250 Years: Living Up to the American Promise

I believe in America, not blindly, not without knowing her failures, but fully, with eyes open, having seen enough of the world and enough of what men can do to each other to understand what this country actually is and what it cost to build it.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men did something that had never been done before. They looked at every government that had ever existed, studied the philosophers, wrestled with history, and built something new. Not a kingdom, not an empire, but a republic grounded in the conviction that human dignity comes from God, that liberty is not a gift from government but a condition of our creation, and that any government deriving its power from the consent of the governed must be held accountable to the people it serves.

That idea changed the world.

It Didn't Come From Nowhere

The men who wrote the Declaration and framed the Constitution were not working in a vacuum. They were the inheritors of centuries of Christian thought—the understanding that every human being bears the image of God and is therefore endowed with worth that no king and no government can grant or revoke. That conviction, more than any political calculation, is what made the American experiment possible.

When Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, he was making a theological claim with political consequences. The entire architecture of this republic, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, the principle that no man is above the law, rests on the foundation that there is a moral order above human authority to which all human authority must answer, and it built the freest nation in the history of the world.

The Blood We've Spent for Others

I spent years as an Army Ranger hunting the enemies of this country in some of the darkest corners of the world. I know what it costs to defend freedom, and I know that America has spent that cost not just for herself but for people she had no obligation to.

Think about what that means.

At Yorktown, young men died to birth a nation they would never fully see. At Antietam/Sharpsburg, Americans killed Americans by the tens of thousands to settle the question of whether liberty meant what it said—whether “all men” actually meant all men.

At Belleau Wood, Marines fixed bayonets in a French wheat field and charged into machine gun fire to stop an empire from swallowing a continent. On the beaches of Normandy, boys from Iowa and Georgia and Texas drowned in the surf and bled out in the sand so that people they had never met could live free. In Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq and Afghanistan, American sons left home and did not come back, paying with their lives for a principle that extends beyond borders and beyond self-interest.

No nation in history has shed more of its own blood for the freedom of others, and that is definitively the most extraordinary things any civilization has ever done. No marvel of science, no writing of literature, and no production of industry has had more impact upon the world.

But We Have Not Always Been What We Claimed to Be

Honesty requires saying this plainly. America has not always lived up to her own ideals. There are chapters in this history that are not redemptive, wounds that have not fully healed, and moments when the gap between what we declared and what we practiced was a canyon rather than a crack.

We know this. We should not pretend otherwise.

But here is what I believe: the fact that we have a standard to fall short of is itself evidence of something remarkable. Most nations and empires throughout history committed their atrocities without moral conflict because they had no founding ideal demanding better. America's failures have always been measured against America's promises. And in generation after generation, men and women have given everything to close that gap, to make the republic more fully what its founding documents declared it to be.

That arc is not accidental. It is the long, painful, costly working out of a Christian conscience in the life of a nation.

What America Has Given the World

As a result of our striving, America has created the freest markets in history, highest innovation, lifesaving medicine, year-round accessible food, cutting-edge technology, and exhibits the most generosity of any people ever in history. Even in the aftermath of war, we do far more than history should demand to rebuild enemies into allies, asking for nothing but enough land to bury our dead.

And to further matters into the philosophical, we wrote a governing constitution that has served as the model for free governments on every continent. We spearheaded a tradition of religious liberty that has allowed faith to flourish without the coercion of the state. We built a military that has, more than any other in history, been the wall between civilization and those who would tear it down.

And through it all, we've been a light—an idea that has drawn the oppressed, the persecuted, and the desperate from every corner of the earth, people who came here with nothing because they believed that here, more than anywhere else, a man could build something, raise his family, worship freely, and live without fear of his government.

That light is real, and let me tell you, brothers, I have seen what the world looks like without it.

250 Years

We certainly have more work to do in keeping up with the American promise. The republic is not finished, and it is certainly not guaranteed. Every generation has to decide whether they will be worthy of what they inherited, whether they will tend the flame or let it burn out.

I think about the men who never made it off the beaches of Iwo Jima, the boys who fell at Gettysburg and never saw the end of the war they died in, and the men who didn't make home from Fallujah. They paid for something they believed in—something worth believing in.

Two hundred and fifty years. Let's be worthy of it.

Remember, Train Hard. Train Smart. And never forget the price that was paid so that we could live free.