10 Reasons Why America Truly Is Exceptional
5. America has a messianic identity
From the Pilgrim Fathers’ “City on a Hill”, to the Founding Fathers’ “We the People”, to Manifest Destiny, to the Industrial Revolution and the Final Frontier, America has been seen as the Promised Land where all the hopes and desires of the human race could be realized to their full potential. There have been many other immigrant receiving nations, but only America has come to symbolize the ultimate Land of Opportunity where even a humble poor migrant from the Old World could become anything he or she was capable of.
The United States is exceptional in that it was founded on a set of republican ideals, rather than on a common heritage, ethnicity, or ruling elite. In his famous Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln said that America is a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. America’s messianic identity is inextricably connected with liberty and equality, and in the world’s perspective the American mission is to ensure, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
