Welcome to politics by faith. Thank you for being here. We did something on the show this morning,

and I want to relay some of it here and then go a little deeper. We read from a beautiful speech

by Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri, answering the question, what is an American?

It is the best swing at this question that I've heard so far.

And we have the whole speech on my Twitter account, Slater Radio. You can read it all there for

yourself. But I want to go over a couple highlights here. And then what we do with this.

This was a click moment for me. I love moments like this. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's it.

Now I get it. Schmidt says in a speech in 1998,

Bill Clinton said that the continuous influx of immigrants was, quote, a reminder that our America

is not so much a place as a promise. And the senator says, but these principles are not abstractions.

They're living, breathing things rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life.

It's only in that context that they, the ideas, the principles become real.

Take a trip out to rural Missouri and spend a little time with the folks

out there. And you'll quickly realize that the Second Amendment is not a classroom theory for them.

It's part of who they are. Now, here's the key. If you imposed a carbon copy of the U.S.

Constitution on Kazakhstan tomorrow, Kazakhstan would not magically become America.

Because Kazakhstan isn't filled with Americans. It's filled with Kazakhstanis. What makes America exceptional isn't just that we

committed ourselves to the principles of self-government. It's that we as a people were actually

capable of living them.

Something about that just clicked for me. I have fallen for this progressive idea that America

is an idea. And that's it. We're just an idea. We have a lot of ideas. But that's, I mean,

and yes, there are ideas, but that's not it.

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