When I was a little girl, I used to wonder why I’d been privileged enough to be born in the United States of America.
I couldn’t believe that among all the people on earth now and throughout history who had lived through miserable living and working conditions, mass genocide and war, extreme poverty, not to mention the millennia of pre-industrial infrastructure, I had been born living in the wealthiest, most powerful, most unique, and most free nation on earth.
How? It blew my mind.
As you may know, I was born into progressive, bourgeoise bohemian circles from San Francisco and grew up in the 90s, and yet I still considered the U.S. to be the best nation on earth.
I find it so poignant that there’s a trend of 90s nostalgia during an incredibly patriotic season of American culture after a decade of painful disillusionment, because this was the period of time when even leftists understood what they had in the United States and the last great period before the ubiquity of the internet engulfed the flow of American politics and culture like a tidal wave.
Of course, my perspective was tinged with left-wing cynicism about capitalism, as well as a distain for globalism that I largely still relate maintain, but before the 21st Century, it was not political to be grateful to live in the U.S. and grateful for and adherent to the Enlightenment values that it was founded with.
I also wonder if someone will read the first two paragraphs of this missive about my country and wonder if I’m writing with nostalgia or irony, because the United States has been weakened so much from the giant that it was in the 1990s, when the world was a so very different place. My views towards the United States have also changed in many ways and remain still nuanced and textured.
The fact remains that because of the American experiment and what it was, I was born into the most privileged class of people that have ever lived on the face of the earth – white American women.
America has been beneficial for women because it was founded on values that recognized the inherent dignity of men and women as being created equal, which is a moral and religious statement that implies the existence of a creator.
Christianity is what made America great. Christianity is what made my life so incredibly blessed and privileged.
Enjoying these values unmoored from conscious knowledge of Christian objective truth is what made them so detrimental to my heart, and my spirit, and my moral character.
America, as many Europeans are discovering while visiting our great nation for the World Cup on the occasion of our 250th anniversary, is a beautiful country.
Americans are incredibly American-centric because our country is truly “great” in the sense that it is huge. It has been wildly successful. It has blown every other civilization out of the water in terms of economic and military expansion. It has held relative stability on the world stage for decades after saving Europe from imploding on itself as the old systems crumbled (although yes, many rabbit trails we could go down there, I highly encourage such exploration).
It’s also gigantic. We have massive mountain ranges, gorgeous coastlines, expansive prairies, wild, mountainous desert wilderness, all of which you can drive through for hours without hardly passing more than a few gas stations and Podunk towns with population counts in the dozens. All this is spread out between all of our massive cities and sprawling suburban complexes the likes of which the world had never known or seen until American industry took full flight (for better or for worse).
This is what the European mind can’t comprehend, as the meme goes. It was only as an adult that I realized that to those hailing from across the pond, the United States’ sheer size alone is often a surprise, all the more so the distance many of us drive to work or the grocery store each day (60 miles each way, in my rural-dwelling family’s case).
And let’s not forget that much of this was originally settled first by pilgrims willing to settle in a completely foreign land with their families for a chance to have a community all of their own, and later by families that carted all their belongings halfway across the continent in carts, risking all manner of danger and uncertainty for a small plot of land to call their own.
This is the American dream, and millions of people from around the world still live it — and seek it — to this day.
Our country is huge, our expansion has been exceedingly impressive, our potential seemingly limitless, and our land is also beautiful beyond description.
The natural beauty of this geographically vast nation is also endlessly breathtaking, and constantly reminds you what it really means when we call a land “God’s country.”
But if a nation is to be God’s people, it must not only be great, and not only beautiful, but good.
I recently listened to Whitney Houston’s stirring rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner from 1991, a performance which only gets more poignant in time as one considers how much our country and the world has changed since her famous Super Bowl recording as well as the sad personal story of the singer herself.
As my eyes stung with tears at her passionate rendition (I am physically incapable of listening to this recording without crying), it occurred to me that the beauty of our great nation is much like the beauty of Houston’s own legendary vocal skills.
She sounds like a woman whose entire soul has been thrown into the words of our famed National Anthem, there is no questioning the immense feeling behind the belting lyrics. This is why it always makes me cry. This is why the crowd erupted into deafening cheers. This is why it’s gone down in history as one of the most famous performances of the anthem in history.
Houston is, herself, the epitome of the American dream. A woman with extreme natural talent that stirringly reflects the goodness of God’s design, the liberty and excess she enjoyed as a wildly famous singer were no match for the spiritual demons that followed her throughout her life and all the way to her sad end.
In the same way, our nation has achieved greatness never before imaginable by mankind, enjoying resources that the European mind cannot comprehend. And yet, all our excess, all our wealth, all our sense of dogged determination born in the miraculous defeat over the British empire at the hands of a ragtag army of merchants and farmers, has not directly contributed to our goodness.
It has played as much a part in our decay, in our ugliness, as it has in the things that are truly beautiful and good about our nation.
That is because true greatness, true beauty, and goodness are defined by and come from God.
We are fond of saying that this is God’s country; our national motto is the declaration In God we trust.
Yet…do we? Has the growth and expansion of our great nation striven for goodness as much as it has goodness? Have we reaped the fruit of submission to God, or do we step all too often on the rotten fruit of materialism, postmodernism, and cynical free market capitalism?
These are the questions I continue to ask myself as a God-fearing American who loves her country, believes in her goodness, and is enraptured by her beauty – yet longs for more of the goodness that can only come from God to once again infuse our great land and our uniquely American culture.
America, the beautiful, I love you.
O beautiful for spacious skies O beautiful for pilgrim feet O beautiful for heroes proved
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!
In liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
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