I had a conversation this week that reset my brain over the past few days, because of how clearly it illustrated something I have been trying to articulate about the gap between what America says it is and what it actually is. Also, perspective.
The woman I was talking to is Armenian, Christian, a mother, an immigrant. She is warm and genuine, and she came to this country believing something about it, the way a lot of people do when they arrive here from somewhere harder. She was visibly confused when I told her that our family has been considering and planning a move to Mexico. Not offended or angry, just genuinely puzzled in a way that made clear the thought was wild to her. And when the conversation turned to my feelings about religion being taught in public schools, I could see something shift in her face, a kind of quiet incomprehension, like I had said something that didn't compute inside the framework she was working from.
I don't say any of this to criticize her. I say it because that conversation is a window into something that I think is worth examining honestly, which is how thoroughly and how effectively the mythology of America has been sold, not just to the people born here, but to the people who crossed oceans and borders to get here, and how much that mythology asks of people in terms of belief, and how little it delivers in return.
The American Dream is one of the most successful pieces of marketing in the history of the world. The story goes like this: if you work hard enough, play by the rules, believe in the right things, you can make a life here. You can be safe. Your children can have more than you had. The country is free, it is fair, and it is exceptional in ways that make every other option a downgrade. This story has been exported globally for more than a century, through Hollywood, through foreign policy, through the experience of immigrants who arrived during specific windows of time when the economy was expanding, and the doors were open, and the story happened to be more true than it usually is. It became lodged in the consciousness of people around the world as a kind of fixed star, and for many of them it still is.
The reality is more complicated. The United States has the highest rate of child poverty among wealthy nations. It is the only developed country without universal healthcare. It has more people incarcerated than any country on earth, in both absolute numbers and per capita. It has worse maternal mortality outcomes than most of its peer nations, with the sharpest disparities falling on Black and Latina women. It has a public education system whose quality is almost entirely determined by the zip code a child is born into. It has a political system that has, over the past several years, openly demonstrated its capacity to be reshaped by a small number of extremely wealthy people at the expense of everyone else, and to do so while a significant portion of the population defends that reshaping as freedom.
None of that means the country is without value or without people doing extraordinary work inside it. It means the gap between the story and the reality is wide, and that gap costs people something real, whether they see it or not.
The thing about the American Dream mythology is that it doesn't just make people feel good about where they are. It makes them feel suspicious of anyone who questions it. To leave by choice, when you have a choice, reads as ingratitude. To say out loud that you don't want your child educated inside a framework that blurs the line between public school and Sunday school reads as an attack on something sacred. The mythology has been internalized so deeply that questioning it feels like a personal affront rather than a political observation.
This is not accidental. A population that believes deeply in the exceptional goodness of its country is much easier to manage than one that evaluates it critically. The Dream is not just a comfort. It is a control mechanism. And the people who benefit most from the Dream remaining unexamined are not the immigrants who crossed borders to find it. They are the people who have always owned the most of whatever the Dream is supposed to produce.
I thought about this when I read about Whitney Lynn, a 40-year-old Florida evangelist who was removed from an Alaska Airlines flight this week after she stood up during a gate delay and preached to the passengers around her, people who had not asked to hear a sermon, people who could not leave, people who were, by her own description, a captive audience. She had written those words herself under a video of a previous airborne sermon: "I just love a captive audience." She compared what she was doing to offering a drowning person a life raft, which sounds generous until you notice that she was the one who decided everyone around her was drowning, without asking, without evidence, and without the possibility of anyone disagreeing.
When staff removed her from the plane, she accused them of "spiritual warfare." She said, "demons don't like the name of Jesus." She asked one of the staff members escorting her whether he was from Puerto Rico because she couldn't understand him. Alaska Airlines banned her from their flights. She said she intends to keep preaching on planes and plans to contact an attorney.
I am not interested in mocking this woman's faith. I actually have some very positive opinions about religion, as it is a positive force in the lives of many people, and I also have many friends and family members who are religious that I coexist with in life easily and respectfully. What I am interested in is the specific logic she is operating from, which is that her conviction entitles her to impose on others, that anyone who objects to that imposition is spiritually compromised rather than simply a person who wanted to sit quietly on an airplane, and that being asked to stop is persecution rather than consequence. That logic is not unique to her. It is the same logic that drives the effort to bring religious instruction into public schools, to write one religion's definition of marriage into federal law, to build a governing framework, as Project 2025 explicitly does, around the premise that American rights are God-given rather than constitutionally guaranteed and that the God in question is a specific one.
The separation of church and state is not an attack on Christianity. It is a protection for everyone, including Christians, from the imposition of any single religious framework on public life. When I say I don't want my son learning about religion in public school, I am not saying religion has no value. I am saying that a public institution funded by everyone's taxes is not the place for it, and that the line between education and indoctrination matters, particularly when the indoctrination is being actively pushed by people with political power and a documented agenda.
My Armenian friend looked at me like I was the unusual one in that conversation. And from inside the mythology, I understand why. She came here believing something. The country she arrived in told her that story, and for a time it was true enough to sustain the belief. The fact that I am making different calculations now, that I am looking at what this country is actually doing and deciding that another place might offer my family more of what matters, that doesn't fit inside the story she was sold.
But the story was always a sale. The question is just whether you keep buying it.
