Once those groups were established, “there was a natural search for leaders who set a tone at the top.
Outside of the U.S., the idea of American leadership didn’t take hold until after World War I and the formation of the League of Nations, and later the United Nations, the Rev. Robert Franklin, professor of moral leadership at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, noting both slavery and the removal of native Americans as the nation’s “original sins.” “It was probably not possible to think of America as such a nation in the 19th century,” said the Rev. Mike Lee, R-Utah.Īmerica wasn’t always seen by the rest of the world as a shining city on a hill. “We’ve got plenty of problems - I don’t dispute that for a minute - but I think we are very much a force of good in the world in what we aspire to and what most Americans still believe in,” said U.S. president “morally bankrupt.”īut it is the foundational documents - The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - the blueprints on which Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” was built, that still govern the nation. Recently, one Harvard professor called America a “failed social experiment.” And the leaders of six leading divinity schools and seminaries issued a statement calling the actions of the U.S. Just six years shy of its 250th anniversary, can America maintain its place as a moral leader in the world? Theologians and policymakers across the country say yes - and not despite our failures, but because of them. Those speeches, and the documents to which they refer, evoke moral leadership, the kind that catapulted an infant nation, an experiment in self-governance, to be a moral exemplar throughout the world.Īs Independence Day approaches, America limps to her party, hobbled by a raging pandemic, widespread economic distress and weeks of protests over racism and police brutality. Similarly, when Abraham Lincoln spoke briefly at a cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he reminded a hurting, fractured nation of a principle it committed to paper in 1776: “All men are created equal.” It was a shoutout to promises of the past, promises that America’s flawed founders had made nearly 200 years earlier. “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’” King also hinted at how America could get through its coming dark days in April 1968: The masses of people are rising up.” He was happy, he said, to live in a time in which people were finally grappling with the problems men have been grappling with throughout history. King said he saw God at work in the chaos and fury of the civil rights movement. But he showed up at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, anyway, and as a storm raged outside, delivered what is today known as the “ I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. had a sore throat and a slight fever, so he decided not to deliver a planned speech on what would be the last evening of his life.
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