| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Three Cs of American Greatness
00:03:23
|
|
| The three C's that made America Great is the name of your new book. | |
| Could you comment on why you wrote the book and what it means, Christianity, capitalism, and the Constitution? | |
| Well, Jim, Steve Fiesel and I are the co-authors of the book, and what we wanted to convey was that there are some under really underpins of our society, culture, and country that without we fall. | |
| And the three Cs that we identify are Christianity, the Judeo-Christian worldview, capitalism, an economic prospect of how we run our economy, and finally the Constitution, the document that really is our governing God. | |
| So let me begin with Christianity. | |
| A lot of people may not understand. | |
| We're not saying that everybody in America's got to be a Christian in order for America to be America. | |
| Some of our founders were devout Christians. | |
| Some were not. | |
| But even the ones who were not recognized that what was unique about a Judeo-Christian worldview was this. | |
| We are who we are because we are individuals. | |
| And our worth and our basic value is not because of how much land we own or how close our family is to the crown or what our occupation is. | |
| It's not our last name. | |
| It's because, as the founder said so brilliantly in the Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator, not their government, but by their creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | |
| Now, that singer statement is the foundation of what makes us different than most countries because we recognize in America that we are individuals, which means that we have individual worth and value, not associated with our gender, our race, our ethnicity, our belief system, our vocation, our possessions. | |
| And that with that basic worth given by God, we are also responsible first to God, then to each other. | |
| That is a radical, in fact, I would use the term, it was revolutionary for them to say that. | |
| In fact, it was the genesis of a revolution. | |
| Because in so many countries on this planet, people are considered given their worth based on what is their worth to the state, their worth to the group. | |
| We have worth based on the fact that we are individually worth something. | |
| And that is powerful. | |
| And it means that a kid who grew up as poor as I did, growing up in South Arkansas in a little orange brick rent house, is capable of one day becoming a governor, running for president, and talking to Jim Baker on television. | |
| And if it had not been for the uniqueness of this great nation, I would have still been sitting in South Arkansas catching chickens like I did when I was a kid. | |
| And I want to tell you something. | |
| Sitting here talking to you is way better than running around a chicken house on a hot August night catching chickens. | |
| So I'm grateful I lived in America where I wasn't stuck where I started. | |
| And that's one of the great truths that Christian faith gives us, is that our worth, our value comes from God. | |
| It doesn't come from the government or from other people. | |
| It doesn't even come from our own family. | |