So, Is America Worth Saving?
This year’s Independence Day arrives to find an America with many intellectuals in despair. If the problem isn’t corrupt capitalism, it’s racism; if not racism, it’s secularism; if not secularism, it’s rule by judicial fiat. Pick your crisis and your prime mover of despair.
One example is “Coronavirus is revealing a shattered country” by The Week’s Damon Linker. After noting that many believe America’s problem is Trump, and once we replace him, things can return to normal, he writes,
This has always been a fantasy, but it's an especially delusional one now. The fact is that America's problems are much vaster than Trump. The big, bad Orange Man is a symptom (both an effect and a cause) of a political system and national culture losing its bearings and spiraling down toward what looks distressingly like a collective nervous breakdown.
I could link to many other articles I’ve saved that play this depressing tune. And to be honest, I deeply resonate with them. We do indeed face a proverbial tsunami of social, political, economic, and spiritual that create tidal waves that threaten to drown the great American experiment of freedom, equality, and democratic, rational discourse.
But if there is a God-shaped vacuum in each of our hearts, there is also a candle of hope flickering in me for the ideals that the United States has stood for. So on this 4th of July weekend, I encourage reading two pieces that move in that direction.
The first is an interview with historian Allen Guelzo, who discusses the meaning of the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg:
The American Civil War was exactly what he described as that third test. Can we survive an attempt from within to destroy the American Republic? Lincoln believed that what had happened at Gettysburg and what was happening in the Civil War was the third test. If we dedicated ourselves to the principles of the Republic with the same fervor that those soldiers had dedicated themselves—even to the point of “the last full measure of devotion”—then we would indeed experience a new birth of freedom.
It made me wonder if our current crisis is a fourth test that calls us to dedicate ourselves to a new birth of freedom.
The other piece--“Is America Really Rotten to the Core?”--does a good job of summarizing the current despair, acknowledging the serious problems we face, especially in regard to race, and yet does not flag in its support of the American experiment. It is
A story to believe in, to be proud of – and to hope for. Even many of the critics show glimpses of this same hope, as that group of progressive scholars added “The American Revolution’s dreams deferred now call us to a brighter common future.”
That brighter future still awaits if we want it.
The path to getting there, however, is not violence and mounting aggression. Nor is it the dismantling and deconstructing the American system.
The Founding Fathers themselves acknowledged their moral shortcomings in drafting the Constitution. They created within the Constitution an ability to drastically change itself, something that was formerly utilized regularly when black Americans held no political power, and something that has been underutilized in promoting equality since the implementation of the 19th Amendment.
The foundation for those higher realizations are right under our feet – in the very system of self-government purchased by the blood of our forefathers and mothers.
Let’s not reject it now.
Hamilton at a Deep Discount!
Another way to rekindle the hopes of the Founding Fathers—while acknowledging the complexities and paradoxes of America’s beginning—is to watch the TV version of Hamilton on the Disney Channel. Here is an article about “the author of God and Hamilton” who “shares the spiritual truths he sees in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical.”
The struggles of Alexander Hamilton’s life are at the center of what it means to be fully human, and the story of the gospel,” he said. “He walked with God, yet had tons of failures, brokenness, and faults as well. Hamilton experienced shame but found redemption.
Having seen the musical in Chicago, I can highly recommend it. Subscribing to The Disney Channel is a bargain compared to Broadway tickets, which ran as high as $600 a few years ago.
Bigger than the Bible’s Temple
Moving to the southern hemisphere, let us ponder the meaning of “Brazil’s massive replica of the Temple of Solomon.”
[It] was opened in 2014, to huge fanfare and with the nation’s then president in attendance. While plenty of churches around the world take their titles from biblical sites, this one goes far beyond simply borrowing a name. It is a literal reconstruction of the ancient temple, as described so precisely in the Bible.
The main difference is that it is substantially scaled up from that holy original, which stood a mere 40 feet high. The new Brazilian exemplar is 180 feet, about the height of an 18-story building. That figure is no accident: the Temple of Solomon was specifically designed to be twice the size of the country’s famous Catholic symbol, the statue Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
It would be easy to dismiss the Temple and the hyper-Pentacostal church that built it, but historian Philip Jenkins instead tries to understand and set the whole business in historical context. It’s an interesting piece as well as a model of charitable comment.
The Bottom of the World
Moving even further south, I enjoyed these “recent images of the Antarctic landscape, wildlife, and research facilities, as well as some of the work taking place there.” As the cliché puts it, it’s a whole other world.
Grace and peace,
Mark Galli