Chapter Six: Two Hundred and Fifty Years On
Stand back now from the founding and look at the whole stretch of years between that summer in Philadelphia and the moment you are reading this. Two and a half centuries have passed. The thirteen seaboard colonies became a continental nation and then the most powerful country on earth. The question worth asking on such an anniversary is not whether America has been perfect, for no nation has, and not whether it has been wicked, for that is just as lazy a verdict. The honest question is the harder one: what has actually become of the promise, for better and for worse?
The founding, the faith carried outward, and the anniversary, 1776-2026
The greatness is genuine
Begin with the good, because it is genuine and a grateful people should be able to say so without flinching. The country built on that 1776 promise became, over time, one of the freest and most prosperous places human beings have ever lived. And where the founders' own practice fell short of the principles they had written, those principles did not stay broken. They held the nation to account, measuring its failures against its own creed and, one by one and often at terrible cost, setting them right. That was never the betrayal of the founding but the founding finally being believed.
Out of the same soil came an astonishing flourishing. A people left largely free to work, to trade, to invent, and to worship lifted itself and much of the world out of poverty, cured diseases, fed multitudes, and opened opportunity to waves of newcomers who arrived with nothing. When the great wars of the last century threatened to hand the world to tyranny, this nation spent its sons and its treasure to help turn it back, even in alliances that were themselves far from clean, and then, remarkably, helped rebuild the very enemies it had defeated. Americans have been, by any fair measure, among the most generous people on earth, quick to give when disaster strikes anywhere. And from these shores the gospel went out across the world in a missionary movement of a size history had never seen. None of that is small. None of it should be muttered as if it were an embarrassment. A people who cannot see the good in what they were given will not have the heart to defend it.
The failures, named honestly
And yet honesty cuts both ways, and an account that only flattered would be no more truthful than one that only accused. The same nation carried real evil and still carries real wounds, for it has fallen short of its own founding words in more ways than one. Prosperity has too often hardened into greed, and freedom has too often been mistaken for the license to do whatever one pleases, which is not liberty at all but its counterfeit. A people that the founders warned could only stay free if it stayed virtuous has, in many ways, grown comfortable, distracted, and forgetful of the very convictions that made it free. The seeds the founding planted, that law answers to a higher authority, that rulers are bound under the law and not above it, that liberty survives only with watchful and self-governing citizens, are seeds that can wither when no one tends them, and there is honest reason to ask whether they have been tended well.
This is the place where it would be easy to do one of two false things. One is to wave the flag and pretend nothing has gone wrong. The other is to sneer at the whole inheritance as a fraud. Honesty does neither. The gains and the losses are equally true, and a thoughtful person holds them together rather than choosing the comfortable half. Scripture sets one standard over every nation that has ever existed, and it does not flatter and does not despair.
"Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people." (Proverbs 14:34).
That standard is not a partisan weapon, and it is not aimed at one side of any present quarrel. It is aimed at all of us, and it asks of a nation exactly what it asks of a person.
"He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does Yahweh require of you But to do justice, to love lovingkindness, And to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).
The thing no machine can fix
There is a particular lesson the last two and a half centuries press on anyone willing to learn it, and the present generation is in the best position of all to see it. Every age that has gained a powerful new tool has imagined the tool would remake human nature itself, that better communication or fuller information would at last make people wiser, kinder, and more united. The printing press carried that hope, and the telegraph, and the radio, and the television, and each disappointed it, because the trouble with the world was never finally a shortage of information. It was a disorder in the human heart, and each new machine simply gave the same old heart a louder voice and a longer reach.
The digital age is the largest such tool ever built, and it has spread knowledge and connection as nothing before it, and it has also spread rage and deceit and division as nothing before it, because it serves whatever is already in the person who wields it. To have lived through this and still expect the next device to save us is to have learned nothing. The human heart is not upgraded by its gadgets, and the One who can change it does not change. That is not nostalgia for a golden past that never existed. It is the oldest realism there is, and any real hope has to begin there.
So we should be careful, on a proud anniversary, about where we place our hope. It is right to be grateful for good leaders and to pray for them and to work for better ones. It is a mistake to imagine that the right person in the right office will finally fix what is wrong, because what is wrong runs deeper than any office reaches.
"Do not trust in nobles, In merely a son of man, in whom there is no salvation." (Psalms 146:3).
The whole sweep of these two hundred and fifty years sits, like every nation's story, under a hand that does not waver, the same hand that appointed the times and the boundaries of every people in the first place.
"And He changes the times and the seasons; He removes kings and establishes kings; He gives wisdom to wise men And knowledge to men of understanding." (Daniel 2:21).
The present is not the end of the story. It is the current point in a story still going, still under God, and still, in part, waiting to be written by the people now living in it. The drift and the wounds are not imagined, and nothing here has pretended otherwise. But the last word is not drift, and it is not despair. It is hope. What that hope is, and what it asks of you, comes next.
For Reflection
"But wouldst thou know, O vain man! Whoever thou art, what the Lord thy God requires of thee? Thou must be informed, that nothing short of a thorough sound conversion will fit thee for the kingdom of heaven. It is not enough to turn from profaneness to civility; but thou must turn from civility to godliness. Not only some, but 'all things must become new' in thy soul."
George Whitefield, "On Regeneration"1
Here is the answer. If the trouble with the world is finally the human heart and not a shortage of tools, then no device and no decade will mend it, and only the new heart God alone can give will. Whitefield pressed that on his hearers two and a half centuries ago, and the promise behind it is older still.
"Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26).
Hymn
All the Way My Savior Leads Me
Fanny Crosby (1820-1915), blind from infancy, wrote this hymn in 1875, and Robert Lowry (1826-1899) set it to music under the tune name ALL THE WAY. It is a backward look over the whole of a life's journey, finding that the Savior has been the guide on every winding path. It is a fitting word for a chapter that takes the long view over two and a half centuries and rests its hope, in the end, not in the nation but in the One who leads His people all the way home.2
All the way my Savior leads me;
What have I to ask beside?
Can I doubt his tender mercy,
Who through life has been my Guide?
Heavenly peace, divinest comfort,
Here by faith in him to dwell!
For I know, whate'er befall me,
Jesus doeth all things well.All the way my Savior leads me,
Cheers each winding path I tread;
Gives me grace for every trial,
Feeds me with the living Bread.
Though my weary steps may falter,
And my soul athirst may be,
Gushing from the Rock before me,
Lo! a spring of joy I see.All the way my Savior leads me;
Oh, the fullness of his love!
Perfect rest to me is promised
In my Father's house above.
When my spirit, clothed immortal,
Wings its flight to realms of day,
This my song through endless ages:
Jesus led me all the way.