Dear siblings in Christ, 

I have vivid memories of the Fourth of July celebrations of my youth.   

Images of red, white, and blue bunting lining houses and city streets in the days leading up to the holiday, infused with the enticing smells of barbecue and cooling homemade pies.   

The booming sounds of fireworks blending with the string and horn sections of the Boston Pops and Neil Diamond’s “America.”   

As the years stretch further away from those defining moments, I find my reflections on them tinged with the predictable warmth of nostalgia and wistfulness for the simpler time that they represent. I can still connect with my sense of the endless possibility and freedom that this country proclaimed and remember the strength of the community connections and social fabric that helped make those aspirations incarnate. My youngest self not only believed in the American dream, but I felt properly enlisted in the great unbroken line of patriotism that connects tea-dumpers and civil rights icons, veterans and civil servants, revolutionaries and regular citizens.    

As a child, I was well indoctrinated in the cult of the flag and an idolization of our country that is so often conflated with patriotism. I said the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each school day, sang the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” with gusto and no hint of irony, and resonated with the pride in America that “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” portend.  My grandmother taught me how to properly unfold and raise the American flag on a flagpole, and how to protect it from undue weather, lower it respectfully, and fold it tightly for safe storage. All of this training instilled a passion for our country and its principles that I carry with me to this day. 

And yet, like many, the combination of maturing into adulthood and exposure to the histories and narratives of this country falling outside the officially sanctioned canon revealed the all too frequent disconnect between the vision of what our country could be and what it was in practice. I saw how the pledge’s promise of “liberty and justice for all” seemed to exclude vast swathes of people. I traveled the “land of the free and the home of the brave” and witnessed how freedom and bravery were so often defined according to partisan interests. I marveled at the “amber waves of grain and purple mountains’ majesty” of our geography while lamenting the fraying and tattered fabric of the “brotherhood” that was supposed to stretch “from sea to shining sea.” 

Was this dissonance inevitable and just the natural result of moving from the innocence to experience1 of which William Blake wrote? 

Or did my generation experience a unique kind of disillusionment as institutions of decency became corrupted to benefit smaller interest groups, and as our global communications expanded to encompass the world beyond our borders, forcing us to confront the long shadows of our nation-building at home and abroad? 

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to definitively answer that question, but I do know that my sense of allegiance to the superficial symbols of our national identity has diminished in direct proportion to my love of the principles for which they stand.  And I cannot separate that change in perspective from my more complete adoption of the narratives of our faith and the proclamation of the Gospel that raises appropriate suspicions about the idol worship that often passes as patriotism. Whether presented in Jesus’ restatement of the Sh’ma2, in Augustine’s contrast of the city of God and the city of man3, or in reform movements from the late Middle Ages to the present day, we who follow the way of Christ cannot legitimately give our ultimate allegiance to anyone or anything but the triune God.   

Yes, any mature Christian knows that our churches still too often confuse allegiance with God with allegiance to nation, party, or interest group. Yes, the Gospel has much to say to the nation in which it takes root, and our personal politics should rightly flow from the strength of our faith tradition and its deepest truths about what leads to life in abundance4. Yes, people of good faith can and do disagree on the details of how to govern and legislate in a way that allows our faith convictions to align with the story of this country and lead to more blessing than curse. 

But as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of this American experiment—a democratic republic ever seeking a more perfect union—it bears repeating that as much as we long for greater transformation in our national life, our efforts of reformation as Christians must commence with the concentric circles of our allegiance.   

We begin by focusing on the transformation of self, accomplished through the grace of God and the consistent attention and focus that prayer makes possible. Our primary responsibility as baptized members of the Body of Christ is to allow the Gospel to take root within us and shape us so that the fruits of the Spirit may find greater expression in our daily lives. If Christ has indeed conquered the world,5 then the conquest starts in our hearts and souls. This is a primary difference between Christ’s reign and all others. Allegiance to Christ’s way cannot be coerced, enforced, or legislated. It arises through the sacrament of baptism and is empowered through grace. And though the battlefield is an interior one, as Christ’s reign grows within, it reveals to us that our diverse, unique, and wonderful selves are not simply isolated entities but part of a larger Body spanning countries, continents, and centuries.  

As we experience the first fruits of the Spirit in our lives, we realize that for them to keep growing, we have to labor alongside the other members of the Body in community who are also tending to their own spiritual gardens. Akin to the difference of scale between a home grower of grapes and a vast vineyard, maturing members of the Body see collaboration with others as essential in order to faithfully harvest the fruits of the Spirit and to extend their blessings more widely. This is why we gather for worship, formation, and outreach together and why we zealously spread the good news of this faith that has transformed us with others.   

This is a circle of faith that holds so much promise and, sadly, so much heartbreak.  As we gather in larger groups, we can sometimes lose sight of the necessary and blessed diversity across difference that constitutes the Body of Christ. At this level, the gaps in understanding, experience, and cultural perspective that exist between us can be exploited by those who serve other idols—like the gods of self and wealth—and finding common ground and the space for disagreement without disconnecting from one another is one of the greatest and most enduring challenges.   

But for those who can faithfully attend to the interior transformation and connect this interior journey with the shared life of the Spirit in community without being diverted by lesser calls and interests, the next challenge is to participate in the transformation of the wider world through the love of Christ. This conversion is not about making the entire world Christian in name, as if such a thing would be possible or pleasing to God, but rather about ensuring that that vision of a reconciled world—made incarnate and eternal through Christ’s Passion—becomes more realized in our time.   

This is why and how our witness to Christ’s way shows up in the public square, it is why we make common cause with our interfaith and atheist neighbors to make the neighborhoods and countries we share more reflective of the expansive reign of God, and it is why we labor to ensure the personal, the local, and the global dimensions of our faith are aligned. The measure of our effectiveness in this largest circle is not found in our own growth and power as an institution, but in our fidelity to the principles of the Gospel and our integrity of witness binding each of these concentric circles. And for those of us who hold citizenship in this country of the United States, it means holding our country accountable for its stated and lived aspirations, working for a repair of the frayed social fabric across lines of difference and division, and about acknowledging that while our ultimate allegiance is to God alone, our secondary love of country asks us to give our best and most faithful efforts to seeing God’s dream shape our American one, too. 

As you prepare to gather with loved ones this holiday weekend, and as we celebrate this milestone anniversary as a country, my prayer is that we can hold together the blessed memories of yesteryear and the aspirations of our forebears while telling the truth about just how far we still have to go as a people. I hope you can truly enjoy the traditions and cuisine that accompany this national holiday while also planting your heart’s deepest desires in the eternal soil of Christ’s reign, free from the innumerable idols that threaten to uproot us and bind us to anything lesser. I hope that you might give thanks for the many blessings of this land and country we share, while remaining steadfastly committed to its reformation. 

¡Happy 250th anniversary, USA!   

May we never forget to let freedom ring from both the mountainside and the Lincoln Memorial.   

May we keep working together for a more perfect union, a more reconciled nation that serves as a channel of blessing more than a conduit of curse, and a country whose most vocally espoused values are more incarnate reality than empty political rhetoric.    

May we, as followers of Christ, never lose sight of the fact that our patriotism—as deep and as heartfelt or as wounded and disillusioned as it may be—flows from our allegiance to God alone and can never be yoked to anything lesser.       

Yours in Christ,