Two hundred and fifty years is a long time for any nation to keep a promise.
On the fourth of July, 1776, a small group of men in Philadelphia put their names to a document that made a claim larger than themselves, larger than their generation, and larger, it would turn out, than their own conduct. They wrote that all men are created equal, and that the rights every person holds are not granted by any king or congress but given by God. Then they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to make the claim stand, knowing that if they failed every name on the page was a confession of treason.
This little book is for a family to read together over a few evenings as that anniversary comes. It is not a textbook and not a speech. It is an honest, warm walk through where the United States came from, what it was founded to be, what it has cost, and what it asks of the people who live in it now. A household can read a chapter aloud after supper, talk it over, and come back the next night for the next one.
You will find two things held together here that are too often pulled apart. The first is genuine gladness. There is real reason to love this country and to love the Fourth, without apology. The second is plain honesty. A nation that wrote that all men are created equal while holding many of them as slaves cannot be understood by looking away from the contradiction. The two belong together. A love that cannot bear the truth is sentiment, and a truth told without love is just another way of despising what we have been given. We will try, every step, to hold both.
America is one nation among the nations, with a founding more thoughtful than most and a record, like every nation's record, of real greatness and real sin. The final hope is not the nation but Christ, who governs the rise and fall of every nation and saves people out of all of them. That frame is set plainly at the start so that nothing later has to be guessed.
Read it slowly, and read it together. Where a founder is quoted, the words are his own, checked against the record, not smoothed or invented. Where Scripture appears, it is there because the founding cannot be told truthfully without it. The men who built this country held a range of beliefs, from devout Christian orthodoxy to a deist's distant Providence. But they argued within a culture steeped in the Bible, and grounded the rights they claimed in a Creator who made every person in His image. You do not have to share their beliefs to follow the history, but you cannot understand it with the Bible's influence left out.
By the last page, the aim is simple. That you would close the book loving the Fourth more honestly than before, seeing both its glory and its wounds, and wanting, in your own home and your own time, to live up to the promise that was made two hundred and fifty years ago. That promise was never finished. It was handed forward. It is, just now, in your hands.
"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).
Scripture quotations are taken from the (LSB®) Legacy Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2021 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc. LSBible.org and 316publishing.com.