‘Independence’ Day

This weekend – Monday is ‘Independence Day’ in the United States of America, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776 – brings the usual national, civic, and neighborhood celebrations with food, flags, and fireworks; parades and pageants; Sousa and Copland and the unsingable and usually unlistenable national anthem.

I have been formed strongly enough by American ideals to believe that the communal and individual freedoms of religion and conscience (including the prohibition of an established religion), assembly and speech and the press, and the rights to enfranchisement, equality, and the rule of law enumerated in the US Constitution are worth celebrating – and worth working to maintain or more fully establish in the face of constant efforts to curtail them.

But I am baffled by the kinds of celebrations I described above (fireworks excepted*), which, along with all the trappings of ‘school spirit’, civic clubs and fraternal organizations, military displays and pledges of allegiance, seem not only to belong to another era, but also to be malign exercises in cultivating, at best, mass complacency, and at worst, mob mentality. And I am utterly put off by the encroachment of this sort of thing upon the liturgy and life of the Church: an encroachment which was furthered, in the Episcopal Church, at the height of that other era with the adoption in 1928 of ‘Independence Day’ as a Votive, was codified by the appointment in 1979 of that day as a Holy Day (thus requiring Mass to be celebrated), and is only compounded (given the Church’s failure to actually observe Holy Days as prescribed in the Prayer Book) by the inevitable leakage of the celebration onto the nearest Sunday.

This revulsion is not born simply of an aversion to the use of tawdry and passion-stoking marches and national anthems (American and otherwise†) of a Sunday morning. Rather, it is based in a conviction that to the extent that the Church as an institution becomes, or is seen to become, part of the political, cultural, or economic establishment, it loses the ability to challenge that establishment and risks conflating and thus betraying the highest ideals of both our system of government and our religious tradition. We see all around us the destructive power of believing that God is on the side of a particular nation or political faction, and history, including that unfolding around us, is littered with the bodies of those who have fallen afoul of state religions. Of all people, followers of Jesus Christ ought to be acutely sensitive to this fact: Our Lord’s was one of them.

Thus I submit that, however much American Christians may support our constitutional ideals, it is improper for us to sing ‘God save the state’, whether ‘state’ mean (as it is most likely to connote today) ‘the government organization or bureaucracy, mostly remote from the people and from concern for their well-being’, or more abstractly ‘a particular arrangement of borders drawn up more or less artificially and set in opposition to other such entities’. Whether Christians choose (or are forced) to work within, or in opposition to, state structures, Christianity must have a broader vision not limited to, or by, those structures, which are always passing away – and must witness to the fiction of ‘independence’ (not really a Christian virtue, and not a very useful geopolitical attitude either), in today’s world more than ever.


Now, just as there is no perfect form of human society or government – Utopia, tellingly, means ‘no place’ – the proper relationship between Church (or individual Christians) and state or society cannot be defined once and for all. The consideration of this relationship quickly brings up some very big, difficult, and ancient questions which our scriptures, traditions, and history have wrestled with, without resolution: How much, and in what manner, do we believe the Lord to be involved in the affairs of the world? Are forms or heads of government divinely appointed (as is usually said of monarchs)? Do the fates of nations follow a heavenly plan (as is often said of colonizers and conquerors ancient and modern, with or without a religious cause)?

More specific questions arise too. In the American context, we might ask: How direct may the Church and her leaders (whether on the Right or Left or in a more complex position) be in criticizing or advocating for government policies without violating her members’ freedoms of conscience and the separation of Church and state? Is tax-exempt status appropriate for religious institutions? Is that status worth attempting to maintain even at the cost of keeping silent in the face of injustice? As for individuals, is activism the appropriate avenue for living out our faith in society? Or is non-governmental charitable work? What of participation in public office? Is the answer different for different people according to their gifts and vocations? When is it appropriate for either individuals or the Church to break the law?

I of course cannot answer these questions, but they are worth asking, and if the observance of ‘Independence Day’ as a Holy Day can bring any good, it is perhaps as an opportunity at least to broach them. The adoption by the Church of a glib patriotism, on the other hand, only papers over them and serves neither Church nor society nor their individual members well. 


I suggested earlier that Christians must have a vision broader than the borders of the state in which they find themselves. I will qualify that slightly by saying that some more or less indigenous peoples might make a case for a kind of pride based in an ancient and ongoing culture and history and a symbiosis of people and place. Our tradition teaches that the world was made by a loving God and that we are called to be good stewards of that good creation, and wherever and whenever this state of things is most fully realized, it is worthy of celebration.

By the same token, however, I assert that true patriotism is not even possible in the colonial context of the United States (or Canada or Australia, for example). Very, very few people who live within these borders can actually sing the words ‘God bless our native land ’ with honesty: even four hundred years of occupation do not grant a sort of common-law deed to the colonists. And in the twenty-first century, even the truly ‘Old World’ is hard to find:

The Old World and the New are not two regions marked reliably on maps. The Old World is wherever indigenous traditions are permitted to exist and acknowledged to have meaning. The New World is wherever such traditions are denied and a vision of human triumph is allowed to take their place. The Old World is the self-sustaining world – worldwide – to which we all owe our existence. The New World is the synthetic, self-absorbed and unsustainable one – now also worldwide – that we create. 
     Robert Bringhurst
     A story as sharp as a knife:
     The classical Haida mythtellers, 16–17

Finally, though the Church may well align more closely with the ‘Old World’, ultimately it belongs to neither the ’New’ nor the ‘Old’, however defined, but is rather an outpost of the oldest world of all, that of Paradise, or, put another way, of the newest, the New Creation. As such, as the Apostle and the Prophets so beautifully tell us, our homeland comprehends every tribe and nation united in the recognition of our common source and goal. Neale’s translation of Abelard’s ‘O quanta qualia’ reminds us that patriotism, for Christians, must be rooted there, in our ‘dear native land’; that our only nostalgia can be ‘for that country [to] yearn and [to] sigh’; that our only national songs must be the ‘sweet anthems of Zion’. Like Our Lord, we each of us live in a particular place and time, among a particular people and speaking a particular language; like Him we minister to those in need and confront in word or deed the injustice we see; but like Him we have our face set toward Jerusalem and a kingdom not of this world.

*  I have always found watching fireworks a rather contemplative experience. Pyrotechnics may be a poor substitute for the natural night sky of which few of us in the modern world have any real experience, but they do evoke something of the same sense of awe, and their nearly thousand-year history connects us to many generations of people gazing at them in wonder.

†  Sunday services in my place of work included the tunes of the British and Finnish national anthems and the text of an anthem associated with the sometime Kingdom of Saxony.