New York City (then New Amsterdam) in the middle of the 17th century was home to people speaking sixteen languages and worshipping in a variety of ways. But when a 23-year old Quaker convert named Robert Hodgson started gaining prominence as a preacher, the provincial director general Peter Stuyvesant ordered him publicly tortured and issued a law criminalizing the harboring of Quakers.

A group of citizens rose up against that law, issuing a petition that became known as the Flushing Remonstrance, which stated: “We desire therefore in this case not to judge least we be judged, neither to condemn least we be condemned, but rather let every man stand and fall to his own master.”

That was more than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

The great political philosopher Michael Walzer points out that political theorists long believed that democracy could only exist in countries with ethnically homogenous populations. Countries where people from different backgrounds mixed tended to be ruled by dictators. “Except in the United States,” he writes in What it Means to be an American .

Our nation proved those political theorists wrong by our example, and provided a model for the diverse democracies of today – India and South Africa, to name just two.

The world needs an example of a nation where people from different backgrounds live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty. That is our heritage and our promise and our gift to the world this century.