If I had to pick one Bible verse that students of American history should know, it is Acts 16:9: ‘And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia and help us.’ In the middle of his second missionary journey, the apostle Paul had a dream or a hallucination in which a Macedonian stranger pleaded for his preaching. Paul dropped what he was doing in Asia Minor and ‘immediately’ sailed across the Aegean.

Theologians refer to this as the ‘Macedonian call.’ For example, in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ Martin Luther King, Jr., writes: ‘Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.’

For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses — an all-purpose ingredient we’ll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.