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In American Leadership and the World we will learn that the gift of liberty has been given by God for a reason. The purpose of freedom is to live for others and to commit acts of altruism. America’s mission to the world is to promote freedom through actions: serving the world through the example of love. In this way, the good news that all are created equal and possess the value of the children of God will spread to the whole world; from every mountainside, freedom will ring.
 There are two basic perspectives regarding America’s role in the world: Some view America's responsibility as pertaining exclusively to its own needs and should not be extended to include the affairs of other nations. On the other hand, there are those who insist that isolationist policies are increasingly harder to maintain in a world that is rapidly shrinking.
America must engage the world, but in what manner? Even more important, what "America" do we wish to share with the world and what should be our motive?
In this presentation, we would like to identify three important areas where America can contribute the most to benefit the world:
- To share the spiritual principles of liberty.
- To share the fruits of America's blessings.
- To stand as a model of “One Family Under God.”
1. To share the spiritual principles of liberty
As we mentioned in our first presentation, America is giving the world mixed signals about the meaning of freedom. On the one hand, America continues to be a hope for the ideal of freedom, the longing of which resides in every heart. On the other hand, our exercise of freedom in America conveys the impression that freedom entails acceptance of a degree of moral corruption.
If America's mission to the world is to share "freedom and democracy," we must, first, be clear ourselves about what it is that we mean by the term "freedom." What type of freedom is it that America seeks to share with the world?
It would be interesting for Jay Leno in his "Jaywalking" segments, to pose that question to average Americans: define freedom. It would not surprise if a variety of vague answers ensued and that, basically, those answers would resonant with the idea that freedom merely means to do as I please.
 It should concern us, because as the adage says: "freedom isn't free." Nor can freedom be entirely paid for by others and then bequeathed to those who will then enjoy it's benefit. Each recipient of freedom must be actively involved in the maintenance of freedom. Freedom does not trickle down, it is not a gift from government or a king. The task of maintaining freedom requires more than merely standing at attention during the playing of the national anthem. It requires a deep understanding of the nature of freedom and the responsibilities required to sustain it.
A good place to start would be to examine the founder’s perspectives about freedom or liberty. The unique way Americans viewed their liberty made a deep impression on Alexis de Tocqueville. He observed that the American understanding of liberty was deeply intertwined with religion, distinct from how the French thought about liberty. In his view, this was one of the elements that made America unique. After his return from his 1835 journey to the United States, he commented:
“The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”
De Tocqueville was referring to the uniquely American sentiment that saw freedom as a gift, a blessing from God. It is secured by law, by the function of government, but it is not attributed to government. It comes from God.
Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, described liberty in this way; as an endowment from God, an inalienable right to humanity. Our Constitution, whose Preamble also referred to liberty as a "blessing," enumerated carefully not only those endowed rights but also the essential limits upon government in order to safeguard our divinely bequeathed liberty:
“We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”
 Thomas Jefferson, understood clearly that liberty could only endure as to the degree that people remained convinced that liberty was the benevolent gift of a loving God:
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
Jefferson is implying, not only need we be grateful to God for this gift, but that maintaining freedom requires adherence to principles that, if violated, will incur the benefactor's wrath. Freedom is enjoyed at God's consent. We must adhere to the principles set forth by the Creator; if not, freedom will be lost.
James Madison recognized that membership in a free, civil society presupposes the recognition of and acquiescence to the laws of the Governor of the Universe. In other words, freedom isn’t “free,” freedom is conditional upon the exercise of the personal virtue prescribed by religious faith.
“Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.”
Even the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, reflecting on the failures of Greek democracy, argued that the state needed to promote virtue. To succeed it needed its citizens to exercise the more hierarchical virtues of self-control and duty. For this reason, too, John Adams cited the Constitution as only functional for a "religious and moral" people because virtue flowed from religion.
 This convergence of "liberty and religion", observed by de Tocqueville, existed because, largely, the founders were deriving their understanding of liberty from the same religious source, the Bible. In fact "liberty" is a King James Bible term:
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. II Corinthians 3:17
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. Galatians 5:13
The reason the Americans, observed by de Tocqueville, spoke of God and liberty as, virtually, one and the same is because "where the Spirit of the Lord is, THERE IS LIBERTY." Thus, where there is to be liberty, by definition, there must be, also, the presence of God. In fact, Abraham Lincoln had asserted that God had planted the love of liberty within us:
“What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? Our reliance is in the love of liberty, which God has planted in our bosoms."
Thus, you cannot have one without the other. To attempt to do so, by definition, leads to tyranny. In that God placed this “love of liberty” in our hearts, we could conclude that the ultimate purpose of liberty, of freedom, is to be able to encounter God and to be able to encounter my neighbor with love. In other words, freedom is the necessary oil for the operation of "the two great commandments." and the two great commandments are the foundation of the Ten, and the Ten Commandments stand at the foundation of the nation.
 The founders were students of the Biblical record. They observed the manner in which God exercised His governing power. He did not rule as a totalitarian. Instead, God shares power and the role of governing with those He seeks to rule. Rather then ruling over creatures, God sought to engage Adam and Eve within a governing partnership. They would play an integral role by governing themselves. In Eden, the commandment not to "eat the fruit" is the instrument, the law by which they would be governed. Adam and Eve, not God, were to apply this law to their own behavior. Freedom, for them, would only manifests to the degree they could fulfill the task to govern themselves.
This was the first recorded instance of the exercise of the principle of human freedom and it was what would distinguish humanity from all other creatures. Whether the Genesis story is fact or myth, a free society requires a moral populace willing to take up the personal responsibility of self-regulation.
 The founder's embraced the idea of social contract, put forth by John Locke, that stressed government needed the consent of the people in order to govern legitimately. They added to that a Biblical perspective in recognizing that the people needed the consent of God to be a member of civil society, in effect maintaining a higher social contract, or covenant with God.
That perspective was drawn from the Biblical record of God's "contract" with the nation of Israel. For them, freedom was conditional to the extent the people could maintain God’s consent. Israel was to be blessed or not blessed contingent upon faith in the law or lack thereof.
This principle, citing liberty as contingent upon a code of self-regulation, is affirmed by Edmund Burke:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” Edmund Burke
Samuel Adams, likewise, links public virtue with the destiny of the nation. Like Israel, America will prevail as a nation if it maintains its virtue, that is, maintains it's faith in the "laws, commandments and decrees" of God.
"While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader ... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.” Samuel Adams
 Today, Father Richard John Neuhaus gives us warning. A “high and inpregnable wall” is imposed between not just “church” and “state” but between spiritual principles and public virtue.
"Secularists have used laws that were supposed to separate Church and State to further their own atheistic ideas." Father Richard John Neuhaus.
Attempts to achieve freedom without God as its spiritual basis, eventually leads to political tyranny. President Harry Truman warns us about the loss of morality and the subsequent rise of the all pervasive State:
"The fundamental basis of this nation's law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teaching we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don't think we emphasize that enough these days. If we don't have the proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in the right for anybody except the state."
Tyranny of the totalitarian State was always the result when “freedom” was attempted, but without a spiritual foundation. The theories of Marx and Engels, who declared religion to be the "opiate" of the people opened the path for the tyranny of Lenin, Stalin, the Soviet system, Kim Il Sung, Castro and Pol Pot; all within one generation.
 Tyranny of a different sort, but just as vial, also prevailed whenever hedonistic philosophies purged a society of it spiritual and moral heritage. The 1960's counter-culture, its sexual revolution and its spawned self-absorbed popular culture of today romanticizes the ensuing behavior as "modern," "liberated," "progressive," but it turns a  blind eye to the real consequences of the new standards; lives that are ruined by inordinate, uncontrollable addictive, self-destructive behavior.
Patrick Henry reminds us that these types of “freedoms” are nothing more than the chains of slavery.
“Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”
2. To share the fruits of America's blessings.
The second important area where America’s can contribution is to share with the world the abundant material blessings of God. There exists today a strong debate on how much and in what manner should America give to the world. Some say we should give more while others question the value of “State” giving and foreign aid projects. 
Is America a generous nation? Most American's like to think of their nation as being generous. There are two distinct views of this. One view sees America as being able to give much more. James Miskel provides the following assessment:
Western nations can clearly afford to spend more to address the problems afflicting impoverished nations. Only the Scandinavian countries invest more than 1% of their gross domestic products (GDP) in foreign aid. The United States, Japan, Germany and the other leading economic powers spend proportionately much less. The United States spends only 0.12% of GDP -- one-eighth of one percent -- in overseas aid The Debate About Foreign Aid - James Miskel
Miskel's criticism comes from the perspective that national giving is exclusively within the sphere of State-initiated and managed foreign aid programs. Carol Adelman at the Hudson Institute has a different view. She has studied how much Americans give privately in foreign aid. She says it’s a myth that Americans are stingy.”We’re one of the most generous people in the world, and that’s because of our private philanthropy,” she said. Adelman published her findings in the institute’s “Index of Global Philanthropy,” which found that while the U.S. government gave about $28 billion in foreign aid in 2005, privately, Americans gave $33.5 billion.
 When we examine the status of American assistance to the world, in terms of what amount would be the proper volume of giving, one is drawn to an indisputable fact. One reason Americans aren't giving more is because so much of the nation's resources and so many of its citizens are involved in addictive behavior.
Hard core drug users and casual users - spend approximately $60 billion dollars a year, according to U.S. government estimates. That alone, is more than twice the amount of both public and private giving combined. USA Today recently reported that Internet porn alone has become a 13 billion dollar a year industry. PornoTube, started nearly a year ago, generates 10 million to 15 million hits a day — making it one of the 200 most-popular sites on the Web, according to Alexa, which tracks Internet traffic.
A nation losing its virtue bares a heavy fiscal burden as a result. Consider the ever increasing expense of law enforcement and the incarceration of 7,000,000 Americans presently within the penal system. "In 2003 the United States spent a record $185 billion for police protection, corrections, and judicial and legal activities. Expenditures for operating the Nation's justice system increased from almost $36 billion in 1982 to over $185 billion in 2003, an increase of 418%" Source: Hughes, Kristen A., "Justice Expenditure and Employment in the United States, 2003" (Washington, DC: US Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, April 2006), NCJ212260, p. 2.
The Purpose of Freedom is to Give
 The purpose of freedom is fulfilled when we live in love for the sake of others. Galatians 5:15 tells us clearly that freedom is for giving to others, not self-indulgence.
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. . Galatians 5:13
It is only in an environment of freedom that love can exist and living for others can be experienced. In fact, when we are no longer capable of altruistic behavior, we lose our freedom. The more we direct life to our own selfish purpose at the expense of others, the more we are subject to self-destructive habits and inordinate, uncontrollable desires and obsessions. We lose empathy with others; our own desires become singular and paramount. The path culminates with a desperate turn toward the State. We call on the all-encompassing State to compensate for a broken society helpless to provide for its self-absorbed citizenry.
As Truman had warned us, the decrease of virtue amongst the citizenry leads to the increase of totalitarian government. The people, themselves, call for it. In truth, Americans do not need more government programs, government hand-outs, government bureaucracy for local, state, national and world charity. This is not giving, this is a form of slavery. America needs to restore virtue and freedom. If America can restore the spiritual root of it's heritage and manifest the virtues thereof, then the ideals delivered in the "sermon on the mount" will guide the nation in all that it does; not because of the government, but because of the character of its citizens.
3. Stand as a Model of “One Family Under God.”
 In 1969 the first color photo of earth was transmitted from Apollo 10. It revealed a view never before seen by the human eye. There before us was our planet, hanging in the blackness of space; a luminescent blue orb with fields of brown and swirls of white spinning clouds. Most noticeable was that the magnificent earth in the photo was unlike any globe placed upon any teacher’s desk. How utterly different than any map. Before this, our image of earth was one tethered within an imaginary net of boundary lines that defined the nations. But now, as we gazed, in awe, at this first photo from space, we realized in that instant that the boundary lines defining the nations were all imaginary; they didn't exist. There were no nations, only one home for humanity. It made us feel that we were all, somehow, connected.
 It’s interesting that both genetic science and the Bible show that there is a single origin of molecule. According to genetic science we come from a single male ancestor. In the Bible too it is mentioned that there is a single male Adam and single female, Eve. Dr. Spencer Well, Geneticist
In his book, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, Dr.Wells follows a genetic trail through DNA back-tracing to a single human ancestor some 60,000 years ago in what is now Namibia in Africa. The entire human race has chromosomes from this original ancestor. This conclusion is remarkable in that it is the same conclusion of Genesis: we are one family. However, we are a family that has lost its common sense of origin and heritage.
 Thus the actual story of humanity has been a tragic one characterized by the rise and fall of estranged peoples of unrelated identities, each with an indigenous myth of origin, each driven to cordon off a territory in which to display their own separate cultural identity distinct from the surrounding sea of “others.”
 It is the story of distrust, hatred, ethnic cleansings, genocide and wars. Each act of atrocity justified as a necessity in order to advance, or to avenge, "my people." It was a history predicated on the false premise that there are those who are my people and there are those who are not. The greatest truth of this age is the undeniable reality that there have never been others. There has always only been us. All humanity are my people, genetically, spiritually, literally; we are one family under God.
 Some believe that God heard the prayer of the Pilgrim Fathers and made a Covenant with them as he had done with the Israelites in the wilderness. So too, the prayers of African slaves, chained in the darkness of the hull bottoms of slaveships named "Brotherhood" and "John the Baptist." They were praying for a land, to form a nation reflective of the value that they had discovered at the root of their faith. A nation not based on the definitions of aristocracy and peasantry, freeman or slave nor beholding to the whims of divine kings. A nation  based upon a new view of human value. That all were created equal and as such were endowed with the rights of a people so loved by their Creator. This is the root of the declaration that we are truly One Family Under God.
It is also the basis of God's hope and purpose for America; that America would be a shining example of love and service to the world so that the world might know that they are loved even as God has loved America and shared His abundant blessings with her. With that altruistic value, "living for the sake of others," America's leadership in the world would forever be welcomed and embraced. The value that brings together mind and body, husbands and wives, parents and children, would define the character of the American and, thus, the character of the nation.
America was to live for the world bringing true freedom into the world as a model of the good news that we are truly one family. It is God’s enduring Providence to bring that wondrous news to every land in the hope that it could be the ethos of every nation, every religion, every family and every person. It is an immutable truth that existed before all prophets and all religions. It stood even before the dawn of time, this dream; it is God's dream, it is a part of him and is with him for all time.
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