Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 270 | What Makes America Great

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

Antifa and Marxists might want the American people to believe that the United States was founded upon evil ideals. On this July 4th weekend, Allie is here to explain why America is one of the greatest national experiments ever. Though it has had troubles in its imperfect history, the more we move toward the ideas America was founded on, the greater opportunity individuals living here will have.   Today's Link: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Friday. We have a very special episode for you today since tomorrow is July 4th. We are going to talk about why America is so awesome. And I think that this is a message that is probably more needed than ever right now. So if you've been listening to me for any amount of time, you probably have heard me say that the 4th of July is my favorite holiday. And before I get any accusations from people saying that I am idolizing America more than I love Jesus because I like 4th of July over Christmas or Easter. It is not because I am prioritizing America or my patriotism over the birth of Christ or the resurrection. I care about those things, obviously, more than I care about the United States. Those are much more significant, significant events than the founding of the

United States of America. It is just the celebration of these holidays that I am comparing here. And I like the celebration of the 4th of July because of the atmosphere, because of the season that it's in. Summer is my favorite season. And just because of all of the different things that go along with celebrating the 4th of July. It's just a fun atmosphere. It's a fun holiday to celebrate. Of course, I do love America and I do love the reasons that we're celebrating it, but not even in the same light year of the celebration of Jesus. I just want to make that clear. I do love the 4th of July. I do love America. I've always loved America when I sing the Star-Spangled banner, when I pledge allegiance to the flag. I get teary just because we are so incredibly blessed to live in this

wonderfully free country. Are we perfect? No. And we're going to talk about that a little bit today. It's important for us to be able to see our country and see our history and see our present state in the right way through a truthful lens. And so that's what we're going to do today. I hope that you finish this episode feeling so excited to celebrate the 4th of July this weekend with your family, even as you might be looking out your window and seeing chaos waged it all around you and maybe you're questioning your own patriotism. You're questioning whether or not this really is a great place to live or whether we really are a fundamentally good country based on good ideals and ideals. This episode is for you. If you have not noticed, which I'm sure you have, especially if you listen to this podcast, a lot of Americans, an unprecedented number of Americans, I would say, do not feel that gratitude for American freedom or pride in American accomplishment.

If you talk to, for example, a professor at an elite university or especially a student of one of those professors, you will probably hear them say that America is inherently irrevocably evil. In fact, we are the most evil nation on earth, that we are built on white supremacy, that we are a wicked imperialist force, and that all international turmoil in the modern day can be traced back to American aggression. That might be what you hear from a number of professors and college students and recent college grads. A Gallup poll came out last year tracing patriotism among self-identified Republicans and Democrats from 2001 to 2019. and I think the findings are really interesting. In 2001, 64% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats were, quote, extremely proud to be an American. That number shot up. By 2003, 86% of Republicans, 65% of Democrats.

So the vast majority of both parties, it dropped slightly for both parties after that by 2013, 71% of Republicans and 15%. and 56% of Democrats were extremely proud to be an American that's still a majority of both parties. And then something amazing in a very sad sense to me happened, especially among Democrats. From 2013 to 2017, that sense of patriotism or the feeling of being extremely proud in the words of this poll, it dropped 13 points, 40 to 43 percent. That's amazing to me that there are, patriotism and the Democratic Party dropped while their favorite president was in office. And what's interesting is that if you look at other, there's another Pew Research Study that I cite a lot, polarization and in politics, and it's from 2017, the Democratic Party moved left on every issue

while Barack Obama was in office. So if you look at the views of the Democratic Party on things like race and welfare and immigration and the Second Amendment from 1990, to 2017, the biggest change, the biggest shift to the left for the Democratic Party was while Barack Obama was in president. And it coincides with, I can't say that, you know, I can't say unequivocally that it correlates to, but it coincides with this lowering of patriotism while he was in office. Now in 2019, it is down to 22 percent, only 22 percent of Democrats. And it probably is less now in 2020. are extremely proud to be an American, according to this Gallup poll, whereas 76% of self-identifying Republicans are still extremely proud to be an American. So there is a big divide in how we see the

country, and it's due to, as I'll talk about in a little bit, really a worldview divide. A 2017 Pew study shows that fewer and fewer people believe that America is the greatest country in the world. This is this idea of American exceptionalism. 38% believed that America is the greatest country in the world in 2011. The vast majority believed that it's at least one of the best countries in the world. But only 22% of all Americans believe that today, 41% of Republicans believe that America is the greatest country in the world. Only 19% of Democrats believe that. Only 12%. This shouldn't surprise anyone, but it still is sad. 12% of 18 to 29-year-olds believe that America is the greatest country in the world. Almost a third of 18.

to 29-year-olds believe that there are other countries better than the United States. The older you are, according to this Pew study, the more likely you are to see America as the best country or one of the best countries in the world. It's amazing what kind of perspective experience gives you. Also interesting and important about the same number of white Americans and black Americans believe it to be the best country in the world. 30% of white people, according to this study, and 31% of black people believe that America is the greatest country in the world. The media and far-left activist groups do not want you to believe that. They don't want you to know that they would love to have you believe that only white people are patriotic

in that every other race hates the country and they have good reason to hate the country. And that actually couldn't be further from the truth, at least according to this study. The numbers of people who are white and people who are black are about the same who believe that America is the greatest country in the world. And we're going to hang out here for just a little bit, this exacerbation of a divide, this desire to stoke division where there might not actually be division for political purposes. The leftist media, most of which is driven by Marxism, thrives on this kind of division. Marxism, in the economic sense, for those of you who don't know, and this is just kind of a crude description of it, because Marxism as a term, can be very elusive. But in the economic sense, is the desire to take down capitalism, replace it with socialism and communism. It calls for

an uprising, a revolution of the working class, or what Marx called the proletariat, to take down the rich, the bourgeois. But it's not just economic. It's also a social philosophy. So social Marxism seeks to take down any hierarchy, either a real hierarchy or a perceived hierarchy, so whether that's ethnic or gender or familial. That is why, for example, self-avowed Marxists like Black Lives Matter in Antifa, they're not only against racism. And not even all of the activists, especially in Antifa, can be said that it can't be said that all of Antifa is against racism if you have seen some of the video.

of Antifa activists talking to black cops, for example. But these groups aren't just against racism. They are also, according to the BLM website, against cisgender privilege is what they call it, heteronormative thinking. They seek to, quote, disrupt and dismantle the Western prescribed nuclear family. And just a note on that, the nuclear family, the idea of a mom and a dad and a children,

raising their kids together is not a Western idea. whether you believe in the Bible or not. It is a book that is not a Western book. It is an Eastern book, if you want to call it that. It certainly wasn't written by white people, and it is also an ancient book. And in the beginning, we see this so-called nuclear family. So this idea that the nuclear family is Western prescribed is just not true. But the BLM website says that they would like to dismantle that. It is why their statements of belief on their website mentions mothers three times, but it never says the word fathers. It is a Marxist organization that like all Marxist organizations and nations,

it categorizes people by their various points of perceived oppression, socioeconomic, racial, sexual orientation, etc. It seeks to dismantle any system or institution it views as oppressive. Marxists see any disparity between the groups they view as privileged and the groups they view as underprivileged as the result of discrimination and oppression. So they seek equal outcomes, which they determine to be fair and just. But here's the problem with that. A disparity in outcomes does not always mean discrimination. So equal outcomes doesn't necessarily mean fairness and justice. I highly recommend you read Thomas Souls discrimination and disparities. It is not very long at all.

I listened to it on audiobook. And it was really good. enlightening that talks about all of this stuff and I highly recommend that you read it no matter what side of the aisle that you're on. If you're on the left side of the aisle, it's going to challenge you. But if anything, it could just sharpen what you already believe, but I encourage you to read it. There are innumerable reasons why one individual has a different outcome in life than another. One of them might be discrimination. But the problem is, and something that Marxists just don't want to believe is that we cannot assume that based on someone's group identity. So siblings coming from the same family often have different outcomes in life. We can't expect all people from all different

backgrounds and all capabilities and all experiences to have the same outcomes in life. And that's not necessarily what justice looks like. If we could somehow redistribute all the money and all the social status, which is what a lot of Marxists want so that everyone has the same amount of wealth has the same kind of housing, the same education, the same everything, you are still going to have unequal outcomes because individuals are different. There are a million different factors that play into people's lives. The idea, for example, that white privilege is the determining factor of wealth and success in America is just not true. It's not true. According to the U.S. census, Indian Americans have the highest median income by a long shot.

followed them by then by East Asian Americans and then white. Asian Americans have higher test scores, higher graduation rates, lower unemployment, higher rates of two-parent households than any other ethnic group in the country. White people, as a collective, have inarguably had the most opportunity and the most freedom and the most fairness in America since its beginning. And we are not the most successful group. Is there another country? And I'm genuinely wondering, is there another country in the world in which an ethnic minority is on average, wealthier, and more economically successful than members of the majority. If so, I haven't found it. And if there is, please point it out to me. There are all kinds of privileges that exist. And I would argue that

white privilege is actually one that does exist in America, depending on where you are. Some of you are thinking, well, duh, and some of you are thinking, well, no, that's not true. But I believe that it does because white people are in the majority. So that means, just like majorities in every other country, they will be represented more in the media, in halls of power, in the products that you see in stores. But I would also argue that America in 2020, this has not always been the case and we'll talk more about this, but America in 2020 probably has the least majority privilege in the world that has, like I said, not always been the case. But right now, compare America to any other country in the world and how ethnic and religious

minorities are treated and you will find that America is one of the fairest, if not the fairest and best place for people of all backgrounds to live. And once we get into statistics, we will talk about why so many refugees and immigrants more than any other country in the world come to America. There are all kinds of privileges, like I said, that exist. There is two parent privilege. So studies show that the presence of a dad in the home drastically decreases your chances of poverty, drug use, delinquency, depression, teen pregnancy, dropping out of high school. You, for example, as a Hispanic American who comes from a stable two-parent home, are more privileged than, for example, the white kid whose dad left him when his mom was pregnant.

There are less consequential but also existent privileges. There is pretty privilege. There is skinny privilege. There are privileges that come with age, that come with physical. ability that come with gender. There are geographic privileges, topographic privileges. There are all kinds of privileges in life that may or may not contribute to your outcomes in life. There are people who defeat all odds who only have the privilege of being alive and then they make something incredible of themselves. And then there are people who have every privilege in the world and make

nothing of themselves. People have different abilities. People have different talents. They make different choices. There are countless, unforeseen, and many times unfair circumstances that people find themselves in that can shape the outcomes of their life. And yes, discrimination and injustice can, and do inhibit people's success. But the point is, discrimination cannot be assumed by disparate outcomes in life, which is why the Marxist idea that if we eliminate all hierarchies and that we distribute all money and all power, that people will naturally be equal in all things, is simply untrue. Equal outcomes are only potable by forcibly and constantly redistributing power and punishing the accumulation of success and capital and by forcibly breaking up hierarchies

like the family, getting rid of dichotomies like the so-called gender binary, which of course is what we're seeing. I mean, this is why you've never seen a free communist country. It has to be forced. Every communist or socialist country is not going to be existent alongside freedom of speech, for example, because you have to squash all opposition because it is unnatural. It goes against human nature to not have private property, to not have unequal outcomes because of unequal circumstances. We believe in equal opportunity.

We believe in liberty and justice for all. We believe in fairness. And we should be striving towards equal opportunities. but equal outcomes is impossible without tyranny. Equal outcomes doesn't necessarily mean justice. As Thomas Soul says, justice at all costs is not justice. So like I said, equal opportunity, the elimination of unjust discrimination, fighting for the freedom, and the rights of all people, of all backgrounds to have life,

liberty, and property are worthy causes to fight for. These are the ideals upon which America was founded and they, are good. It is vital to note and to learn from the fact that America has failed many times to live up to those ideals. We were founded upon the then radical notion that all men were created equal and were given certain inalienable rights by God. We have failed to live up to that standard in slavery, in Jim Crow, in Japanese internment camps, in our allowance and celebration of abortion. And our failure has cost human life and liberty. There is a lot of. no denying that. I don't think there's anyone in the world, especially any American that would

deny that. We should not even minimize it, that there are ugly parts of American history that we should look at square in the eye and we should learn from them. We should reckon with our history, but that does not mean, as we talked about on a previous episode, that we should wreck our country. So we should reckon with our history and learn from our history, but that does not mean we need to wreck our country and our foundations. The idea that is very popular, especially today, that America was founded upon slavery and white supremacy, not just that those things existed them, but that we were actually founded upon those things as the 1619 project asserts is not true. And in fact, has been debunked by historians across the aisle. I recommend a piece in the Atlantic called A Matter of Facts by Sean Willence that talks about the shoddy,

historical analysis, if you can even call it that, of the 1619 project. It's simply not true that this is what America was founded on. That was not the point of the revolution. The ideals and ideas of the revolution of our nation's founding were and are good. It is when we have moved away from those ideas and ideals that all men are created equal and deserve equal justice and liberty and opportunity that we have allowed for and even perpetuated human rights abuses. It is when America, in her special, valiant way, has moved towards those good ideals. That's when the beauty happens. That's when men give their lives for slavery as they did in the Civil War.

That is when emancipation happens. That is when we help save the world from Nazis and fascism. That is when we help liberate Eastern Europe from communism. That is when Jim Crow ends. That's when desegregation happens. That is when America goes from having segregated schools and facilities to black people serving on the Supreme Court as a Secretary of State steadily and increasingly represented in Congress and a black man named Barack Hussein Obama winning by a landslide twice in a little over 50 years.

Every country in the world, every people group in the world, has conquered and stolen land from other groups. unfortunately a tragic part of human history. Native Americans were doing that to other Native Americans before the new Americans got there. Every society has enslaved both their own people and other people. Every group has oppressed and every group has been oppressed. Africans and Middle Easterners sold and bought European slaves. Native Americans had African slaves. African Americans had African slaves. The kind of slavery that we saw in early America still exist to this day in much of the non-Western world. And of course, there are still tens of millions of sex slave suffering as we speak. America is two things. It is an experiment and it is young. We are an experiment that had never been tried before.

It had never been tried before. We decided that we were going to courageously try it. Self-governance had never been tried before America. A government. for the people and by the people was fairly novel. It still is the ideas of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to protest, to defend yourself against tyrants, to own property. These all are ideas that in a lot of ways go back to the Bible and they also go back to the Magnicarta and they go back to British rule of law, the Enlightenment, so they were not isolated ideas, but they were newly implemented in the dawn of America. That means, just like any other experiment, it was implemented imperfectly at its beginning.

But as I heard author and scholar John McWhorter say recently, America is an ongoing rehearsal. And we keep rehearsing and we get better and we get better. And the closer we get to our founding ideals, the better we are. That is why there is no need for a revolution. There's no need to tear down American institutions. I don't care about democratically taking down Confederate statues. I completely understand the reasoning behind that. And if a community wants to come together, decide that and peacefully do that, I think that's fine.

But the defacing of monuments of the founders by mobs, the monuments of abolitionists, the discussion surrounding somehow destroying Mount Rushmore. Yes, our founders own slaves and slavery was and is a more. moral travesty. I think we should read about it. We should know about it. We should learn from it. But every historical figure is flawed. Every single one. Every single one of us is flawed. We have to have the ability to place people in their historical context to denounce their sin and appreciate their goodness and appreciate their productive ideas. Carl Marx, whom a lot of these revolutionaries admire was both a terrible person and had terrible ideas. So there's literally no reason to honor him. His ideas have only ended in destruction and human suffering, as you can see,

from the state of any communist country. We are, America is an experiment, and we are young. We are only 244 years old. We are ridiculously young to have made so much progress, not just here in the way of equality, of opportunity, and justice, but in the whole world. We're not perfect, but the arc of American history over our very short life has been good. I just wonder. I wonder this often as I'm scrolling through Twitter and looking at these crazy videos of what's happening in some places and these anarchists. I just wonder if these people who denounce America is inherently evil and a failure

who hate our founders, hate the Constitution, realize how rare it is for them to be able to complain about our government and our system. with impunity, to be able to threaten police officers, to criticize our leaders, to tear down statues in most cases without any consequences whatsoever. That is a product of liberties that the vast majority of the world will never know. We'll never know because they didn't have the founders we have who created the Constitution that we have, that recognized the inherent rights that we have. Just look at what's happening in Hong Kong right now. Crazily enough, the Antifa rioters here wants to compare themselves to the Hong Kong protesters, but it's really just the opposite.

Hong Kong is protesting communism. They are protesting dictatorship. They are fighting for freedom, for autonomy, for liberty. And China has just taken that away. The UN has done absolutely nothing. That's why the UN is an absolute joke. And they are working hand in hand with China, as is the World Health Organization. That's why these organizations cannot be trusted. China has taken away the freedom, has taken away the liberty, has taken away the autonomy of Hong Kong, and it will end in suffering and death. They are going to snuff out any dissent. There is no freedom of speech there. There's no freedom of religion there. And Hong Kong was kind of the safe haven for liberty. And now it is going to be taken over by the communist dictatorship of China. And we are,

are going to see the worldview that the anarchists here want play out in Hong Kong as we have unfortunately seen play out too many times over the past 100 years. And so we can see what it looks like in a country that doesn't believe that we have inherent human rights. Again, we have violated our own ideals, but at least we have those ideals. Like at least we have a standard to try to reach. At least we have something to go back to. At least we have something to get in line with and realize, okay, we were off in this human rights abuse because we believe that all men are created equal and are given inalienable rights by God. China doesn't have that. Communist countries don't have that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second.

I just want to read some statistics about America and what makes us so great and what makes this narrative of America being the worst country in the world so crazy. America gives the vast majority of the foreign aid. We give more foreign aid than any other country. country that is over $31 billion. We adopt the most children per year by far than any other country. In a 2018 Gallup study, it showed that America is the most generous country in the world in terms of the percentage of Americans that, A, donated their money to charity, B, volunteered their own time to an organization. Three, helped a stranger who needed help. 2018 was the first year since 1980 that America didn't lead the world in the number of refugees

accepted before that. We were far and away the country with the highest number of refugees accepted every year. America has by far the highest number of immigrants in the world. One million people immigrates to America every year more than any other country by far. And so it just reminds me that so many of the people that have grown up with the rights and the privileges of America are so blinded to the hardships of people that live in other countries that they claim have it better than the United States does. And they point to everyone else for their privilege. They don't realize that these people, many of them, especially Antifa, who are writing in the street, are actually the ones who are privileged who don't realize the reason

why a million people every year immigrate to the United States that's more than more, that's more immigrants than any other country except in the world is because America is much better than these anarchists think that it is. Capitalism, property rights, global markets, which America has helped champion, has slashed the global poverty rate in half since just 2000. That didn't happen during the communist revolutions of the 20th century, by the way, that happened as communism began to die. And the countries who have insisted upon socialism, North Korea, Venezuela, haven't done so well as the rest of the world has. America has led the world in higher education and science and innovation and technology and medicine in space exploration for decades,

if not centuries, obviously not in space exploration for centuries, but we have done these things really for as long as we have been leading the free world. We are the hub of entertainment, the hub of academia, of technology, of advanced medicine, and only 244 years we have become that. America is imperfect because like all countries, it is made up of imperfect people. But by the grace and provision of God, we have been and still are at our foundation, an incredible nation that has done so much good. Do we still have room to grow? Of course we do. Absolutely. We always will. But we will not grow by getting rid of our ideals, but rather by getting closer to them. So it is vital for the future of your children and their children and their children for the

good of the poor, for the good of the vulnerable, for the good of the minority, and I mean minority in thought, minority in political ideas for us, especially as Christians, to fight for liberty, to push against Marxism, which seeks to steal, kill, kill, and destroy, to reject the narrative that America is inherently and has. inherently evil and has only ever done bad things. In order to have a thriving society, we have to have free speech. We have to have freedom of religion. We have to have a right to bear arms to protect the First Amendment. We have to have the cohesion of the family. All of these things. Unfortunately, revolutionaries want to abolish. That means ensuring our

children know how to reason, know how to think critically, know how to read and to study history, to appreciate the incredible and the rare rights and blessings and privileges that we have in the United States that most people in the world, most people in human history will never be able to enjoy. And most of all, to know God, the giver of our rights, as George Washington said, it is impossible to reason without arriving at a supreme being. That is why we are looking outside our window and seeing so much chaos and confusion. That is the result of moral relativism, which is the result of godlessness. As C.S. Lewis writes in mere Christianity and a lot of other theologians have talked about as well, God is the supreme moral lawgiver. And without the

acknowledgement of a supreme moral law, there is no supreme moral law. That means there is no objective standard of right and wrong. There is no objective standard of good and bad. And so you just have a bunch of confused people vying both for anarchists. and dictatorship at the same time because the godless worldview is constantly contradictory, and it doesn't make any sense. China, the human rights travesties that we have seen in China perhaps worse than any other country, they're forced abortions, not just a couple decades ago, but actually currently of the Muslim population in China, forced abortions, forced sterilizations, organ harvesting, torturing these people, murdering these people, putting them in concentration,

camps. It is because of the godlessness of the Chinese government. The common denominator in all Marxist regimes that have ended in suffering and death is godlessness because you lose your ability to reason. And so the unthinking masses are put in subjection to a cruel tyrant because power corrupts in absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when you are seemingly an all-powerful being who is not in subjection to a supreme moral lawgiver and therefore is not in subjection to a supreme moral law, then the idea of human rights and the idea of freedom is completely arbitrary and really irrelevant. So it is vital, obviously, for individual salvation and the advancement of the kingdom of God, which is going to outlast America and is not

determined by American freedom. And the gospel is not inhibited by limitations on freedom and freedom of speech. But in addition to that, secondary to that, much lower than that, the importance of our children believing and knowing in God is also that they understand where rights come from and the importance of fighting for those rights. It doesn't just affect our lives. It affects the lives, especially of the least of these that Jesus calls us to personally care for. And by the way, that's not calling for the government to care for them. that responsibility is to be on us. Alexander Hamilton says this.

Give all the power to the many. They will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few. They will oppress the many. And we are certainly seeing that play out right now in mob rule. And it is the importance of America to continue to be a representative democracy that is a government for the people and by the people and to hold our leaders accountable. That's another beautiful thing about living in the United States that, that, that, that,

we get to do that. One more quote by a founder, Thomas Jefferson said, experience hath shown that even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have in time and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny. And man, that is true of both Republicans and Democrats right now. That is absolutely the case. And it is our job to fight for the freedoms that we know are not only good but vital for the flourishing of this generation and the generations to come. So knowing all of that, knowing that our belief in a sovereign creator is what allows us to foster liberty and care for liberty and fight for liberty and to recognize inalienable rights. It is also why we believe in the importance of and the triumph of the

individual knowing these things, we should spend this weekend thanking God, thanking God for the foundation of this country. And despite our many sins, despite our many flaws and failures, he has blessed us and has blessed other nations through us. And we should thank him for that. I am thinking him for that. We should celebrate this weekend. Every country has its flaws. Every country has its mistakes. There is no country that has accomplished and done the good that America has, again, by the grace and the strength of God. So God bless America. God bless you and your family. I hope you have a great week in celebrating. I know that we're going to.