Our calling as Christians is to be in the world but not of it (John 17:16). We hear and say this so often, it verges on a cliché. But what does this calling mean for us as American Christians on the eve of America’s 250th birthday? Or, to put it another way, how might we think about the nation’s 250th birthday as Christians and Americans? Earlier this week, Jake Meador proposed this answer to open the conversation: “The shortest way of answering the question is to say that America is a country that generally does not imprison her chaotic saints.” In this week’s three-day forum, theologians, historians, and public thinkers share their own responses.
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We Need Both Patriotic Gratitude and Christian Humility
Daniel Bennett
The Christian life is one of paradox. We believe we are made in God’s image while reckoning with the Fall, and we are called to be in the world but not of the world. The American story, too, is one of paradox. It is a story of liberty and opportunity for some, and oppression and exclusion for others. It is one of remarkable achievements and profound failures.
As Americans approach a particularly auspicious Independence Day, I find myself thinking of these contradictions. It is a mistake to reflect on our country’s two-and-a-half centuries of history through an exclusively positive filter, ignoring our nation’s warts and scars. It is equally mistaken to dwell only on the negatives of our story while downplaying the positives.
Today’s political environment tempts us to simplistically choose sides, to reject nuance in favor of a black-and-white reading of our collective past and present. We are discouraged from recognizing that both praise and criticism can be true at the same time, lest we end up somehow ceding ground to our perceived enemies.
American Christians can model a better way of commemorating our country’s 250th anniversary. Rather than defaulting to naïve optimism or cynical pessimism, we can celebrate the achievements of our nation while acknowledging the many ways it has yet to fully realize its promise. Doing so reflects both patriotic gratitude and Christian humility as we continue the unfinished work of forming "a more perfect union."
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“Can You Help Me Get to America?”
Matthew Loftus
“Can you help me get to America?” As an American citizen living in a low-income country, it’s a question I get asked more often than I’d like. Occasionally someone tries to convince me that I ought to adopt their child and take them to the United States. I have absolutely no power to assist someone in getting a visa to my home country, so I don’t have much to say in response.
I try to disabuse people of notions that they’ve gathered from television or from their fellow citizens who have moved to the US and often project a more comfortable lifestyle than they are truly experiencing. I explain that a salary of $1000 USD per month, which is a top-quintile income here, is poverty wages in a country where rent and transportation eat up hundreds of dollars every month. I will occasionally add some tale of sexual or spiritual decadence in public schools to scare the parents ready to relinquish their child to me. I urge people to consider how they can flourish where they are and contribute to the good of their neighbors in their home country.
However, the inquiries and the hopes of people who want to come to the United States of America reveal some things that are worth being grateful for. Life is not fair for people born at the bottom of the income distribution, but anyone in the US who is willing to work at any job can earn enough to feed themselves and usually family members back home. Our government may engage in a variety of absurd overreaches, but an American citizen will never be abducted and tortured for saying anything bad about their rulers. Our health insurance system is overpriced and ridiculous, but if you suffer a medical emergency in the US, you will receive life-saving treatment up front and deal with the bill later. Millions of people around the world are willing to leave everyone they love and risk their lives in order to have any of these things Americans take for granted.
The United States of America have been blessed far beyond what any one nation deserves, and over the past 250 years much good has been done in the world with those blessings. I still shake my head at the decadence I encounter when I return home—why on earth anyone would want a 12-foot-tall skeleton in their front yard, I don’t know—but I know that the same abundance that allows people to buy dumb Halloween decorations also allows them to fund medical care and Gospel ministry all over the world.
I cannot help but be grateful for what I’ve received from my home country and what she has received from God. My hope and prayer is that as we celebrate 250 years of God’s goodness, more Americans cultivate that gratitude and ask themselves how God wants them to bless others with the abundance they’ve been given.
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“Why Do You Love America?”
Katelyn Walls Shelton
“Why do you love America?” an acquaintance recently asked me, seemingly annoyed. The blunt nature of the question caught me off guard. We have bundled our four young children up in the January cold, hot chocolate in hand, to watch the Washington Monument light up in a projected display of our nation’s history. We’ve dragged them out late in pajamas to watch military flyovers on the National Mall, and we’ve gone to the White House Easter Egg Roll (three times). We have an American flag hanging outside our front door—it’s so big, in fact, that if it’s particularly windy, it sometimes slaps guests in the face as they enter our house. I have worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Executive Branch. My husband has worked for the House and the Senate and a former Vice President. We love America. It took me a second, but I responded: “Because it’s the greatest country in the history of the world. And it’s my home.”
“But Jesus loves all people and all places,” he responded, “and in today’s political climate, America doesn’t really seem all that great.” His implication was that as a Christian, it was off-putting, perhaps even wrong, to be patriotic or feel a sense of pride in one’s place—especially when political leaders don’t always represent Christian ideals and values, or when some who claim the name of Christ abuse it in service of ignoble aims.
But it’s precisely because of the incarnation of Christ that I am free to love my nation and love it abundantly. Jesus lived in a particular time, in a particular place, amongst a particular people. He was and is fully human, even as He was and is fully God. And while He loved the whole world, He did so while on earth by loving and serving those right in front of him, in his place, amongst his people. That’s what we’re called to also. “And you will be my witnesses,” Jesus says in Acts 1:8 just before His ascension, “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” First at home and then worldwide.
It’s easy, perhaps even tempting, to let the politics of the moment breed contempt or disdain for our country. But there’s so much to love, and we can love our country most exuberantly by working to make it more faithful, more just, and more worthy of its highest ideals.
Perhaps it’s providential that the World Cup has coincided with America’s semiquincentennial. Watching fans from around the world visit our homeland and delight in our people, our hospitality, our food, our music, our scenic byways and storied Main Streets, has fanned the flame of love for this country for many. Our love for our people and our place is not a denigration or rejection of the goodness of other peoples and other places—it is a recognition that God made this place and these people and set us among them. He calls them good, so we can (and should), too.
There will always be a gap between our government as it is and our government as it shall be when the one upon whose shoulders government rests returns to rule every tribe, tongue, and nation forever. Until then, I thank God for 250 years of this free republic, and I pray blessings upon it for another 250 and more.
Katelyn Walls Shelton is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program and a 2025 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.
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“Yet the Heavenly Father Sings Over His People”
Samuel James
The two most influential shapers of my life and thinking have been Scripture and raising children. And it has been remarkable to reflect how both of these have taught me about loving, delighting in, and being thankful for that which is imperfect. God’s covenant people are sinners, often spectacularly so. Children are ignorant, stubborn, selfish, and slow to learn. Yet the heavenly Father sings over his people, and I, in my own fallen way, sing over my two sons and daughter.
I think this can teach me something about my country. The United States is far from perfect. Yet I don’t delight or sing over its sins and flaws. I delight and sing over it because it is mine. For two hundred and fifty years, this country has been one of world history’s greatest ever monuments to transcendent truths about God, humanity, and civilization. America was not and is not a theocratic experiment, but it was and is a nation that assumes in its very constitution the reality of justice, the depravity of man, the necessity and limits of power, and the promise and peril of self-government.
Even more importantly, the US has been one of the world’s greatest places for the practice and exportation of Christianity. America’s legacy of religious liberty is almost singular in world history. And this is not a neutral or indifferent virtue. America is rich with gospel-preaching churches, faithful pastors, thoughtful writers, poets, singers, artists, and others who invite others into worship of the risen Christ, publicly, with no fear of legal oppression.
It is common in many places to barely speak of this nation without immediately pointing out all the ways in which it has failed to practice Christian justice and charity. Those failures are real. But they are not what I think of this year. Right now, I think of my family here in the meadowed, cavernous country of Kentucky, where we look forward to feasting and fellowship this July 4th, worship and rest the following Sunday, and a government that is accountable to us all the year. Such blessings must not be taken for granted. They are not automatic. They are not accidental. They are divinely bestowed.
This 250th American birthday, I am grateful. And I pray that I would, by God’s grace, love and care for imperfect things, just as my Savior loves and cares for me.
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The Great Cradle of Liberty
John Shelton
America is the great cradle of liberty. Today, as much as at its founding 250 years ago, we have a Christian duty to honor America.
If the apostle Paul could command the first Christians to honor Rome under the reign of Nero—the mad emperor who lit Christians on fire for candlelight in his courtyard and fed them to wild beasts—how much easier should it be for American Christians, who live in a nation built on unalienable rights, to sing “God bless America, land that I love… my home sweet home”? We should be fiercely proud of our heritage on this national milestone.
Ours is not a heritage of blood, though patriot veins have nobly shed much of that in America’s defense. As President Lincoln eulogized in his first inaugural, “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Nor is it a heritage of soil, though America’s natural beauties, “from the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam,” are incredible and worthy of conservation. We are a practical people too, with deep roots in the earth and in our communities that make America exceptional.
No, our heritage 250 years on is one of the noblest ideas in the history of mankind, one tracing its lineage directly to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—namely, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Only a world reconfigured by the Christian gospel could articulate such a truth. Such a truth becomes inevitable, “self-evident” even, only in a world touched by Christianity.
Whether or not America lives up to our highest ideals on this or that policy matter today, we owe it and the Founding Fathers our honor all the same. Lincoln articulated it best:
All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
At 250, may America remain just that—a rebuke and stumbling block to the harbingers of tyranny and oppression, wherever they may reappear.
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