David O. McKay frames “truth” as something that must be “heralded,” language that reaches back to town criers and revival preaching, where the goal is less to debate than to awaken. The sentence is built to recruit emotion first: urgency (“today”), vulnerability (“youth especially”), then sanctification (“sacred”). By the time freedom arrives, it’s no longer a political arrangement but a moral inheritance.

The subtext is generational anxiety. McKay isn’t merely praising liberty; he’s implying it’s slipping, and the group most at risk is the one most susceptible to new ideologies, mass culture, and institutional authority. In mid-20th-century America, a clergyman invoking “our revolutionary fathers” reads as both civic catechism and Cold War posture: individual freedom contrasted against collectivism, state power, and any social trend that feels like coerced conformity. “Did our revolutionary fathers” isn’t a history lesson so much as a measuring stick designed to shame complacency and discipline doubt.

Context matters because McKay speaks from a religious platform that often sought to fuse personal righteousness with civic virtue. “Freedom of the individual” becomes a spiritual principle, not just a constitutional right, which conveniently places dissent on the wrong side of both country and conscience. The rhetoric works by collapsing patriotism, piety, and youth formation into one obligation: teach the next generation to treat liberty like a sacrament, and they’ll defend it as if defending the faith itself.