Goodness Leads to Greatness – Sunday, February 12, 1984
More than a hundred fifty years ago when America was still an experiment, a French philosopher named Alexis de Tocqueville came to observe and report on this new land and new government.
He noted that any society needs some kind of cement to hold it together, customs, history, faith. There must be some common bond. If this bond doesn’t grow up naturally, it is often imposed in the form of a totalitarian government that holds people together whether they like it or not.
But here in this wide-open land with a multitude of nationalities, customs, tastes, faiths and folkways a people had deliberately set out to leave their citizens free. The idea was exciting, but terribly dangerous. De Tocqueville and others wondered what would keep this heady brew of freedom from turning every citizen into a government of his own. What would hold these scattered states together? What would keep the powerful from imposing their will on the weak if there were no strong central authority to hold them in check?
Why had Americans not split already into a thousand squabbling factions? Or why had they not been locked into the iron grip of a dictator? Why were they succeeding so spectacularly?
De Tocqueville searched for the answer, and among other things he reported this, “Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did, I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”1
De Tocqueville noted it was this “goodness” that bound Americans together. Not a fiery fanaticism that turned one people against another, but love, concern and consideration of one American to another. He found a public and private acceptance that this was a nation voluntarily committing itself to the protection and guidance of God.
Of course, Americans then or now are not always good. But there was and is still in this blessed land a basic concern for other human beings and an acknowledgement of the fatherhood of God over us all, These precepts have served us well these past two centuries and they will continue to do so.
Deep down we are still committed to what Abraham Lincoln called “Firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”2
So long as we keep that commitment, America will weather the storms of the future as she has in the past.
1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
2 Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years and the War Years, Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, 1954, p. 664.
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February 12, 1984
Broadcast Number 2,843