By Erick Erickson
There is a civic, religious strand that runs through American culture that
suggests we have some divinely intended covenant. Our nation is on the planet
for something great. It was once a manifest destiny to stretch from sea to sea.
Then it was that we were set apart as the torch bearers of liberty in the world,
bringing light to darkness.
What set our nation apart was that we were not tied to blood and soil, but to an
idea and truth. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life,
The United States had always been a nation of many different people working
together to advance liberty and reveal those self-evident truths. Our two-fold
motto is “In God We Trust” and also “
We, as a nation not tied to blood and soil, could chart new paths through
history. We had no aristocracy. The merit of men raised them up in society. The
poor man with a good idea could best the rich man with a bad idea. The immigrant
who came from nothing could die a wealthy American. Each generation then
committed itself to our American covenant.
Something though has gone wrong. No longer are we a nation that looks to
Beyond that, those who would restrict this covenant to those already here would
then build up protectionist walls to stop competition, capital, and merit from
freely flowing. That protectionism breeds aristocracy. The
As the nation moves forward through the present turmoil, we should recommit
ourselves to policies that embrace our American covenant of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. We should open our shores to any who come here through
legal processes and make plain those processes, ending long bureaucratic delays
in obtaining citizenship. We should secure our border, but we should also
encourage the best and brightest throughout the world to not just come to
More importantly, we should again embrace the idea that we are better than other
nations because we are not a nation rooted in blood and soil, but a nation
rooted in an idea, a meritocracy, and an experiment in the advancement of
individuals. When we make this nation about what it was and not what it can be,
we break our founding covenant. When we make
“A republic, if you can keep it,” said Mr. Franklin. We fail him and our
founders when we uproot our flag from
Source:
http://theresurgent.com/our-broken-american-covenant/