Have you watched any of the videos of foreign visitors to the United States who’ve come here to cheer on their respective soccer (or if you prefer, futbol) teams in the World Cup? They’re hilarious. People from England, Italy, Scotland, Russia, Argentina, France, Australia, Germany, Japan and other countries speaking in amazement about everything from Buc-ee’s to Walmart, automated car washes to expansive highways, Dunkin Donuts to bars and beer, the grandeur of our geography to our passionate patriotism.
Nearly every American they meet, they say, is so friendly and hospitable. I’m sure there are some whose experience hasn’t been so congratulatory, but for the most part it seems our legally visiting guests are dumbfounded over what they’re seeing, hearing and tasting in the good ole U.S.A.
The most interesting thing is they’re discovering America and its citizens are very different from the impressions they had been receiving from their national news sources. They don’t seem to fit the portrayals of angry, nasty, hostile Americans. Can you imagine – media presenting an intentionally skewed perspective on the news?
Why are the majority of soccer fans on their first trips to the U.S. reacting in such favorable ways, talking up our country in such glowing terms? The effects of capitalism and materialism are part of it. Although we tend to take it for granted, the foreign guests are encountering everything from food to clothing to technology to housing in ways they’ve never experienced. You name it, we’ve got it. In abundance.
But I think the primary reason is something far more fundamental. It’s the American culture that has been developed and maintained – at least so far – over the past 250 years.
In the marketplace, companies talk about their “culture” – the values, beliefs and principles that guide and govern how they conduct business. You can usually identify a business that has built a strong, positive, assertive culture. It not only attracts customers but also ensures they want to keep coming back. I believe the same is the case with our nation, even though our prevailing culture is so familiar to most of us that we don’t even think about it – until some “outsider” reminds us of it.
Where did this culture come from? How did it develop? I believe it was built into the fabric of our society by design, sewn into it through documents like our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the actions and thinking of the nation’s founders. But it’s even deeper than that.
One of the underlying motivations for people fleeing England was their desire for freedom of religion, unfettered by the edicts of a national denomination. But they weren’t seeking freedom from religion, because faith was integral to these courageous folk who ventured across an entire ocean to a new land they had never seen and had only heard about.
As Mikale Olson recently wrote in an op-ed column for The Christian Post, “At the center of American life has always been a particular set of values: hospitality, personal responsibility, generosity, patriotism, individual liberty, and the belief that every human being possesses inherent dignity. These values were heavily shaped by our Christian heritage and became woven into the fabric of the nation itself.”
We find this implicit in the Declaration of Independence, dating back to July 4, 1776. Its opening includes these familiar words: “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….”
Where did the notion that all men – meaning, in the terminology of the time, both men and women – are “created equal” come from? Looking through history and at all the societies of our world, such equality is rare. This doesn’t mean all are identical, or that all should experience equal outcomes. But it does mean that all deserve the same Rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The concept of a Creator comes directly from the Old Testament book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created…” (Genesis 1:1). Belief in the sanctity of life and many of the freedoms we enjoy today also have their basis in the Scriptures. In fact, freedom is one of the Bible’s foundational precepts: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1).
We could go down the line discussing characteristics of Americans our visiting soccer fans have happily discovered, but directly or indirectly many of them have derived from two central precepts Jesus Christ taught during His earthly ministry. One is what we commonly refer to as “the Golden Rule” – “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).
The other is the principle of generosity that continues to inspire many in what is probably the most giving nation in the world. Jesus declared, “…remembering the words the Lord Jesus Himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’” (Acts 20:35).
Watching the news media and listening to many entertainers speaking from their exclusive enclaves, one might conclude the United States is one of the worst places in the history of the world. That apparently was what many of our foreign visitors anticipated. It’s gratifying that their expectations have not been realized; in fact, it’s been greatly to the contrary.
Conscious of it or not, it seems lots of our American citizens are in fact doing unto others as they would have them to do unto themselves. And they’re finding it really is more blessed to give than to receive. Perhaps the reactions of our foreign friends will serve as a wakeup call for us, recognizing that while the United States is far from perfect, it’s still “an amazing place,” as countless foreign friends have concluded.
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