Is it a core group of beliefs that unites us all?
Or our willingness to share our nation with people whose beliefs are very different from our own?
And what would make it greater?
A range of local residents were asked this week about what is wrong and right with the U.S.A.
Kate Joy, a copywriter at the Lamp Post Group, is one of the optimists.
"I think that America has the potential to be great right now, and I think depending on how we proceed, it's very possible," she said. "Especially with all of the technology, if we invest in learning and education we could become a really great place for people to live and enjoy their lives."
But she worries about the country's divisiveness.
"I would change the way that people turn on each other," she said. "I think that we don't accept all of our fellow citizens enough, we don't embrace our differences and see how that can make us a really great nation. We sometimes pit ourselves against each other instead."
Doug Finke, a former plant manager for the Tennessee Valley Authority, believes the U.S. Constitution sets out some guiding principles, but wonders if we have forgotten some of them.
"There are certain things the Constitution wants the government to get involved in and some things the government is not supposed to be involved in," he said.
"I was talking to a friend this morning about the government getting involved in the baseball scandal. Well, I don't think that is the government's job," Finke said. "The government gets involved in health care, and clearly that's the expectation of a lot of our society these days. But if you go back to the original document, there is nothing in there that says that's the government's business at all."
For Anthony Stanton, it is not the Constitution but rather the Bible, and specifically the Ten Commandments, that has made America great. Stanton, a Seventh-day Adventist minister, said the country was established on Christian beliefs but has lost its way.
"A Christian American people is what established this country and made it great," Stanton said. "America is starting to lose its greatness very rapidly, we are plummeting now to a very low level in American history."
Stanton said he believed Christianity gave Americans a "noble and righteous" character.
Legal assistant Andrea Geddes argued that it was not one set of beliefs, but our willingness to embrace a variety of beliefs, that makes America great.
"I think now the country is moving toward more diversity, accepting different types of lifestyles," Geddes said.
She's not as sold on America in the past.
"During the slave trade it wasn't great," she said. "During the '60s with the violence and the protests, that wasn't a good time for the country."
Lane Harrigan said she believes America is not as great today as it once was, but neither are a lot of other countries.
"I think every country has just become too needy," she said. "Every country now wants to be the best at everything, and no one can be that. We're all very greedy. I think that has been the downfall of a lot of things, it's just pure greed."
She's worried that the country has become "lopsided," with too many people at the top and bottom and not many in the middle.
"We're losing our middle class, or at least the voice of our middle class," she said. "More so 50 years ago than now, it felt like the common man had just as good a chance or just as much access to anything."
In Harrigan's view, maybe we shouldn't even worry at all about whether America is great. In her ideal world, "people would not see color," she said. "They would not see races, would not see any reason to treat their fellow man any different regardless of their national heritage or religious beliefs. We would all be human beings."
Contact staff writer Steve Johnson at 423-757-6673, sjohnson@timesfreepress.com, on Twitter @stevejohnsonTFP, or on Facebook, www.facebook.com/noogahealth.