Why I Wrote This Book

It started with St. George.

Not the legend — not the dragon or the princess or the white horse. The real George. A Roman tribune in the third century who stood before Emperor Diocletian and refused to sacrifice to gods he didn’t believe in. He had everything a man could want — rank, reputation, a career most soldiers would kill for. And he threw it all away for nine words he wouldn’t unsay.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

I wasn’t trying to write a book. I was sitting in my favorite chair late one night, long after the kids were in bed — and while three of my ten kids are still at home, “long after the kids are in bed” is practically tomorrow — scrolling through the noise that passes for public conversation these days. And a question surfaced that I couldn’t shake:

Where are heroes like George today?

Not celebrities. Not influencers. Not people famous for being famous. I mean people who stood for something when standing cost them everything. People who looked at the comfortable path and the costly path and chose the costly one — not because they wanted to suffer, but because their conscience wouldn’t let them do otherwise.

I started writing down names. George. John Huss, burned at the stake for insisting the church answer to Scripture. Joan of Arc — a teenage girl who couldn’t read, commanding armies and changing the fate of a nation. Thomas More, who told the executioner he died the king’s good servant, but God’s first. William Tyndale, strangled and burned for the crime of translating the Bible into English so a plowboy could read it.

The list kept growing. Wilberforce, who fought for 46 years to end slavery and never quit. Harriet Tubman, who reached freedom and then turned around and went back into the darkness thirteen times. Bonhoeffer, who was safe in America when the war started and went back to Germany because he believed he had no right to rebuild what he hadn’t been willing to suffer for. Kolbe, who stepped forward in Auschwitz and said: take me instead. Corrie ten Boom, who forgave a man she had every right to hate — not because she felt like it, but because she willed her hand to reach out and take his.

Mother Teresa, who served the dying for fifty years while feeling abandoned by the God she served. Solzhenitsyn, who proved that one voice telling the truth can outlast an empire built on lies. And Charlie Kirk, who carried the thread of courage into our own time and paid for it with his life.

Fourteen heroes. Two thousand years. One question.

I should tell you something about myself. I spent over twenty-five years building an advertising and marketing firm. I was good at it. I knew how to sell things. I understood the power of storytelling. When I decided to step away from the firm I never imagined I’d become an author.

But I had ten kids and I believed they needed to know what a real hero was. I couldn’t find a book that treated these heroes honestly — not as plaster saints, not as villains, just as real people who chose the hard road. I wanted my kids to see that courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s what you do when you’re terrified and you act anyway.

That book didn’t exist. So I wrote it.

It took me a year and a half. I read hundreds of primary sources, waded through scholarly debates, visited places where these heroes lived and died. I learned that William Tyndale gave us phrases we use every day without knowing it — “let there be light,” “the salt of the earth,” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” — and that he was murdered for it. I learned that the man Kolbe saved in Auschwitz lived to ninety-three and spent the rest of his life telling Kolbe’s story to anyone who would listen. I learned that Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing Stalin in a private letter. One letter. Eight years in a labor camp.

Every chapter wrecked me in a different way. And every chapter rebuilt something too.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk changed everything. Suddenly this wasn’t a project I’d finish someday. It was a book that needed to exist now.

The book is called Courage to Stand: Across the Ages. It traces the thread of moral courage from St. George in the Roman Empire to Charlie Kirk in twenty-first-century America. It’s written in the narrative tradition — not a textbook, not a sermon, but the kind of storytelling where you feel the cold of the Mayflower crossing, hear the crackle of the fire at Huss’s execution, and stand in the starvation bunker with Kolbe as he leads dying men in hymns.

I wrote it for my kids first. Then I realized other families might be looking for the same thing.

If you’ve ever wondered where the heroes went — if you’ve looked at the noise and the cowardice and the silence and thought, somebody ought to stand up — this book is my attempt to show you that people always have. In every century. Under every kind of pressure. The thread of courage has never broken.

I hope you’ll read it. And I hope it does for your family what it did for mine: remind you that the question isn’t whether heroes still exist. The question is whether we’ll be one of them.

Courage to Stand: Across the Ages is available now in paperback and hardback at CourageToStandBooks.com.

— Jonathan