On Oct. 27, 1980, my family and I landed in Miami, newcomers from Colombia. On Nov. 12, 1991, I raised my right hand in the New York State Supreme Court in Rochester and became an American. Next week, I mark 46 years in this country and, just over two weeks later, 35 years as a citizen. Between those two dates falls Election Day. I do not intend to waste this significant opportunity.
Communist revolutionaries in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia spent half a century tearing the country apart. They murdered thousands of Colombians and drove more than 7 million from their homes. Their promise was justice and equality. The delivery was kidnapping, massacre, and fear. That is not a theory to me. It is a memory.
America was the other side of that memory. I found a country whose founding makes a claim no revolutionary can: that our rights come from God, not from government. Our Declaration of Independence did not invent human dignity. It recognized it. Because we bear the image of God, we are free, our work is noble, and no government may grant or revoke what God has already given.
This Christian account of the human person is the ground beneath every freedom I have enjoyed in America. It is also why communism and socialism cannot be whitewashed into something safe. Both deny God and make government the creator of liberty, and a government that creates liberty can eliminate it.
My citizenship interview understood this. The examiner asked me directly whether I had ever belonged to the communist party. It was a fair litmus test. A republic must ask whether its prospective citizens intend to keep it or dismantle it. Asked what the Constitutional Convention had produced, Benjamin Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Keeping it is not solely the work of presidents or elites. It is the work of everyday citizens. And the great danger America faces today is not only from those looking to dismantle it. It is also from the citizen who stays home and does not vote.
On Nov. 3, Americans will choose who governs them, from Congress to the statehouse to the school board. Let’s vote in record numbers. Of everything citizenship offered me, the vote was what I wanted most.
Voting is just the start. We can do more. Serve on a board. Sit through the city council meeting. Coach the team. Let’s work together to serve each other before asking the government to do it for us. The self-governing citizen is the one creature communism, socialism, and a total state cannot tolerate, which is exactly why America needs more of them. Let’s vote. And let’s serve each other.
This takes courage. Not the courage of the mob — the political violence of recent years and currently sweeping France shows us what mob courage does. I mean the quiet and confident courage to speak plainly, to disagree in public, to defend the truth when it is unfashionable, and to do all of it without hatred.
Which brings me to friendship. Communism divides the world into hate-filled classes. The Christian faith divides no one — it commands that we love our neighbors. Within four months of our arrival to America, a woman named Jean Groff, American-born, of English descent, an Eastman Kodak employee in Rochester, “adopted” my family, teaching English to my parents and giving their children an education in the arts, music, and literature. She was a complete stranger. She owed us nothing. Whatever I have accomplished in this country rests largely on her love and her friendship. Abraham Lincoln, on the edge of civil war, said it plainly: “We are not enemies, but friends.” Civic friendship, the willingness to argue with a neighbor on Tuesday and help him fix his fence on Saturday, or the willingness to help complete strangers, is not sentimentality. It is the alternative to conflict and revolution. Jean Groff is proof.
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That is why it is such a wonderful privilege to lead a Christian university. At Cornerstone, we are not training spectators. We are forming men and women who know why they are free, who will vote and serve and build, and who will be a Jean Groff to someone who needs one. A nation that wants compassionate, courageous citizens must have institutions that form them. Christian higher education, done well, is one of the few places in America where this is happening.
So, on Oct. 27, I will give thanks. On Nov. 12, I will give thanks again. And in between, on Nov. 3, I will do what I could not wait to do as a new American: vote. Let’s vote. Let’s show up the other 364 days. Let’s be friends with one another, especially when we disagree. America has moved me forward for 46 years. It is my turn, and yours, to move America forward.
Gerson Moreno-Riaño is the president of Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.