By Neil Earle
What better time than July 4 to chew over this question, eh?
Being an immigrant pastor in a multicultural suburban Los Angeles Church it was easy to get other immigrants to comment on this question – sort of the View from Outside by people who live here who don’t have an axe to grind.
An Englishman who with his wife raised five children here in LA replied: “There’s nothing impossible for Americans – the i-phone, the i-pad. That concept of the wide open spaces from the movie ‘Oklahoma’ does something to the American psyche, opens them up to Big Picture thinking.”
A Mexican lady said: “Oh, my, yes – freedom. Freedom to raise your children, freedom to start my business.” I had volunteered the word “freedom” to get her started.
A Filipina grandmother liked the concept of “freedom” too, broadly interpreted. “Sometimes I think there is too much freedom," she added.
I like British historian Paul Johnson’s take in his 900 plus page History of the American People. :”There have indeed been many setbacks in 400 years of American history, “Johnson wrote. “As we have seen, many unresolved problems, some of daunting size, remain. But the Americans are, above all, a problem-solving people. They do not believe that anything in this world is beyond human capacity to soar and to dominate. They will not give up” (page 976).
Fareed Zakaria, an insightful commentator on CNN and an Indian immigrant, is still a fan. Even in his 2008 book The Post-American World – which is all about a world of competing emerging power centers with America still dominant – he speaks about the United States as “the most competitive economy in the world, first in innovation, ninth in technological readiness, second in company spending for research and technology, and second in the vitality of its research institutions. China does not come within thirty countries in any of these…” (page 41).
It’s hard to count the United States out and for many reasons. Perhaps we can summarize them – teacher like – under the mnemonic device
A-M-E-R-I-C-A. Here goes.
America for all its strife and division is a nation like others in the Western tradition. It is deeply committed to the Rule of Law. You could say the same about Canada, the UK, France and Germany but let’s remember there are 310,000,000 Americans living under the rubric of a system dating back to 1787. Few other countries can make that boast. Christians above all people can appreciate the wisdom of St Paul’s commentary in Romans 13, that all believers must respect the constituted authority because all authority ultimately stems from God Himself. Appreciation, yes.
The American union bends but it does not break. One reason we are staying afloat in this Great Recession is the fact that America is still one of the safest places on earth for overseas customers to keep their money. There is little chance of a military or political coup in these United States – the country is just too big to conquer, as the British learned in the Revolutionary War. Military takeovers make for suspenseful movies (especially starring Burt Lancaster) but this is fiction. There is a fiercely independent spirit inside Americans that resents dictatorship and even the overreaching of their own government. (Does the name Watergate ring a bell?) As Christians we pay taxes (gasp – there it is in Romans 13:6!) and give honor and respect because those police and firemen are protecting all of us.
As we show elsewhere (see Commentary) here is much room for improvement here and civil resistance is definitely allowed for Christians (Acts 5:29), but this is not an everyday matter. Ephesians 5:20 says we are to give thanks and it is not a bad thing once a year to give thanks specifically for the blessings of freedom we enjoy – freedom to move about, to cross borders, to send things overseas, start up businesses, to have a say in how our schools and city governments are run. It’s easy to take all this for granted, as we say, but there it is.
At one time 90% of all the missionaries to the world went out from this country. That brilliant skeptic Kevin Phillips bemoaned the fact that one year after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 there were 30 evangelical missions setting up shop in the beleaguered capital (American Theocracy, page 260). After Haiti’s recent disaster, who were the first English-speakers that NBC and other networks interviewed in Port-au-Prince? Namely Salvation Army workers and people from World Vision. There they were, still on the job. Remarkable! The missionary spirit lives on tracing to the country’s undoubted religious heritage. Where was African Enterprise headquartered for so many years? In Monrovia, California just down the road from where I live.
The willingness to help others has not faded among the religious community in this land. Reyna Diaz from El Salvador brings food and clothing regularly from Duarte to her friends back in Central America. “This is a wonderful country,” she says. OK.
If “M” is for mission than “E” is for Education. Sorting out the challenges afflicting public education in this country is one of those daunting problems Paul Johnson wrote about but…the fact is that there are tens and tens of thousands of teachers doing a wonderful job every day in our schools. In 2006 a group of teens from Duarte High School – my city – won the Academic Decathlon for the whole country. Can you believe it? I interviewed those teens and talked to their teachers. They were sharp, sharp, sharp.
Big decisions are ahead in public education but the outlook isn’t all bad by any means.
Here is where the story gets interesting. Some of my friends in the Christian community have been asserting for decades that America was founded as a Christian nation and THAT we need to “call the country back” to its Christian roots. Well, yes, I suppose but let’s remember a few things first. The Puritans set up shop largely for religious freedom but soon denied it to others. Virginia was all about Gold and Glory as much as God and the track record in both places is put to shame by the Quakers in Pennsylvania living at peace with the Indians for fifty years.
A sad part of the American story is that those who wanted religious freedom for themselves often denied it to others. And since across the Colonies you could be fined for not attending church it is hard to say just how religious at bottom the country really was in 1776. It’s true that the English evangelist George Whitefield was a religious sensation in the 1740s but the crafters of the Constitution, for some of these very reasons, felt they had to protect the country “from” religion. They feared religion’s tendency to extremism. These were sober-natured men – lawyers, merchants, successful farmers – skeptical of emotion and especially the notion of one church taking control. When Christians dominate they don’t always endear their cause – such as, such as the law against manufacturing alcohol in 1919 launching the worst crime spree yet seen (the Roaring Twenties) and a law wisely repealed in 1933. (See Commentary for more).
The “I” here in America should definitely stand for Immigrants. Whether you’re talking about Samuel Slater, who memorized the layout of a British textile mill before transplanting a factory to New York in 1789, or Albert Einstein who brought the New Physics to America in the 1930s, this is a country that has been immensely bolstered by its immigrants. The composer who wrote “God Bless America” – sometimes called the Second National Anthem was originally named Israel Balin from Belorus – Irving Berlin.
The legal immigrants still pour in today – and I am one of them. Something about America’s vast size and largeness of scale whether in business or in the needs of government and public service means there is always something new about to happen, says historian Richard White. Something new always bubbling up means a newcomer can make his or her mark. Ask Fareed Zakaria, he’ll tell you.
What about the last “A.” I think we often underestimate the extent to which America’s leaders in Art and Literature have made an impact on the world. Of course Mark Twain and Scott Fitzgerald come to mind. Where else could science fantasist Ray Bradbury end up in a small city such as mine as a guest speaker for three years? Where else could a city of 22,000 run a very successful Festival of Authors? Ecclesiastes 12 says listen to the words of the wise and America rightly celebrates its Joan Didions and Alice Walkers and Marilynne Robinsons who probe the values of what it means to be human in a sometimes inhuman world.
Rounding back to our theme of freedom, even the mega-seller Stephen King studs his novels with moral lessons. In The Stand he shows how a country almost wiped out by a plague rebuilt itself at great cost and amid much struggle in Boulder, Colorado. Once again the Jeffersonian Spirit lives on and surfaces as a theme of freedom more often than we sometimes know.
Happy Fourth. Long life to America and her people.