I went through my archives hoping to find that I’d already written something fascinating about Independence Day, as I’ve been told I ought to call it–the 4th of July being too flip an appellation, apparently. But for whatever reason, in spite of writing reams and reams about practically every other holiday, all I’ve ever done is gotten on and said ‘hello,’ with a side of ‘today we’re driving through such and such a town.’ July seems to be the month that we are always on vacation. And so that must account for it.
But this year we aren’t on vacation Yet, and so the day is going to be marked the way all other Americans mark it–by grilling something and sitting around eating a lot of rich food in the presence of red, white, and blue table decorations. (My question is, is it ok to use the ‘Oxford’ comma on this day? Is it unpatriotic?)
So, I’m going to be the usual nay sayer and quietly whisper that Independence Day is not strictly to my taste. BUT, with this probably unpopular admission, you must not think that I do not love America, nor that I am ungrateful, nor that I am therefore totally evil (I am evil for other reasons, not because I don’t really get the whole America thing).
Three threads knot themselves together to make me blithely ambivalent about the American Experiment. The first, of course, is the very foundational core of what was once American Identity, as far as I can tell as a pseudo outsider. That’s all the discussion about Rights and Independence. Neither of these are very Christian concepts. Independence, certainly, is a theologically limited good. It is certainly reasonable to be able to do things for yourself in a human way, but we are bound to carry that thought farther than we ought and think we should be able to be independent from God, and even from each other–a specious, at best, endeavor. Declaring Independence from Britain may have been a fine thing to do, but when we carry on, as we inevitably do, and declare independence from God, that’s less useful.
So also Rights. I’m pretty happy about the Bill of Rights, especially in their limiting quality and in the way the founders conceived of the interplay between government and the ordinary life of the citizen. The actual Bill of Rights is fascinating and brilliant and most far seeing about human nature. The trouble is, the human person doesn’t stop where he should. Just like with Independence, once you use the word Rights you invite the ordinary bumpkin to consider that maybe he really does Deserve, just by being alive, certain ways of being. This is fine in the temporal civic sense, but we insist on carrying our ‘rights’ into the heavens every time. The person who believes he has the Right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, will not take very many minutes before imagining that he has a right for God to ‘love’ him and give him whatever he wants.
As a Christian on Independence Day, I’m always trying to virtue signal to God that I’m on his side, not America’s. I cheerfully wave my flag with a wary eye towards the heavens.
The second ambivalence for me is aesthetic. I used to come ‘home’ to America from Africa and be told that ‘America is the Greatest Country on Earth.’ ‘Mmmhhhmmm,’ I would nod, smiling my tight lipped smile. Internally I would enumerate the thousands of mini-malls I had driven past on the way back from the airport and keep my own counsel. ‘If America was really as wonderful as all that, you wouldn’t have built such ghastly buildings,’ thought I. And now, if you say that to me, I will smile even more broadly to myself and whisper ‘Donald J. Trump.’
Don’t get mad at me. I’m a political conservative. I dutifully shop in all the mini-malls here in town. And I pray for my president. But any kind of human greatness is not something I’m very comfortable trumpeting, cough, everywhere.
Which leads to my third ambivalent thread. My mother sent me this article awhile ago and I keep reading it over and over. It is ‘zactly right. Place is such a difficult and personal concept. Truly, several times a season, even after more than twenty years of living here, I have the thick brick of homesickness hit me out of the blue. It creeps up behind me on its cement laden feet and whacks me when I’m least suspecting it.
To combat the homesickness, I drive around town trying to make the landscape belong to me. It’s so familiar, now, that it should be no problem to grasp on to some sense of its being property to my own interior landscape. But the familiarity hasn’t yet done its work. It’s not mine. It probably won’t ever be.
Which is fine, because not only am I not from here, I’m not going to live here forever. There is a far distant country waiting for me that is perfectly recognizable, where it won’t be about my Rights and my Independence, but about a citizenship bought in blood, paid for by the One to whom I owe everything, who owed me nothing, but gave me his very life. While I wait to go there, I am grateful to be here, for the freedom bought in human blood, for the cheerful generosity of the American Spirit, for the wide open space to think and believe whatever my conscience allows.
#CelebratingBrexitfor200years!
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