A New Faith

On Veterans' Day I was inspired to pluck the Civil War novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara off my shelf and began reading it. The book is enthralling and magnificently written. I attempted to read it once when I was 14, but I remember it only being a chore. Now, however, I can't put it down. Each page is so packed with deep brilliance and revelation, yet at the same time is spartan and to the point.
One passage I found fascinating and rather timely comes early in the book when Colonel Chamberlain of the 20th Maine Regiment is lost in thought:

He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God.
...
But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all these former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigners; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.

 Photo: November 12th, 2010, U.S. Marines help their wounded comrade to a helicopter during a Medevac mission in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province. (REUTERS/Peter Andrews)