A Divided Fourth: A Christian Response to Rival Fourth of July Celebrations

I’ve always enjoyed the 4^th of July. Our church picnics were a highlight of the summer growing up. During law school, the firm I worked at during the summer had probably the best views of festivities short of the White House itself. Now, living in Sioux Center, where fireworks are legal, every summer is a great chance for smoke, sparklers, and plenty of activities usually punctuated by the phrase: ‘Murica. 

By all accounts, this year should be amplifying that joy. The US is turning 250, and the World Cup has social media awash in international influencers gushing over American pastimes, destinations, and cuisine. Yet, the typical unity found over listening to Sousa marches, eating hot dogs, and watching stuff blow up feels curiously muted. America250, the Congressionally-created nonprofit planning the national celebration has been overshadowed and even partly defunded by a Trump-backed nonprofit Freedom250. Freedom250 has rights to celebrations in DC, and the President has promised to make the 4^th of July “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.” America250 will be hosting a parallel celebration on the opposite coast of the country in LA centering on the diversity of America’s cultural heritage. It seems that America has become so disunified that we can’t even celebrate together, and the best we can do is have rival programs just pretend the other doesn’t exist.

What’s going on, and how can Christians navigate this tension?

At a fundamental level, the confusion that we’re struggling with is the breakdown of our often-implicit conversation about love. Our national dialog is fractured in far more ways than partisanship, which may in fact reflect an attempt to respond to the fracture. In the face of these pressures, Christians need to build robust networks and institutions to nurture a dialog about how we can love rightly in this disjointed society.

Our Fractured Dialog

As social creatures, we are constantly sending one another signals about what is desirable, including what sorts of things are most desirable. In society, we present models of what we should value through our own lives and through the sorts of stories we tell. I learned what it means to prioritize my children relative to work through my own parents, but I also encountered the absentee father learning to be there for his kids as a key plot point in the many parental redemption comedies of the 90s. To be honest, when I’m making mental reference to the idea, I probably think about the Peter Banning’s children hating him in the movie Hook as often as I do about my parents’ own sage advice.

When I reference a breakdown in our conversation about love, one part of that challenge is the fragmentation that has occurred in popular culture. I can make reference to the movie Hook because there’s a decent chance that many of you in your late 30s and 40s have seen the movie, but it would be harder to identify a similar cultural touchpoint today. Where network shows could once get half of the households in America to watch, successful shows often garner 10% today. With the proliferation of streaming and social media platforms, there are just fewer common touchpoints for stories to take hold. 

Of course, there are other important ways that we communicate what is valuable, but the fragmentation of the media landscape is one example that is less laden with ethical baggage. It doesn’t strike me as obviously bad that there are few movies and shows that everyone watches these days. It does rob us of some traditionally easy pathways to establish rapport with strangers, but this is more of a challenge of the modern landscape than it is an evil that must obviously be fixed. 

When you add causes like this in with the more frequently-cited problems of the erosion of families, churches, and other formative institutions, we find that many of our traditional avenues for conversing and forming consensus about our priorities have been choked off. Add in relativism and the idea that truth is something socially constructed, and this challenge becomes not only practically but philosophically more difficult.

Put together, these factors describe an environment where it has become very difficult, if not impossible, to form what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “horizons of significance.” That is, we see a splintering of values because our ability to have a common conversation about what we should love and how we should prioritize these loves has broken down.

Politics of Significance

At this point, you may have a couple of objections. First, my narrative has been wandering away from a consideration of the Fourth of July, and, second, it may seem like our dialog about values is alive, if not well, in our political system. After all, if we have one celebration of diversity as such and another giving a more nationalistic sense of unity, don’t partisan politics represent what are essentially two warring horizons of significance? Isn’t this whole situation really about those who love America on one hand and those who are ashamed of it on the other? After all, 70% of Republicans and only 14% of Democrats reported being very or extremely proud to be Americans right now.

Depending on your politics, this can be a seductive take, but I think looks are deceiving. If our deeper problem is our struggle with the fractured nature of our social dialog, then the elevation and intensification of partisan politics represents a certain way of coping with the challenge. If the old methods of communication aren’t as effective these days, we can turn to political power to legislate our vision of the good life for society. If our institutions can’t hold the fabric of society together, then perhaps raw political power will do the trick.[1]

So this is where we stand. On one hand, we can look to the proliferation of niche cultures and the loss of common dialog and see this as all well and good. We can embrace diversity as an unqualified good (a concept I have questioned previously). On the other, we can try to force a certain vision of the social consensus of yesteryear, often anchored to a cult of personality surrounding the current president. 

The first option is often unsatisfying because it feels like pouring gas on the cultural fires and then sitting like the dog in the famous meme and saying “This is fine” as societal structures burn down around us. The second option feels driven by fear and anger, plagued  by hypocrisy as the values we use to critique the other side become suddenly meaningless when it would mean self-criticism. The emptiness of both options is driven by the fact they represent idolatries, not rightly ordered loves.

A Christian Response

The heightened polarization on both sides of the spectrum signals idolatries because they represent an elevation of certain goods to a place of ultimacy that they do not deserve. I don’t think this elevation is just about the question of whether we center diversity or presidential speeches in our celebrations. There are of course issues that could be unpacked on either side. The idolization that I think is most relevant this July 4th has to do with the role of the government and the purpose of public policy. 

I first realized that this idolatry was at play when I was listening to a podcast interview with the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, Stephen Wolfe. In that interview, Wolfe made it clear that he believes that the purpose of the government is to help its people secure their highest good. As a result, the government needs to have a coherent belief about that good in order to fulfill its function. 

A lightbulb went on for me. While I have plenty of other concerns about Wolfe’s ideas, this disconnect is more fundamental, and it’s one that I see at play on both sides of the spectrum. In much political theory, there’s an assumption that the government exists to direct us toward and help us secure our highest good. Whether we call that making us happy, giving us what we desire, or anything else, it assumes that the partisan politics play a key role in securing our dreams. Further, since the government wields the power to coerce in ways other parts of society can’t, it tends to crowd out those other channels as the more effective way of achieving our goals. Whether overtly through nationalism or more covertly, partisan politics make a play for our deepest loyalties.

This is a mistake, even if it’s an understandable one. 

It is common in political thought to treat the government like a central nervous system, directing our attention toward our good and leading us to acquire it. One of the insights of Kuyper and Christian thinkers before him, like Johannes Althusius, is that the government is really more like an immune system. It attends to the health of society so that communities within society can achieve goods that government was never equipped to provide. We will find the answers to our desires in the love of family, the meaning we find in our communities, and, most importantly, the relationship we find with our God. The government is incapable of providing any of those things and making any of these goods dependent on some policy (“If we could just get the country to do …. then things would be good.”) risks disordering us further. 

For Christians this 4^th of July, releasing a focus on politics can be freeing. Setting these concerns aside, even if our leadership isn’t, is a way to practice a Sabbath-type discipline of separation and denial that reminds us what is more important. We don’t have to worry as much about whether we’re accidentally supporting the wrong side by watching a fireworks display or participating in a charity drive. Where partisan loyalty is demanded at the doorstep, we can respond like the young men in Daniel’s day and refuse to bow. Where it’s not, we can enjoy the opportunity for the type of celebration that brings together the sorts of local bonds that genuinely move us toward our good. We should enjoy food with friends, participate in festivities with family, whether that’s a patriotic display or a cultural celebration, and work to build the bonds of love that are far more central to securing our highest good than the public policy concerns that dominate other moments. 

Footnotes:

[1] I remember being struck by two different books that made similar points about this years ago. The first is Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites, and second is R.R. Reno’s Return of the Strong Gods. Although they come from very different perspective, both books from 2020 ask the question whether old fashioned nationalism might be the only cultural response with enough oomph to effectively counter the rise of woke culture. At the time, I hoped both were overestimating things, but with the sociopolitical realignment of the last few years, I’m not sure they were.