Christianity & July 4 Controversy

There’s always controversy about Christianity’s attitude to July 4. Some liberals and neo-anabaptists have long warned against enthusiastic – if any – celebration. The latter claim Christians should be indifferent to nation states; the former see America as too wicked for honor. Conservative Christians are often accused of idolatrous excessive celebration. Allegations of “Christian nationalism” are common in recent years.

Periodically there’s a claim from a July 4 critic that America is, in biblical terminology, Babylon, not Israel. They mean that American Christians are a minority in a pagan land and should shun its rites, instead focusing on their own called-out community. In this warning, there’s the implied assumption that July 4 celebrants think America is a sort of Israel, or uniquely blessed by God.

Many of America’s early settlers did see biblical Israel as a metaphor for America, but this understanding was the opposite of triumphalist cheerleading. The ancient Hebrews faced constant divine judgment for their failure to heed God’s call. Puritan preachers in this vein understood America, with all nations, to have a covenant with God, which entailed punishment, mercy, and redemption. The nation should seek justice, peace, goodness, holiness and love, just as biblical Israel was called to do.

This Puritan understanding morphed into the larger American self-understanding so that nearly all Americans unconsciously subscribe to some version of it. Leftists who imagine that America is a charnel house of racism, heterosexism and oppression are among the most puritanical, comparing America to some imagined perfection that has never existed post-Eden. They want a purified holy country according to their standards. But unlike the Puritans, they do not appeal to divine mercy or expect redemption. They offer only condemnation and judgement. Also, unlike the Puritans, they don’t include themselves under judgement. Instead, they see themselves as the judges, in place of The Judge.

Rightly understood, America should aspire to be like biblical Israel at least in its pursuit of justice, goodness and offering a lamp of righteousness to the world. Every nation and every human community have this calling, of course. But America uniquely is a created nation, with a founding document, solemnized on July 4, creating a new order with special claims. IRD co-founder Michael Novak called America the signature event of modernity. As Thomas Jefferson, echoing Puritan martyr Richard Rumbold, wrote in his last letter, honoring the 50^th anniversary of American Independence, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.” All persons are born to be free and self-governing. The American Revolution, in asserting human equality with liberty, is the most important political event for contemporary humanity. It is the chief of all revolutions, because unlike other major revolutions, it seeks a just order aligned with human nature.

The often-angry advocates for greater equality and justice are themselves only the ungrateful and unknowing descendants and heirs of the July 4 promise. They assume that their claims to righteousness fell upon them directly from the gods above. Neo-anabaptists at least, in theory, reject or minimize all nation states as Babylon and inconsequential for Christians, since only the church has permanence. Enraged justice advocates who want a holy nation of complete justice, on their terms, essentially offer a new totalizing religion, whose demands for societal equilibrium without atonement can never be met.

Both neo-anabaptists and contemporary progressives are aligned in ideological anti-Americanism that is especially apparent on July 4 and other patriotic holidays. America is unique in having a hostile global ideology aimed specifically against it. There really is no anti-Franceism, or anti-Brazilism, or even anti-Russiaism. Those nations are organic realities. They have foes and critics, but they are not seen as revolutionary projects with global force, as is America with its July 4 claims.

Anti-Americanism as a global ideology attracts a wide and diverse constituency: Islamists, Marxists and leftists, monarchists, Russophiles, Sinophiles, theocrats and arch-traditionalists of all sorts, celebrants of indigenous cultures, extreme environmentalists, and partisans of identity politics who divide the world between victims and oppressors. America, in its aspiration of equality and opportunity for all, but with liberty and not coercion, threatens zealots from far left to far right, from extreme secularists to religious fanatics. Anti-Americanism sees America as too free, or too oppressive, too religious, or too secular, too ambitious, or too mundane. These attitudes inform various hostilities emerging around July 4.

Christians of course should be averse to dogmatic ideologies of all sorts. For Christians, all nations are God’s gift, where they have been appointed to serve, to love, to evangelize, and to pray. In this sense, every nation is both Babylon and Israel, a place where Christians are exiles, and where they are called to urge their society towards God’s highest purposes for uplifting all humanity.

America’s July 4 claims are informed by a particular biblical assumption about the nature and destiny of humanity, that each person is endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These claims are compelling, shocking, revolutionary, never to be fully attained but always to be sought. For this reason, among others, Christians can honor July 4 with special enthusiasm. America’s Independence Day is not on the liturgical calendar. But it does importantly remind us that God is active in the affairs of humanity and is sovereign over all nations, including America, not least of all.