Two Narratives, One Truth: Is America a White Supremacist Nation or the Land of the Free?

Folks, I want to ask you a question whose answer, I believe, will in many ways determine the future of this country. Is America the land of the free and the home of the brave — or is she a white supremacist nation built on nothing but injustice? Because make no mistake, there are two competing narratives about America, and the one you believe will shape how you live, how you vote, and what you hand to your children.

The first narrative: America the villain

The first narrative is one you have heard your whole life, whether you realized it or not. It was popularized by Howard Zinn, dressed up as the 1619 Project, and preached today from the floor of Congress by members of the Democrat Party. It says America is a white supremacist nation. America is a nation of oppression. America is built on slavery. America stole the land. And on and on it goes.

It reached a kind of low point when Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia stood on the Senate floor and declared that “the United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.” Folks, that is about as far from the truth as a man can get. Slavery is one of the oldest and most universal evils in human history. It has been practiced on every continent, by every kind of people, against every kind of people, since Adam and Eve fell in the garden. America did not invent it. America is the nation that, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of her own sons’ lives, went to war to end it. But you will never hear that from the people whose whole project is to convince you that this country is irredeemable — that we shouldn’t even celebrate the Fourth of July, that we ought to tear down capitalism and start over.

Let me be honest about what’s true in it

Now, I am not going to stand here and pretend America has been a perfect nation. She never has been. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m not a perfect man, and neither are you. Only one person has ever walked this earth who was absolutely perfect, and that is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. All the rest of us are on a journey. As my friend Andrew Wommack likes to say, we may not have arrived, but we have left. And America is part of that journey. We have left. We have come a long way from where we started, and by the grace of God we are still moving.

So I don’t ask you to whitewash our history. Slavery was real. Injustice was real. Sin against people made in the image of God is real, and it is wicked. But here is the difference between the two narratives: one looks at our sins and concludes that America is a lie. The other looks at our sins, and our repentance, and our progress, and concludes that America is a providential nation still climbing toward her own ideals. I believe the second one. And I believe it because it is true.

The second narrative: America the providential gift

The Bible says in Acts 17:26–27 that God “has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us” (NKJV). One blood. Now let me show you something in that verse that most people miss, because it matters enormously for this whole debate.

The word translated “nation” there is not the Greek word basileia. Basileia means a kingdom, a state, an organized government over a territory. The word Paul uses is ethnos — E-T-H-N-O-S — the word our words “ethnic” and “ethnicity” come from. So what the Bible is actually telling us is that God made, from one blood, every ethnicity, every tribe, every people, every group — every “race,” if you insist on using that word — and He set the times and the boundaries of our lives. Do you hear what that means? Your being an American was not an accident of history. It was an appointment from Almighty God. And the man sitting next to you, whatever the color of his skin, came from the very same blood you did.

That is the nation the first narrative wants you to hate. And look at what this providential nation has done. There has been no country on the face of the earth more welcoming to the gospel of Jesus Christ, because we are rooted and grounded in Christian culture and ideals. There has been no nation more prolific in sending that gospel out to the world — we have well over 100,000 missionaries carrying the good news across the globe right now. Jesus said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). America has been the launching pad for more of that Great Commission than any nation in human history. That is not the résumé of a white supremacist project. That is the fruit of a nation under God.

The spiritual root of the lie

So why is this narrative being pushed so hard? Here is the heart of it, and I want you to see it clearly. The forces working to dismantle the greatness of this nation in order to remake it have completely discarded the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s principle — that we judge one another not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character. They have thrown it out. They want the exact opposite. They want everybody focused on skin color. They want everybody focused on race. Why? Because they know that a people divided by the most superficial thing about them is a people easily conquered. Racial obsession is a formula for undoing the gift God gave us through our Founding Fathers, our Declaration of Independence, and our Constitution.

And it is spiritual before it is political. I have said this to people and watched their faces fall: if you claim to be a Christian, or at least believe there is a heaven, and yet you think race is the primary thing that defines who you are — what are you going to do when you stand before God without that body? I’ll tell you what you’ll find out. You’ll find out that the real you was never the pigment of your skin. The real you is what’s in your heart. We are spirit, and this flesh is just the house we live in.

Folks, judging a human being by the color of his skin is as foolish as judging him by the size of the shoes he wears. What sense would that make? None. And it makes no more sense when you dress it up in the language of “anti-racism” and hand it to a child in a classroom. It is silly, and it is destructive, and it is a lie out of the pit of hell.

This is really a battle over the lens

Let me tell you what is underneath both of these narratives, because if you miss this you will miss everything. The question is not finally about history. It is about the lens through which you look at history. If we do not immerse ourselves in kingdom thinking, in kingdom culture, in a biblical worldview, then we will end up viewing our own country through the lens of the world — and the world’s lens is wrong. It is not merely mistaken; it is fleshly. And the Bible tells us plainly that the flesh profits nothing; it is the Spirit who gives life (John 6:63).

That is why two people can look at the very same history and come away with two completely different countries. The person looking through the world’s lens sees only oppression, only grievance, only power and skin color, because that is all the world’s lens is ground to show. The person looking through the kingdom lens sees a fallen people, yes — but also a providential purpose, a nation God has used as few others in history to carry His gospel and to expand human freedom. Same facts. Different lens. Different nation.

So when I tell you America is the land of the free, I am not asking you to ignore what your eyes can see. I am asking you to put on the right pair of glasses. Because the enemy of your soul is not colorblind — he is a divider, and he knows that if he can get a Christian to look at his neighbor and see a category before he sees a soul, he has already won half the battle. We cannot let him. We have to learn to see one another the way God sees — from one blood, made in His image, bound for eternity.

My own life answers the question

I don’t argue this as a theory. I argue it as a man whose great-grandparents were slaves and sharecroppers in Virginia — and who, in that same country, graduated from Harvard, served in the United States Marine Corps, and stands before the nation today a free man preaching the gospel. If America were truly the irredeemable white supremacist nation the first narrative claims, my life would not be possible. Neither would the lives of millions like me. I am not a victim. I am a grateful son of a providential nation, and I will not spend the one life God gave me bowing at the altar of grievance.

So how shall we celebrate 250 years?

We celebrate the way you honor any gift from God — with gratitude, with honesty, and with stewardship. We tell the truth about our sins and the truth about our greatness. We refuse to let anyone mesmerize us with the most superficial characteristic a person could possibly have. We teach our children that they came, every one of them, from one blood. And we get up off the sidelines and engage — in government, in education, in the family, in media, and in the church — because the God who set the boundaries of our dwelling did not do it so we could sit quietly and watch His gift be torn apart.

So which narrative will you believe? I have made my choice. America is not a perfect nation, but she is a providential one — the land of the free and the home of the brave, still on the journey, still able to be, under God, indivisible. We have not arrived. But thank God, we have left.

God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.