Minor Musings on the 4th of July

This has been a good week but a busy week and I looking forward to a little time to relax. We are celebrating today the way many Americans are celebrating today. We are having a family barbecue at the Hallsten’s and then going to the fairground to watch fireworks. The barbecue doesn’t start until 5:00. I have a lot of things I could be doing but I feel like I have earned some time to relax a bit and just let the day unfold.

I thought it would be good to take a few moments to think a bit about the significance of the day. We are celebrating the birth of our country. Someone I respect a lot believes that when Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain they were rebelling against God. I am not sure I agree but he does have a point. I am sure the motives that led them to rebel were not all as virtuous as they often have been presented.

As a Christian I hold dual citizenship. I am a citizen of the United States of America but my greater loyalty is as a citizen of God’s kingdom. Yet, I am very proud of my earthly country. The United States is far from perfect we have some serious flaws but on this Fourth of July I would like to focus on our virtues.

From our founding we have held an ideal of equalitarianism. “All men are created equal…” I admit that we have not lived up to our ideal. The charge of hypocrisy is valid. Yet, the very nature of an ideal is something to which you aspire and I believe the United States has always aspired to be a culture in which people were treated equally. This ideal of equality has had at least two effects on us. We are a culture that roots for the underdog. We love stories about people overcoming obstacles and down-and- outers defeating people of privilege and power.

Second our ideal of equalitarianism causes us to value the individual. We are a nation of individuals. We tend to value individual rights and choices more than we value the good of the community. This does not mean that we do not care about the whole. We applaud individuals who choose to sacrifice for the good of group but we tend to loath the idea of the group imposing its will on the individual. This shapes they way we practice democracy.

Another thing I like about this country is that we have cultural attitude of optimism. I suspect that this might have been born out of our early experience of settling the frontier and was further fuel by immigrants coming to the United States to begin a new life. I suspect that this has had three effects on our culture. We have the expectation that life is going to improve. We believe that given enough time and effort we can overcoming any obstacle or solve any problem. Last, this optimism has given us an amazing cultural hubris. This is not a hubris born out of a sense of genetic superiority or a long history of impressive accomplishments. It is a hubris that is born of pride of being part of an ideal that all people are created equally and have a right to liberty.

Just, some minor musings on the 4th of July.