|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]
The relationship between the United States and Israel is usually seen as “special” because of technical matters.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel and the U.S. share vitally important intelligence and technology.
But what about shared values?
Shortly after America’s new ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, arrived at his post, he sat for an interview with the Christian network TBN. Huckabee, the first Evangelical Christian to hold this post, was clear that what roots him in Israel is the Bible.
“3,500 years ago, God said, ‘This is my people, this is my land, this is my place, this is my purpose,'” noted our new ambassador. He later continued, “America stands with Israel.”
Polling data shows that Americans with religious identity, who attend church, are much more strongly in support of Israel than Americans with no religious identity.
Per Gallup, on average from 2020-2024, among American Protestants, 66% expressed more support for Israel, compared to 18% who expressed more support for the Palestinians.
Among Americans with no religious identity, 34% expressed more support for Israel, compared to 43% who expressed more support for the Palestinians.
Over 2020-2024, among those who said they attend church once per week, 67% expressed more support for Israel, and 17% expressed more support for the Palestinians. However, among those who never attend church, 41% expressed more support for Israel, and 37% said they express more support for the Palestinians.
Gallup connects weakening support for Israel with weakening religious identity. Over 2001-2004, 32% of Americans said they attend church once per week. By 2020-2024, this was down to 23%. In the 2001-2004 period, 15% said they never attend church. By the 2020-2024 time period, this was up to 30%.
So, the Bible could well be the most important dimension of the unique and special relationship between Israel and the United States.
We’ve heard a lot about Make America Great Again.
With all the anxiety now regarding domestic and foreign affairs, we ought to ask, “What makes America great?”
One of the great speeches in American history is the speech that President Ronald Reagan delivered March 8, 1983, to the National Association of Evangelicals, in which Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”
In that speech, Reagan quoted French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote what many view as the greatest book ever about the United States — “Democracy in America,” published in 1835.
Tocqueville noted: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits enflamed with righteousness did I understand the greatness and genius of America. America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
The following is the increase from 2001 to 2023 of the percentage of Americans saying the following are morally acceptable: Gay and lesbian relations, 40% to 64%; bringing a baby outside of marriage, 45% to 70%; sex outside of marriage, 53% to 72%; polygamy, 7% to 23%; doctor-assisted suicide, 49% to 53%; pornography, 30% to 39%; abortion, 42% to 52%.
From 2001-2024, federal debt as a percent of GDP went from 32.8% to 96.2%, and federal spending went from 17.6% to 23.1%. The percentage of households with married parents dropped from 24% to 17.9%. And the fertility rate went from 2.03 children per woman to 1.61.
The average real growth rate of the U.S. economy from 1950-1999 was 3.6% per year. From 2000-2024 it was down to 2.2%.
There we have it. The way to make America great again is to make America good again.
Emblazoned on the Liberty Bell is the verse, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” taken from the Book of Leviticus in the Five Books of Moses.
There is indeed a special relationship between the U.S. and Israel. The common ground between our countries is the eternal Bible.
Jews count the creation of the world as occurring about 6000 ago. Most others believe the world is billions of years old. This difference is piddling given the quantum reality of all possibilities being in superposition all of the time. Only some form of intervention reveals a single truth.for the moment. Interpretations of these truths are only post hoc narratives. Written language appears rather recently, but human interactioms preceded recording of those interactions. I was recently impressed by a YouTube video that documented a bottleneck in human genetic development that occurred about 8+ thousand years ago in which most men in the world disappeared, with there being only 1 man for every 17 women. In pursuit of booty, in the form of free food from early farmers and free women and young girls, men fought to the death of nearly the entire human race.. Human history can easily be seen as beginning only after the apocalypse. We can see the Bible as being a response to the catastrophe. It makes axioms like “Thou shall not kill” seem like the only common sense choice in order to survive. (Please see the website, “extinctzoo” for more details.) Apparently, human survival is not a given. We will cull our numbers until we can live together. Given our current population collapse, we will not have to kill each other; only sit back and watch as we do it to ourselves.
My favorite line from the Bible is “Choose Life.” Here is an example of how the world will look after our next disaster. This musical video has its roots in the Bible. Enjoy! “Ori’s Light” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnshEjAFP0w
“What makes America great?”
To the extent that a person or a nation remain committed to reason and rationality and to achieving peace and prosperity on earth to that extent they will be good and maybe even great.
Fidelity to reason, fidelity to the facts of reality, are what made America great.
“America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more—and nothing less. The rest—everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything “noble and just,” and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history—was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle. The first consequence was the principle of political freedom, i.e., an individual’s freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by the government. The next was the economic implementation of political freedom: the system of capitalism.” – Ayn Rand
I enjoy assigning “Francisco’s Money Speech” to students. Unfortunately, too many people mistakenly believe some version of the fixed-economic-pie fallacy. I ask students “are other people poorer because Bill Gates and Elon Musk got wealthier.?” It is telling that we have people make the really dumb statement :”I support fair trade, not free trade.” Government then, often catering to special interest groups, gets to decide what’s “fair.” We need look no further than President Trump’s efforts to get companies not to raise prices in response to tariffs for evidence the fidelity to reason is sometimes missing, with predictable, negative, unintended results.