America is Still the Hope of the World.

I’m a bit behind the curve in covering Pope Francis’ trip to Korea. But it is a significant event.

I spent a week with Youth With a Mission in Hawaii a few years ago. While I was there, I met many Korean Christians who were training to go into missions all over Asia. One of them told me that Korea is the number two missionary-sending nation in the world. The first is the United States. These were Protestants, but the Catholic Church is also growing in Korea.

All this underscores the savage persecution of Christians in North Korea, as well as the history of Christian martyrdom in Korea as a whole.

South Korea would not exist without America. It would have been absorbed into Communism, and the people who today have built a country that can compete both economically and in missionary-sending on a world scale would be enslaved, instead.

The freedom of South Korea was purchased with American blood and treasure.

South Korea is an example of what America has done all over the world in protecting and building other nations into free societies. The fact that this has been such a massive fail in Iraq raises questions that we need to consider with an honesty that I do not think we have the courage to entertain.

America, which once freed whole civilizations from tyranny, is crippling and wounding herself with political correctness, corporatism, moral decay, partisan bickering and the petty nihilism of the pampered. I do not see any indication that we are willing to accept the astringent of honest self-appraisal.

In fact, we throw people overboard whenever they raise questions that poke holes in the politically-correct magic-think we use to shield ourselves from the realities of life.

Martin Luther King, Jr said, “A lie can not live.” He was right.

But lies that comfort people in their fears, the self-lies we use to shield ourselves from the stark realities of life, only die after prolonged, vicious and utterly wasteful battles to defend those lies from the truth. America has always been able to face truths before, however reluctantly.

We turned high-powered water hoses and unleashed dogs on the truth in the battles over segregation, but we allowed the truth to be said and in the end, the truth prevailed. We fought a whole civil war over the truth of the humanity of all people, and even in that terrible event, the truth prevailed. Will we be able to face the many truths we are denying now?

I do not know.

I only know that if we do not, we will destroy ourselves for the lies.

Pope Francis is visiting South Korea, a people and a country that America saved and then empowered to become a great free nation. We have much to be proud of when we call ourselves Americans.

America is still the hope of the world. I saw that in the faces of Iraqis who were hoping and praying that the Americans would come to save them from ISIS.

No one can destroy America but America itself. The question for all of us is are we so in love with the comforting lies we force everyone to parrot that we will, in fact, destroy ourselves? Are we willing to die for the lies we tell ourselves to keep from facing the truths we don’t want to know?