Anniversaries are liminal spaces, at the threshold between memory and possibility. But anniversaries can only serve our future if marked by honest memory. Without honesty, celebration becomes shallow, even dangerous. When we refuse to name the sins of our past, we leave room for them to be repeated.
As the United States marks 250 years of independence, I have been encouraged by Faith250, an interfaith movement inviting communities to gather around the founding documents of our nation to ask deeper questions about who we are and who we want to become. They read the Declaration of Independence, Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” “America the Beautiful,” and Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
July 4th, 1852, Douglass’ speech in Rochester, New York, cut through patriotic performance when he announced, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Patriotism without repentance is not love of country, but denial. On this anniversary, we must remember that slavery was not abolished until 1865 with the 13th Amendment. Even then, some states resisted abolition for decades, and Black Americans continued to live under the terror of Jim Crow, where violence, lynching and legal oppression enforced White supremacy with devastating consistency. The legacy of slavery shaped the inequities we still inhabit.
Related reading: “PC(USA) labels White Christian nationalism ‘Theological Error'” by John Bolt, Outlook reporting
Before each Faith250 discussion, participants agree to a covenant: “We commit to creating an environment where the community can discuss subjects that reflect diverse and potentially strongly held opinions.”
We do not stay one church body because we all think alike. We stay because we have promised to discern together what faithfulness requires.
That radical covenant recognizes that it is not agreement that makes a union, but commitment.
That same truth will be on display this summer at the 227th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), where our own union as Presbyterians will be tested and practiced. Commissioners will debate overtures, approve studies, create task forces and issue public statements on matters of faith and justice. Committee rooms and plenary sessions will be full of diverse and strongly held opinions. Anyone who has spent time at General Assembly knows it is not a performance of perfect harmony.
Read the Outlook’s full coverage of GA227
We do not stay one church body because we all think alike. We stay because we have promised to discern together what faithfulness requires.
Nowadays, wherever diverse people gather and ideas are openly shared, I find hope.
This is the hope upon which America’s democracy was founded. Sociologist Eboo Patel calls it America’s genius: civic spaces where people from diverse identities and divergent ideologies come together around common aims and form cooperative relationships.
We take this genius for granted, but Patel reminds us that throughout much of human history, particular identity groups built institutions for themselves, and those institutions often deepened hostility rather than fostering cooperation.
Civil society is different in that it creates institutions that bring us together across differences for shared purposes. Many of those institutions in the United States were founded by faith communities. Presbyterians built colleges and hospitals that served all people, not just Presbyterians, not just Christians. The civic imagination is larger than tribal belonging.
The current state of our union feels fragile because we have forgotten that inheritance. We are increasingly locked within identity groups, suspicious of those outside them, mistaking ideological purity for moral courage. We have confused union with uniformity.
But union has never required sameness. It requires shared responsibility.
Frederick Douglass, speaking at the 76th anniversary of American independence, found hope in the nation’s youth. “Seventy-six years,” he said, “though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation … nations number their years by thousands.”
At 250, America would still seem young to Douglass, a nation still capable of change. Our hearts, he wrote, “may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young,” hoping that “high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny.”
That hope remains our work. The state of our union depends not on whether we agree on everything, but on whether we belong to one another enough to keep building a future together. Our anniversary invites us to pause, to look honestly at where we have been, and to look courageously at where we hope to go.
