When I arrived in Rambouillet, France, my host family was surprised to see me. Not that I was unexpected: my family (the G — s) had already prepared dinner and given me a large, wood-paneled bedroom with two windows overlooking the garden. Nor was my family unfamiliar with foreign students; I was perhaps the fourth or fifth international language-learner they had billeted in recent memory. After three Chinese and two Italians, though, I was their first American, and what surprised them most about my arrival was my physique.

Americans are fat, they told me over dinner that first night. “At least, that’s the image the French have of them.” My family emphasized a couple of times that this was an image, just an image, and one that was clearly shaken by my 165 pounds. Three weeks later, though, I learned that Mme G had been actively worried about having enough to eat when I arrived. Thanks to American film and reality TV, my host family had the impression that in the Land of McDonald’s, the celebrities may be abnormally beautiful, but the Everyman is obese. And it wasn’t just this family: I heard the sentiment over and over during my four weeks in France.

I discovered later, too, that M and Mme G had actually cancelled their vacation plans for the month of August just in order to host an American student. What would he be like? “You’d think, coming from America, he’d have green ears, be fat, look strange,” quipped Mme G on the third weekend in — “but voila! He’s normal!”

One of my own greatest surprises in Europe was learning how large a shadow America casts across the Atlantic. Most Americans can live a long while without thinking awfully much about France, or any other European country, for that matter. But the French watch American TV. They listen to American music. American films play in their cinemas, English mouth movements mismatched to French voices. The French eat at McDonald’s. America isn’t everywhere in the country, but the USA is much more present to France than Europe is present to America.

Present like a ghost, though, not a heavyweight boxer — the vague, amorphous idea of Americanism rather than strong, solidly accurate conceptions. This leads to inaccuracies. For one, clearly, not all Americans are obese, and McDonald’s is not our sole source of nutrition. Additionally, one day, Mme G asked for a geography lesson: “In the United States, there are sixty states, right?” I corrected her, and she continued: “And in each state there is a little President? What is he called?”

“The mayor?” offered a nearby friend.

But sometimes the stereotypes were uncomfortable rather than ridiculous. I often felt like Gulliver explaining England to the Brobdingnagians: yes, many American families eat in front of the TV rather than together; yes, marriage is not a virtue (“Is divorce your national sport, like it is here?” one Frenchwoman asked me); yes, Americans tend to want their food fast, convenient, and unhealthy rather than quality and relational; yes, Americans are easily jingoistic and perhaps even arrogant when dealing with other nations; yes, obesity is a serious problem. Perhaps our greatest national disease is crass materialism: the American spirit huffs along in a cloud of steam — bigger, better, bigger, better, bigger, better — railroading over the invisible restraints that might stand in the way of progress. In France, however, I lived with a family who handmade each meal and spent multiple hours at the dinner table — because they recognized that conversation, relation, nutrition, and even culinary beauty are important. Next to this, the American Dream (new house, new job, new life, ASAP!) seems spiritually bankrupt.

More uneasiness bubbled up during my trip, but from an unexpected angle. In France, as a long-lasting gift from the Revolution of 1789, religion and government are completely separated. All marriages are civil; religious ceremonies, if performed, are simply ceremonies. Witnesses in court swear on their honor rather than on the Bible. I managed to have some long conversations with a twenty-something Frenchman named Adrian, and when we were on politics I mentioned that America is not a Christian country, at least not officially. “But your President swears on the Bible,” he said, “so in the end — ”

I’ve always taken America’s civil religion (swearing on Bibles, “In God We Trust” on currency) as a benign, common-sense expression of spiritual awareness that happens to more or less approximate the religious position I myself hold. But next to France’s institutional secularism, I have realized how much of a radical statement this is: as Adrian realized, it’s not merely feel-good religiosity but rather a substantive declaration of who we are and what we hope to do as a country.

And yet when I look at America, especially in light of its international reputation, I’m no longer certain the motto fits. Are we trusting in God’s strength to continue legalizing abortion? To continue our championship divorce tournaments? To pursue the newest and best at the expense of relationship and community? What kind of God do we think we serve?

What kind of God does the world think we serve?

These are my doubts of the American legacy.

When he returned to England after his voyage fantastique, Lemuel Gulliver initially refused to have any contact with humans, even his wife and children, so disgusted was he by English society compared to the other lands and races he’d visited. (Only after five years did he allow his wife to eat dinner with him — “at the farthest End of a long Table.”) I didn’t expect it when I arrived, but I had a similar, though much lesser, reaction throughout my stay in France. The evils that I take for granted in my country become too real to ignore when stamped with divine backing and sent forth to set an example for the nations. Today, in our attitudes and actions, America does have much to be ashamed of.

For the third weekend of August, my host family took me to Normandy. We visited, on Saturday, the Mémorial de Caen, the Normandy American Cemetery, and Omaha Beach. The day was draining. This was mostly because of the Caen Mémorial, a large museum with extensive wings on the history of WWII and the Cold War. We started in WWII, detoured to a special exhibit about the Red Cross working in war and terror zones around the world, then finished up with the USSR vs USA. My soul was prostrate before we left WWII.

The museum focused heavily on the atrocities of the war, especially the horrors of Nazi Germany. Genocide and mass violence, propaganda and cowardice, bombings and dead civilians. The depth of the human capacity for depravity is overwhelming, and at first it was comforting to know that America led the fight against this evil. But then I saw the Allies bomb Dresden, Germany, turning a populated civilian center into a shower of sparks, and I read about how they bombed Caen itself, during lunchtime, destroying the city when they meant to destroy a nearby bridge in support of D-Day. (Thankfully, there was no exhibit on the A-bomb.) Righteous motivations aside, the good guys were responsible for the pain and suffering of multitudes.

And after that realization collided with my skull, it was difficult to tell which way was up. There was no longer a saintly side and a demonic side. There were just sides. America was fighting a war against evil while inflicting terror herself. After the WWII exhibit, I saw Senator McCarthy gesturing like Hitler as he spoke to Congress, and I saw footage of 9/11 and the Rwandan genocide. There’s no end, is there? The darkness, the horror. America didn’t defeat it. America itself was and is tainted by it.

This is the fast track to despair, which is where most of the world went after WWI. By WWII they were used to it. Not me, though, and it took a good deal of wrestling to come to terms with the apparent futility of it all. What did the war accomplish? In the grand scheme of things, not much. It didn’t eradicate pride and jealousy, bring an end to all war, or excise human depravity and folly. The roots of evil run far below the trenches, and the war, any war, was never intended to destroy them. Spiritual enemies like those require a spiritual conqueror: we await the Second Coming. All the war did (and could do) was to take down a very specific, very dark form of evil at a specific place and time — imperfectly, with unforeseen casualties, but in the long run successfully. On the human scale, that’s all we can really hope for. It was worth the sacrifice then, and in the end the success is worth celebrating now.

Mme G didn’t visit the Mémorial de Caen with her husband and I. She herself is from Normandy, and her parents, and her grandparents, who lived through the Nazi occupation and the American liberation. Mme G is three generations removed from these events, but as we talked over lunch she seemed to choke up. “The Americans may not think about the French,” she said, “but the French know the Americans. What they did here is branded into our memory.” For Mme G, five generations, from her grandparents to her grandchildren, owe their liberty to what the Americans did on June 6, 1944.

This is such a better legacy than McDonald’s. This is why I’m proud of my country: the ideals of freedom and sacrifice, of liberty and justice for all, that have motivated us in our greatest hours. We have never been perfect, and we’re certainly not perfect now, but we have dedicated ourselves to the pursuit of these ideals, and our efforts after them have done damage, true, but also a heck of a lot of good. This is what I’m proud of. This is the American legacy I stand behind.

As Evelyn Waugh writes, “There is no more agreeable position than that of dissident from a stable society. Theirs are all the solid advantages of other people’s creation and preservation, and all the fun of detecting hypocrisies and inconsistencies.” It’s important to call out hypocrisies and inconsistencies. We need to recognize where we as a country fall short of the ideals we proclaim. But this should never cause us to despise our ideals, or to sneer at the people who gave them to us. Despite the checkers in our past, there is much to be proud of: a history of generosity, courage, and justice. Our failures then and now cannot and should not erase this.

And because America is my country, I want to bring the rest of our legacy up to speed. Where we have fallen short, we can pick ourselves up. Where we have bent, we can straighten. Where we have dimmed, we can illumine, but only if we work hard and pray hard to see it happen. I am praying — and I will be working — to see America become truly one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all: not just in word but in deed, not just on paper but in the eyes of the whole world.