What Makes America Great? by Regis Nicoll

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By Regis Nicoll, Crisis Magazine, July 4, 2019


Regis NicollThe current occupant of the Oval Office
 got there on the promise to “Make America Great Again.” And while Lady Liberty lost some of her luster from the rear guard position of the last Administration, her greatness endures and is the reason America has an immigration problem—scratch, crisis.

Foundations

Five decades after America gained independence, the French author Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on its exceptional character. Unlike other nations that were defined by ethnicity, geography, common heritage, social class, or hierarchal structures, America was a nation of immigrants bound together by a shared commitment to the republican principles of individual liberty, equality, personal responsibility, and laissez faire economics.

Those principles comprise the “America creed” which G.K. Chesterton wrote “is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.” There, the theological pegs of our Union are established in four explicit references to the Judeo-Christian God.

The Declaration of Independence opens by acknowledging “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It goes on to refer to the “Creator” who endows man with “certain unalienable rights.” It makes an appeal to the “Supreme Judge of the world,” and closes with an expression of trust in the “protection of Divine Providence.”….Read the entire article here: crisismagazine.com/2019/what-makes-america-great