The uniqueness of America. . .

Though it is not popular to say, there is a profound sense to what has become American Exceptionalism.  It does not lie necessarily in moral virtue or economic progress or equal justice or any of the other things that are certainly part of it.  Our exceptionalism is that our nation is a nation of principles that bind and not a nation united by ethnicity or race or birth.  We do not look alike nor sound alike nor do we like the same things but our nation has worked because despite this diversity we were united in the principles that defined our nation once and still.

This is quite unlike other nations and their identities.  We say we believe in America.  People do not say they believe in England or Italy or China or India.  These are nations whose formative history is built around other uniting principles.  Even though it is now a rather impotent monarchy, England is formed around the King.  France has a formative history as well -- one that repudiated the monarchy and instilled a people's government.  China has become synonymous with communism and its vaunted history has taken second place to its political ideology.  India only recently cast off its once colonial identity in favor of a new nation formed by a majority even though there are significant minorities of its resident population.  America shares in few of these marks of history and identity.  We have always been a nation of immigrant peoples leaving homelands for various purposes to find new life in a nation whose principles were not simply a guarantee but a pledge of its identity and reason for existence.

At least part of the reason we find ourselves so divided culturally and politically is that the very principles that we believed in and that once beckoned the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse, and the homeless, tempest-tossed to come.  Diversity of political beliefs has not in and of itself created the great divide but rather reflects it.  We are no longer quite sure what we believe in when we say we believe in America.  Our sense of duty and responsibility are even now being replaced by a sense of entitlement and the role of government to provide for us as well as protect us.  Our sense of right and wrong is threatened by a greater lack of faith in police and the justice system as a whole than we could have ever imagined.  One survey says that fewer Americans trust our current FBI than did Hoover's FBI.  Our sense of the values that unite us is being undone by our inability to honor marriage and family and children in favor of the individual's desires as preeminent.  Our pursuit of amusement and entertainment over invention and accomplishment might well undo our place among the nations.  Our unwillingness to give honor and value to every life and to treat certain lives as unworthy of legal protection and esteem has turned us into a nation more concerned about the humane treatment of pets than people in the womb or at the end of life.  Our commitment to education has been replaced by the use of our schools to indoctrinate our children to the prevailing opinions of the woke instead of equipping them with the essential skills of success.

The recovery of these principles is hindered by the fact that we no longer as a nation value religion.  We have a jurist considered for a federal judgeship whose convoluted opinions on the freedom of religion were deemed untenable by the Supreme Court.  The religious freedom and the freedom of speech that were once considered the bulwarks of our unity and strength are under threat by the thought police who can dismiss Scripture and political opinion as hate speech -- with impunity!  Faith is not the problem in America but the lack of faith is showing the cracks in our identity and unity and may well be our undoing.  What was once a willingness to favor no religion over another has become an intolerance of the faith that had been part of our essential unity and character.  America is unique because we were united by principles more than ethnicity or race or common heritage.  It worked.  Not perfectly but it worked.  At least until we decided that the principles that were who we are needed to be repudiated by the modern ideas of sex, gender, individualism, victimhood, secularization, and judgment.  Could it be that those who love to pick at the wounds of our failures as a nation and society are trying to make us bleed to death?