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(Saint Paul, that is; see below.)
I’m a U.S. citizen, but I don’t celebrate U.S. independence. If you’re a Christian or if you just have common sense or a good knowledge of history, there’s no reason why this ought to scandalize you.
I have both a general reason and a specific reason for my non-commemoration.
The general reason is that it’s a national “holiday.” Through the discovery that everybody is descended from one prehistoric woman, the “Mitochondrial Eve”, we now know to be true scientifically what religions like Christianity have told us for millennia: that all human beings are really one family. Further, thinking in national terms can have adverse effects that include motivation for belligerency, bigotry and xenophobia toward actual foreigners and toward persons perceived as foreign, chauvinism and chauvinistic delusions, and politicization of international athletic competitions. If you’re a Christian, you have even better cause not to identify yourself primarily with a nation-state; the New Testament and the Church Fathers tell us that we are only sojourners in this world, and that our true home lies in Heaven. (See Philippians 3:20; Hebrews 11:10, 13-14, and 16, and 13:14; Ephesians 2:19; and the non-canonical but patristic Epistle of Diognetus. Accordingly, I consider myself to be not an “American” but a subject of the Kingdom of God who happens to have spent his earthly exile in a country called the United States of America; I try to be a good citizen of my native land, but I’m not in love with it.)
The specific reason is that the American Revolution was:
- Ultimately Pointless.
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and many smaller polities have the same freedoms that we do, and none of them took up arms against the home country. Unless, therefore, one prefers war to peace, how does one justify our revolution? Moreover: What’s so wonderful about independence anyway? The U.S. is bankrupt in terms of both money and morals. Would our land really be governed worse if it had never cast off royal rule? - Detrimental to Non-patriots.
The revolt by (some of) the colonists was the occasion of a war that, as indicated in the preceding paragraph, did not need to be fought; in countries that remained loyal to Great Britain, slavery was abolished in the 1830s, whereas in this country, emancipation would not take place for another three decades; the Crown had done what it could to protect the indigenous peoples from the rapacity and genocidal intent of many of its country’s settlers—in fact, that was a (rarely mentioned) cause of the Revolution, and is why most tribes took the side of Great Britain—and once the colonies became “states”, that restraining influence disappeared; and Loyalists, whose estates were confiscated and large numbers of whom were forced by circumstances to emigrate, obviously derived no benefit either. - Un-Christian.
Romans 13:2 tells us that whoever resists the ruler resists what God has established, and makes himself liable to damnation. How does one reconcile political revolution with a verse like that? Also see 1 Peter 2:13-14, and note that Scripture scholars date both Paul’s letter to the Romans and 1 Peter to the reign of Emperor Nero. If God, by inspiring the writings of Saints Peter and Paul, instructed followers of Christ to obey the government of someone who was a tyrant by any standard and a persecutor of Christians, do you think that He approved of our insurrection against the authority of our fellow Christian King George? - Hypocritical.
I grew up believing in the myth of the Revolution like my earthly countrymen, but when I pursued a serious, objective study of U.S. history, I learned that the insurgents were not “patriots” resisting foreign “tyranny”; they were British colonists guilty not only of rebellion against governance by their own people, but even of soliciting the intervention of powers such as France and Spain, which had been engaged in hostilities against Great Britain a decade and a half earlier. Should anyone do the same to us, we’d call their actions treason, not patriotism. - A Contribution to the More Radical French Revolution.
Those who deplore the French Revolution (and its Napoleonic aftermath) while lauding ours presumably don’t realize that if there had not been a revolution in the Thirteen Colonies, there almost unquestionably would not have been one in France. The victory of the American revolutionaries inspired their French counterparts; and the chief reason why France’s monarchy fell is that, having exhausted the state treasury by waging war on the side of the American rebels, it had to raise taxes, which, because of a series of poor harvests, could not be paid by the largely agricultural populace.
We would be happier, and please God more, if we did not take our nationality so seriously; and probably the leading reason why we take it so seriously is that we’ve convinced ourselves that the origin of the U.S. was the noblest occurrence in all history. The way in which our land was founded is not to our eternal discredit, but it ought to be a much-needed source of humility (which is, anyway, a virtue) rather than of pride (which is a deadly sin).
