John Trumbull, Declaration of Independence (1818-1819).
There will be fireworks tonight, and cookouts, and flags on porches, and somewhere a child will press her hands over her ears and grin anyway. It is a day made for gladness, and gladness is the right response to it. You do not have to apologize for loving the Fourth of July.
But the Fourth is also the day that most tempts two opposite mistakes, and both of them ruin it.
Two ways to get it wrong
The first is the mistake of the flag-waver who cannot bear a hard word about the country, for whom love means applause and any honest criticism feels like betrayal. The second is the mistake of the cynic, who has heard about the nation's sins and concluded the whole thing is a fraud, and who cannot manage a single warm word without a sneer attached to it.
Both are lazy, and both are a way of looking away. The first looks away from the wounds. The second looks away from the glory. And the truth is that you cannot understand this country, or rightly love it, without holding both at once.
Gladness and honesty, together
There is real reason to love this nation and to love this day. A group of men once put their names to a claim larger than themselves, that every person is created equal and given rights by God that no government may revoke, and then bled for eight years to make the claim stand. That is worth a celebration, and worth one without flinching.
And there is a hard truth that has to sit in the same room. The nation that wrote that all men are created equal held many of them as slaves, and it cannot be understood by pretending otherwise. The two belong together. A love that cannot bear the truth is only sentiment, and a truth told without love is only contempt. The honest thing, the grown-up thing, is to hold the gladness and the honesty in the same hand and refuse to drop either one.
Notice, too, what the contradiction does not do. It does not cancel the promise. The standard that all men are created equal was the very thing that judged the nation's own sin and gave every later generation the ground to stand on while it demanded better. The promise was true even where the practice failed it, and that is exactly why you can love it honestly.
Where the hope actually rests
The reason a Christian can love his country this freely is that he is not finally leaning on it. America is one nation among the nations, given a time and a boundary by God like every other, capable of real good and real evil like every other, and certain, like every other, to pass.
"and He made from one man every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;" (Acts 17:26-27).
A man whose deepest hope is secure in heaven is exactly the man who can love his earthly country with his eyes open, because his whole world does not rise and fall with it. He does not have to pretend it is perfect in order to love it, and he does not have to despair when it fails, because his anchor was never down here to begin with.
"Lord, You have been our dwelling place from generation to generation. Before the mountains were born Or You brought forth the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God." (Psalms 90:1-2).
The promise is in your hands now
Two hundred and fifty years ago a promise was made, and it was never finished. It was handed forward, generation to generation, each one receiving it imperfect and passing it on, and now it has reached you. Whether the next stretch of the story bends toward the promise or away from it will be decided, in part, by people doing small faithful things in unremarkable places. Which is to say, by people exactly like you.
So when the fireworks go up tonight, love them. Mean it. There is no virtue in a sour heart that cannot rejoice over a genuine gift, and this country, for all its faults, is a genuine gift. But love it the way you love anything rightly: with your eyes open, your hope anchored higher, and your hands ready to do the work of keeping it.
Everything in this little reflection, and a great deal more, is in a free booklet we wrote for this anniversary, Liberty Under God. It is made for a family to read aloud together over a few evenings, and it ends where this does, with a promise handed forward into your hands and a hope set higher than any flag. It is free to read in full, and free to share.
And if you want to raise children who can love their country exactly this way, gladly and honestly at once, who can tell the genuine article from the counterfeit and know why the promise was worth the blood, that is the whole work of GraceHaven Academy.
See our new video series that covers this book as well. Liberty Under God | Episode 7: Our Place and Responsibility — What Now Is Ours to Do
Happy Fourth of July. Love it well.