It’s all over the internet. The foreign fascination—even infatuation—with America, as citizens from across the globe visit our shores for the World Cup competition. Hundreds of thousands, singing our praise while lambasting their local media for lying to them.
In more ways than one, they were seeing America for the first time. Its sights and scenery. Its stores and stadiums. Most of all, they were seeing its people. And it’s been love at first sight.
It is both edifying and unifying to listen to their heart-warming testimonies. Knowing the false narrative that Europeans in particular have been fed about America’s crime-infested culture and crass capitalist economy, the fact that these good people are believing what they see, not what they’ve heard, suggests that the Miracle of America may be obvious to just about anyone who will take an honest look. Even Americans.
But are the eyes of our friendly visitors fully open, or are they failing to see the most important realities about our country, its history and its founding principles—realities that made everything they love about America possible?
Their enthusiasms hit three main topics, the first being their awe-struck reaction to America’s material richness, bigness, and consumer choices. They can’t get enough of our stores and restaurants, our big homes and big trucks. Even our infrastructure impresses them. All this, of course, reflects America’s great wealth. But where does that wealth and prosperity come from?
Then there is the overwhelming beauty of America’s outdoors, spoken about almost reverently, as though our founders had a special dispensation with Mother Nature. Our scenery is a mind-blower.
Their third observation is the most revealing. They speak of how much they love the American people. Repeatedly, they gush over our friendliness, our helpfulness, our kindness, our generosity, on a scale so natural and personal that many felt they were more at home in America than in their own country. They weren’t just accepted. They were encouraged!
An English lady hit the bullseye when she noted Americans’ positive attitude. “At home, I’m always having to shrink myself. In America, I’m told to ‘go for it!’” She felt liberated.
That says it all. Almost anywhere you go in the world, people are accustomed to being under the thumb of civil authority and having to seek permission from the government to pursue their dreams and live their lives. Navigating through an army of bureaucrats who invented a thousand different ways to say “no.”
Then they come to America, and they hear the words “go for it!” Take initiative! Follow your dreams! Imagine the possible! You can do it! That is the spirit of a free nation. The language of a free people. And they love it. It’s contagious. They want to stay.
The lesson our foreign friends should learn is that the heart and soul of America has very little to do with our fast food and fast cars, our mega-houses and mega-stores. All the glitz and glow that attracts their attention is but an image, bearing witness to the freedom that produced it. The freedom to try. The freedom to succeed. The freedom to fail and try again.
Historically, that freedom is grounded in faith, and in a Declaration of Independence that sets us apart from the rest of the world. When Thomas Jefferson penned those immortal words, “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights,” he and the signers all knew they were establishing a new kind of country under God, where the rights and liberties of the individual citizen were “natural,” inalienable and inviolate, precisely because they were granted by the Great Lawmaker, not by man. No man or man’s government could alter or overturn them.
Our Constitution spells this out in detail, limiting the power and prerogatives of civil government. It was this foundation upon which the American Experiment was built and has thrived for 250 years. Our friendly visitors are seeing the thriving. They need most of all to see the foundation. Men do best when left free. And that freedom must be secure, not conditional to the next election.
Freedom without virtue and without faith is a chair without legs. It’s just temporary, state-granted privileges, not freedom. Not liberty. The nations of the world testify to the folly and failure of unrestrained government, substituted for God. America stands alone on a foundation of faith-based freedom.
We Americans, more than anything, need to relearn our history and rediscover the fundamental truths that made us—and will keep us—both great and free.
