Hey Greta,

"I gain faith in faith." I like your trajectory of thought. I am always reminded that confessing "Jesus as Lord" is ipso facto a confession about who/what is NOT where we root our lives.
Is America possible? In theological terms the question might be posed (with apologies to Sen. Obama): Do we have the audacity to hope? I think so. Tillich has an excellent reflection on living in the tension between hope and cynicism. I have found it useful, maybe you will too.

"There will be victories as well as defeats in these struggles. There will be progress and regressions. But every victory, every particular progress from injustice to more justice, from suffering to more happiness, from hostility to more peace, from separation to more unity anywhere in mankind [Sic!], is a manifestation of the eternal in time and space. It is, in the language of the men of the Old and the New Testaments, the coming of the Kingdom of God. For the Kingdom of God does not come in one dramatic event sometime in the future. It is coming here and now in every act of love, in every manifestation of truth, in every moment of joy, in every experience of the holy. The hope of the Kingdom of God is not the expectation of a perfect stage at the end of history, in which only a few, in comparison with the innumerable generations of men, would participate, and the unimaginable amount of misery of all past generations would not be compensated... No! The hope of mankind lies in the here and now, whenever the eternal appears in time and history. This hope is justified; for there is always a presence and a beginning of what is seriously hoped for."

I like to think sometimes that even as ideals seem impossible to achieve they also chasten us to not ignore the responsibilty of following Christ, and with hope, to see the breaking in of God's realm.