In a piece for The American Conservative called “Safety Third,” Adam Ellwanger illustrates how various people living on the land that is now called America have taken risks. Indigenous people who fought for their way of life, slaves who fled to freedom in the North, pioneers who took to the frontier with nothing more than what a wagon could hold, the passengers on Flight 93 who stormed the cockpit — these disparate groups are bound together by what he calls the makeup of the American spirit: “mobility, risk-taking, and optimism.”
In pointing out that the obsessive safetyism of prolonged Covid restrictions is an aberration from the national character, Ellwanger affirms dangerous enterprise itself as inherently American. The country’s founding was an act of cutting off certain resources in the radical belief that the American people could procure their own; one of the original national mottos was “annuit coeptis,” or “providence favors our undertakings.” The primary motto of the United States, “In God We Trust,” is not an empty statement. Ellwanger notes that in a time when “their monarchs did not allow free practice of religion … the New England colonists were people of such great faith that they would leave their ancestral homes and risk death — including the death of their children — to go on a sea voyage that might end in utter destruction.”
We know that risk-taking is American, but is it also inherently Christian? The Bible instructs us to “walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). This idea is reflected in the story of Jesus walking on the water (Matthew 14:22-33), when he tells his disciple Peter to walk toward him on the waves. Peter does the impossible, only starting to sink when he sees “the strength of the wind.” Before the ocean engulfs him, he cries out to Jesus, who saves him “immediately.” Both verses illustrate that to be a believer, to commit to an undertaking in faith, it is necessary to disregard what circumstances look like to the physical eye. The vision in one’s mind of what one aims to achieve must look bigger and more significant than the obstacles along the way. The divine image we choose as motivation must be the point of focus, not the material reality on the ground.
To many people this might seem like irresponsibility or even mental illness. And perhaps in some cases, it is. But these same spiritual principles show up in the entrepreneurial mythmaking of America. In his famous Stanford address, Steve Jobs talked about a juncture in his life in which he decided to start over. Although it was “scary at the time,” he agreed in his mind to “trust that it would all work out OK.” And one of the keys to his achievement was to refuse to “be trapped by dogma” or to live “with the results of other people’s thinking.” He told the audience, “don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
To have faith in oneself instead of any other human authority could be seen as a Christian act (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” Philippians 4:13). It is also uniquely American, and populist to its core. The “American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith” exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History includes a placard which introduces the idea of revolution. “In 1776,” it reads, “many Americans made a great leap to a new idea … maybe the people were enough.”
Another placard describes America’s birth but is bafflingly accurate in 2022. “There still seemed to remain two different sorts of free people in the United States: the wealthy elite and the untutored ordinary people.” The blurb asks if at the outset of the nation, these elites would “expect to rule.” It wonders if they would “exert their social and economic power to shape government policies.” And if so, “what was the role of the common people and their common sense?”
It is the “common people” of the United States, often informed by their faith and the conservative values that are so anathema to activist policymakers, who have retained the American spirit and continued to take risks in this era of interminable caution. I am reminded of an elderly male relative — an Air Force veteran who proudly calls himself a hillbilly and wears a belt buckle that says “God Bless America” — and how he stood on his front porch after I visited last summer. As evening fell and I walked to the driveway to get into my car, he squinted at the sunset, hands on his hips. “Drive fast,” he told me. “Take chances.”