John Adams thought America’s independence should be celebrated “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.” In honor of our 250th birthday, Americans did just that, with a National Mall gathering and massive fireworks display to Independence Day parades in all fifty states and much more.
As my wife and I watched the July 4th coverage on television, we spent some time with the PBS event in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where we listened to one of the most perceptive speeches about our nation’s past and future I have ever heard.
“Do we still have what it takes?”
Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, chairs the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and serves as National Honorary Chair of the Virginia 250 Commission. Her undergraduate studies in philosophy and history at Stanford University helped her understand what her biography calls “the power of ideas to drive change.”
After welcoming those gathered in Virginia and expressing her gratitude for America and all who built our nation, she observed, “Perhaps as we gather tonight, we quietly worry. Have we become too jaded? Too fractured? Have we lost the ‘secret sauce’? Do we still have what it takes?”
To ensure our flourishing and our future, what does it “take”?
Ms. Fiorina recollected, “Ours has always been a fractious, restless nation, and yet, over and over, we have found common cause.” That “cause,” she continues, is unique among the nations of history: “Throughout all time and across the face of the earth, ours is the only nation not founded on ethnicity, territory, or religion. Ours is the only nation in human history founded on ideas, principles, and a system of government.”
“Where more things have been possible for more people”
The primary idea upon which our principles and system of government rest is, of course, our founding declaration that “all men are created equal.”
It is because America espouses the equality of all people that our governance embraces checks and balances to ensure that no individual wields unaccountable power over others. This is why we elect people to represent us and remove them when they do not. It is why judges and laws restrain human failure and are themselves restrained when they fail.
It is why our legislative system is designed so that the majority rules but the rights of the minority are protected. It is why our economic system is designed so that, as Ms. Fiorina stated, “America is where more things have been more possible for more people from more places than anywhere else on earth.”
Consequently, when we fail our aspirational claim that “all men are created equal,” our failures are at their worst. The Founders failed the people they enslaved by perpetuating the institution of slavery. Our westward migration failed the indigenous peoples we displaced.
Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, the legalization of abortion has failed more than sixty-four million preborn children. The growing popularity of euthanasia fails the elderly and infirm. Where systemic racism and prejudice still exist, they fail our nation’s founding declaration. Pornography corrupts those who make it and those who use it. And on it goes.
Four Greek words for “love”
Why, if our nation is built on the idea that “all men are created equal,” do we struggle to enact that which we embrace?
The answer is simple: it is literally not within our nature to do so.
From Cain’s sin against Abel to July 4th shootings and explosions that killed at least six and wounded dozens, fallen humans act in fallen ways. It is one thing to believe that “all men are created equal,” but quite another to act accordingly.
To treat all people equally requires a degree of selfless love that humans struggle to produce. To cite the common Greek words for “love,” we can easily enact eros, erotic love, and do so in godly and ungodly ways. We can live out philea in our friendships and storge in our families.
But agape—unconditional and selfless love that always treats others as equal to ourselves—is something else entirely.
When we thrive and when we fail
God loves us equally because “God is agape” (1 John 4:8). By virtue of his unchanging character, he cannot love us any more or any less than he does at this moment. We are equal in his love, not by our nature but by his.
Do you know this to be true of you?
I will never forget meeting Billy Graham. The holiness shining in his blue eyes, the purity of his soul and passion of his heart, were tangible. It is unfathomable to me that God loves me as much as he loves the greatest evangelist in Christian history, but it is true. And he loves you as much as he loves me.
Now his Spirit wants to produce in us the same love for others as his first “fruit” in our lives (Galatians 5:22). When we submit each day to his Spirit (Ephesians 5:18), he empowers us to live out our founding creed in ways that transform our lives, our relationships, and our nation.
Our history over these last 250 years has taught us that America thrives when we embrace the equality of all people and fails when we do not.
Which will be true for you today?
Quote for the day:
“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” —Rupertus Meldenius
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