Last week we began to address the concept of “American Exceptionalism,” or what made America different from all other nations, at least until recently. In the last few decades, America has been turning from what made it an exception while other nations have begun to embrace what had made America exceptional. This understandably coincides with our decline and their advances.
The first reason for American Exceptionalism was the foundational honoring of God the Creator that was sown into our government and our culture. The basic image of God in which man was created was the expression of God’s creativity. The closer man gets to God, the more creative he will be. Regardless of how revisionist historians have changed our history, this was a basic foundation in America. True creativity requires liberty, which is why we are told that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (see II Corinthians 3:17).
Many nations have promoted religious freedom, but there is a difference between that and truly honoring God and welcoming Him. As we see in Revelation 3:20, in this age the Lord will not even enter His own house, the church, if He is not wanted. For most of its history America wanted God, loved God, honored Him, and invited Him into almost everything we did. When we started telling Him we did not want Him anymore, beginning in the early 1960’s, He began to leave. You can mark the American slide from that time.
Another basic way that America was an exception was that we were the first modern government that was “of the people, for the people, and by the people.” It was the first country on earth where the government existed for the people and not the other way around. It was the first government based on the devotion to the value of the individual and the protection of the rights of the individual. This released an unprecedented prosperity and advancement because it released people to be who they were created to be.
Fundamental to this value of the individual was the individual’s right to own private property and have it protected. If someone built something, then the government would protect the fruit of their initiative and/or innovation. This was considered both the right thing to do and the just thing to do. As we are told in Psalm 89:14, righteousness and justice are the foundations of His throne. These are the foundations of the kingdom of God, which is why in the kingdom of God there will actually be private property. In God’s economy “the righteous will receive the results of their own work” (see Isaiah 3:10).
This was a fundamental principle of the Promised Land where the families of Israel were each given their own land, and they could eat the fruit of their own labor. As a part of the blessing of this, they were also required to consider the poor and share their blessings with them. However, it was by their own initiative that they did this so that charity was also personal, uplifting those receiving the charity as well as the charitable.
As we covered earlier, when the first English colony in America had a communal garden, in its first two years, half of the colonists starved to death each year. In the third year when each colonist was given his own plot of ground to plant and eat from, no one ever starved in that colony again. Productivity is vitally connected to personal initiative. As idealistic as it may sound that we should all work only for the common good, this has never worked, and it never will, because we were not made that way. We were not made that way because personal initiative leads to personal responsibility, or stewardship. Also, only when we have something can we give something, which is necessary for experiencing love and charity.
In contrast to this, Marxism is built upon the basic fallacies that “the individual has no value,” and there shall be no private property. This has never worked except to impoverish people, and it never will work. Yet there are many who continue to prove Einstein’s definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.