How To Find Prosperity

Monday, February 16, 2026

If you were paying any attention to things geopolitical over the weekend then you know SecState Rubio delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday that may prove as pivotal in setting the world’s course for the next few decades as Winston Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” address at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri once did.  (For the uninformed that is the speech in which Churchill coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” and set the course for the Cold War.)  The speech has won nearly universal acclaim not just from punditry but from those in attendance who gave it a standing ovation.

Here is a video of the speech itself.  Coverage and commentary from PJ Media, the NYPost, and most insightfully from friend of the show, Eli Lake in The Free Press.  Of course, legacy media got squat.

The speech stood in sharp contrast to what the so-called “higher adjudicatories” of my church had to say over the weekend.  In my church what congregations think and what the higher governmental structures of that church think can often radically diverge.  So while Rubio was giving his masterwork of a speech, some of those structures in my church released a statement condemning the Trump administration and particularly the functioning of I.C.E., reminding me that I had a Christian obligation to “welcome the stranger.”  (See Leviticus 19:34)

In particular their statement contrasted with this passage from Rubio’s speech, as quoted by Lake:

To this end, he declared that the new American-European alliance should focus on controlling national borders. “Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia,” he said. “It is not hate. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.”

The idea of welcoming people into this country is to share our prosperity.  But if we welcome thieves and violence doers, they rob not just us, but those we welcome, of that prosperity.  Open border advocates think that simply by entering this country people achieve prosperity, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Prosperity in this country is earned, not granted merely by presence.

The United States does welcome strangers, but not with open borders – there is a process.  Starting a business in California is a bureaucratic nightmare involving multiple agencies, countless forms and quite a bit of money forked over to those various agencies.  Yet the same people that built such a structure to guard the entrance to the prosperity creation machine that is business think no such structure should exist when it comes to entering the country.  How precisely is this supposed to work?  If we are to share our prosperity, should not starting a business be simple and easy?  After all the most prosperous among us are in fact business owners.

Rubio reminds us that the purpose of our immigration structures is not to be unwelcoming, but to insure that we can provide prosperity for those that seek it and are willing to work for it.  Rubio speaks of ” the fabric of our societies.”  What is more essential to the fabric of American culture than hard work – earning prosperity?  To simply have prosperity by virtue of presence is not American in any way – it’s what the Soviet Union promised but was never able to deliver.  And most interestingly there were few nations in world history harder to enter than the Soviet Union – people crossing that border without the proper process were unceremoniously shot.  When I visited that country I had to load my own luggage on the Moscow bound airplane at gunpoint.  There was no welcome and I had suffered the entire process, just for a two week visit.

SecState Rubio emphasized, several times, in his speech that America was willing to walk this path alone, but that it hoped and prayed that our European partners and progenitors would join us.  His speech also reminded us and Europe of our joint Christian heritage.  We are at our best when our governance is bolstered with faith in Christ.  Yet what I experienced with my church was the opposite; it was a church condemning government when all government is trying to do is preserve and provide prosperity not just for Americans, but for those that come to America genuinely seeking it.

Somebody is missing the boat in this discussion.