America Has a Gratitude Crisis

B ritish author Aldous Huxley was right when he wrote that “most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” Today, as America approaches her 250th anniversary, we see many such displays of ingratitude — from celebrity Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who says, “America, from its foundation, is a white supremacist country,” to right-wing podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who suggests sharia-led Muslim nations and Putin’s Moscow are superior to America. Many recent polls have shown that patriotism, particularly among younger generations, has diminished in recent years.

Patriotism, of course, is more than gratitude, but it should not be overlooked. Additionally, the replacing of gratitude with grievance has diminished the way that Americans feel about America. Consider, for example, Benjamin Franklin’s rebuke to the representatives gathered in Philadelphia who hammered out the document that would govern their new nation. It was 1787, a little more than a decade after the Declaration of Independence was signed and almost six years after the British surrendered at Yorktown. America was a fragile nation, barely held together by the weak Articles of Confederation. There was no guarantee at this meeting that the nation these men founded would become the world’s leading superpower.

Yet Franklin spoke up after several weeks of intense argument, urging the delegates to pause for prayer and thanksgiving:

All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance.

Franklin tied America’s future prosperity to this notion of humble gratitude. Not a traditional Christian by belief, Franklin nevertheless believed in an overruling providence who guides the affairs of men. Franklin attributed the unlikely success of the Revolution to God’s guiding hand. Like many of his contemporaries, he saw the possibility of ordered liberty as a divine blessing from God for which to be thankful.

Abraham Lincoln felt similarly, as the first president to proclaim a national Thanksgiving holiday. In his 1863 proclamation, he wrote: “No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”

Lincoln was not naive about America’s deep problems, writing these words in the midst of a tragic and bloody civil war. Nor should gratitude for America’s blessings blind us to the many challenges in our own time. Still, we should recognize that America is today the most free and prosperous nation in the history of the world. We live under an umbrella of liberty that few people in human history have enjoyed. We are so free that we can air our grievances on multiple public platforms whenever we wish. We can march in the streets against things we oppose. We can cast our votes for ideas we like and against ideas we hate. And we can do all of that while living with luxuries that would make most people in any other era think we were royals.

Mark Tooley, president of The Institute for Religion and Democracy, writes:

The young and the comfortable in today’s America too often assume their security and ease are the human historical norm. They don’t know that war, genocide, tyranny, extreme poverty, and oppression are far more common to the human experience. What America, despite its countless sins, has achieved for its own people and for billions around the world directly and indirectly can only be called blessed and providential.

The loss of gratitude is also likely owed to the erosion of America’s spiritual character, evidenced in the decline in church attendance and other factors. Christianity, particularly, reminds us that “where there is envy and selfish ambition, there is disorder and every evil practice (James 3:16).”

For many, freedom and prosperity have become so familiar as to become passé. When we grow accustomed to seeing only the familiar, problems seem all the more obvious and blessings get overlooked. I often experience this contrast when I talk to the immigrants or children of immigrants who attend the school where I teach. They and their parents are among the most patriotic people I know, and it is not hard to understand why. If you’ve escaped from totalitarianism or communism, if you’ve left behind grinding poverty with no hope of upward mobility, if you’ve ever lived in a place where religious freedom was not a reality, America seems too good to be true.

Gratitude is also natural when you read a little bit of history and recognize just how rare the idea of America is. Jonah Goldberg is right in his assessment:

Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very, very long time. . . . The Founders were creating something new in the world.

Yet today, from our politicians, in much of our history books, and increasingly, on popular podcasts, all we hear about is that the only story worth telling in America is one of injustice, exploitation, and white supremacy. Our children are often taught that America has been mostly a force for bad, not a beacon of hope for those who yearn for freedom. Our politics is now organized around resentment, our parties are collections of increasingly narrow subsets of groups. And online, the way to get rich is to maximize grievance. Gratitude rarely goes viral.

Of course, the antidote to envy isn’t a Pollyannaish ignorance of present injustices. There is no shortage of problems that trouble our communities and our country. Still, belief in the ideals our country was founded on and humble gratitude are better catalysts for change than cheap cynicism, dialed up for maximum digital engagement. Consider our greatest social reformers, such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., or Abraham Lincoln. When they pushed for social change, they appealed to the American people’s highest ideals.

Perhaps we’d do well to once again heed the oldest Founder, Benjamin Franklin, and look up from our arguments and thank God for America’s providential blessings.