Fourth of July

Independence Day is Coming. Too Bad I'm a Lousy American.

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:12:47 -0700

Like most people, I ended up an American citizen by default. I’ve had moments of soaring patriotism, created mostly by emotional tableaus of distant wars and family ancestry, but for the most part I’m a lousy patriot. Saturated by opportunity and spoiled by freedom, I approach the Fourth of July as a selfish pragmatist: Can I have three hot dogs and still look good in my swimsuit? Do I have enough blueberries to make a tri-colored fruit salad?

For people who are intensely nationalistic, my indifference to this country’s freedoms must be maddening. If I were to compare patriotic devotion to, let’s say, Christianity, I would be the frustrating pew-sitter who takes advantage of VBS and church potlucks but cares little about either theology or personal sacrifice. I would be part of the 80% of church attenders who watch the 20% do all the heavy lifting. The comparison between politics and religion isn’t really a stretch. What two topics are most apt to raise blood pressure among dinner guests or create lively classroom debates? For some people, being an American is their greatest asset, their identifying marker, their point of highest allegiance. So when I only see Independence Day as reason to host a family BBQ instead of blood shed for freedom, my patriotic brothers and sisters get a little crazy.

Some background might give context. I spent my adolescence in two alternating places: Texas (where good ‘ol boys fly their flags and join ROTC ) and the Midwest (where the American ethos of guns and God still rules). My deeper roots extend to New York City, where my German grandmother and her tight-knit Pentecostal community enjoyed their religious freedoms in the 1930s and 40s just as Hitler threatened the globe with the Führer Principle. Furthermore, my father-in-law is one of a shrinking number of veterans who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. With this foundation, I should get a serious lump in my throat when I think about my country’s freedoms, but on most days it doesn’t happen. How come?

My first defense might be a serious contender. Since my first allegiance will always be to Jesus Christ rather than nationalism, I’m uneasy about the alliance between evangelicalism and red state politics. The result is that I often under-emphasize my American-ness without even realizing it. Some of my Christian brothers and sisters have made it difficult to separate their faith in Christ from their faith in Republicans, and I’ve reacted by pulling back unnaturally far. I think I subconsciously want to create some distance between their ideology and mine.

The second reason might be more typical of most Americans: I’ve marinated in my freedoms for so long, I simply forget its value. (It’s the same reason why the insured can’t figure out why everyone’s worried about health care, or why kids with great fathers ignore them sometimes.) Abundance breeds indifference.

Both reasons make me think. As the weekend approaches, I’m feeling that I deserve some appropriate scolding. While my allegiance to Jesus Christ will always be my first priority, I would do well to realize just how blessed I am to live in this beautiful, wild, extraordinary, free, and diverse nation. As I’ve shaken my head this year at the stupidity of politics, its scandals, its alliances, and its knuckleheads (as if I could run Congress), I have also forgotten what it feels like to get teary during our National Anthem or feel deep gratitude for my American brothers and sisters serving overseas. I’m not proud of taking this country for granted.

Everyone says that traveling overseas will cure you of such tunnel vision. I’m not so sure. Enough Americans flit here and there to foreign soil and return having not been changed at all. It requires some deliberate meditation, some intentional respect, some hard thinking about where we live and what it means. Proper, reverential gratitude for my country is not only appropriate but God-honoring. Being an American doesn’t make me superior to my brothers and sisters around the world, but it does make me thankful.

Blueberries and swimsuits will still be on my mind Monday, but this year I hope it’s a little bit more.

Founding Fathers' Flaws and God’s Grace to All of Us

MarkM — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:20:53 -0700

He served two terms as President. Many historians consider him the greatest of American leaders. A tall, white, landowner from Virginia. Impeccable credentials, but a couple of serious issues. Liaisons with “other women.” Well, we are kind of used to that by now. A supporter of slavery. Hmmm, that’s a real problem. An owner of slaves? This is . . . troubling. Created his own version of the Bible by cutting out all the miracles, leaving the moral lessons to be read among the gaping holes in the pages. That could be a problem. Founded the University of Virginia and insisted that a chapel would not be allowed on the campus. Unlike the other universities in the United States, his would be the first to have a library as the center, instead of a chapel. Knowledge instead of God. Interesting. A deist, slave-owning landowner from Virginia. Yes, this is Thomas Jefferson and one of our “founding fathers.”

The red, white, and blue banners are up on the brick front of the local church. Impassioned sermons are being honed and practiced, as the fourth of July approaches like a lit fuse on a Chinese firework. Typically, we hear about our founding fathers perfection, similar, perhaps, to the stories of starry-eyed grandparents. But we know that all the oratory isn’t true. Sure, some of them were, by today’s standards, committed and godly men. But not all were. The fact that they were all “fathers” (no mothers allowed at that point), that they were all white (an additional requirement), and relatively wealthy landowners (also required) does not help define their perfection, but highlights the beautiful reality of a new and struggling nation, emerging slowly like a diamond from a very rough and grey stone.

Here is my point: let’s change the approach in church this Sunday. Instead of trying to push the founding fathers into the “they were all just like us” mold, let’s celebrate God’s grace to our entire nation. Let’s rejoice in the fact that he can use all of us, together, to be a unique place on the face of the earth. We don’t have to believe the same things, we don’t have to have the same history. God has used all us, crooked businessmen, bigots, liars, and drunks alike, to craft a nation that is better than all us. The real beauty of the founding fathers this fourth of July is that they were just as messy as we are today. We can take encouragement from the fact that today, just like then, God is in control and may choose to sustain and magnify our meager efforts.

What is America, Anyway?

Brett McCracken — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:00:35 -0700

Every Fourth of July I get a little nostalgic. I also get patriotic, but mostly it’s just nostalgic. Can you relate? I think most of us can. This grand holiday is at once a momentous celebration of American independence, a celebration of American history and culture, but also a day of memories. In fact I’d say that more than 50% of my day this Fourth of July will be spent thinking fondly back to the various Independence Days of my youth, and this is not in the least a sad or pathetic thing.

I’ll be thinking back to the summers in Oklahoma when the neighborhood kids would get together and set off fireworks on someone’s driveway, when we’d prance around under the humid summer moon, sparkler in one hand and melting popsicle in the other.

Or I might recall the various summers I spent at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Colorado, when the whole family was there, eating homemade vanilla ice cream and apple pie, waiting for me and my cousins to perform Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be An American” (complete with hand motions!).

Then there was the Fourth of July my family and I spent in San Francisco, watching fireworks explode over the Golden Gate bridge, or the year I was in Boston, watching fireworks on the banks of the Charles River, Boston Pops playing in the background. Or the insanely hot Fourth of July my family and I spent in New York City, watching an afternoon ballgame at Yankees Stadium, baking in the upper deck as peanuts and hot dogs and beer sizzled in the July heat.

And I remember one time, the summer after the Persian Gulf War (I think it was 1991), we neighborhood kids in Broken Arrow (Oklahoma) marveled as a local war veteran shot off some special “scud missile” firework. That was such a quick, clean, wonderful war. It was one we could name fireworks for.

I’m not sure Fourth of Julys are ever really about patriotism, at least not as much as they are about family, and the glory of summer, and the making of memories. And perhaps above all it is a holiday about time… It’s a day that celebrates America’s past, which is a rarity for a country that so thrills in the future. But it’s also a day that lets us stop what we’re doing and sink into the present, losing ourselves in the mesmerizing flashes in the sky, the Sousa marches, the barbecues.

It’s a day that captures what is ineffably American, and it has nothing to do with trite slogans (“United We Stand!”) or Gap flag shirts. It has much more to do with the sorts of complexities pointed out by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who described in The Great Gatsby how the “fresh, green breast of the new world … pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the first time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

It has to do with Melville’s whale, or Hawthorne’s letter “A,” or Bob Dylan’s harmonica. It is crystallized in Citizen Kane’s Rosebud sled, or the moment in Badlands when Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen dance in the cold prairie darkness to Nat King Cole’s “A Blossom Fell.”

It has to do with loss, and grace, and all that is good and bad about man’s ambition in the world. And perhaps Jack Kerouac captures it most clearly in his drug-addled prose in On the Road:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…”

I’m not really sure what any of this means, just like I’m not really sure what America means—especially these days. But I do know that things don’t have to be crystal clear or black and white (or red, white and blue) in order to be beautiful. We can and should be thankful for this country, for our place in it, even if we don’t always understand it.