By James C. Harrington
July 4th is more than a grand mid-summer holiday with festivities and fireworks. It should be a time to pause and consider what we are celebrating as a country.
We will hear dramatic readings of the Declaration of Independence, and facsimiles of it will grace newspapers. However, we must honestly profess that we have moved far beyond what its authors intended.
Their view of who had unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness was quite narrow: essentially white male freeholders and landowners. Some who signed the Declaration held hundreds of fellow human beings in vile and oppressive bondage.
Their vision of inalienable rights was pinched and selfish. Subsequent generations have steadily and painstakingly extended the Declaration’s promises to everyone. We still have more to do.
Independence Day in our era should be about building community, extending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone, not just the privileged, rich, or self-absorbed nationalists.
The Declaration, as imperfect as it was, does contain a communitarian statement of principles. It is a vision that the last line of the Declaration emphasizes: “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
We now subscribe to the ideal that the rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness inalienably belong to everyone. But we just let it be a vacuous idea, a hollow promise. We veer away with abandon from making the ideal real.
As a nation, we are becoming ever more individualistic, and personally selfish. “What’s in it for me” has overpowered “what’s good for us all.” The pledge of mutual community-building has disappeared.
For a country where a sizeable percentage of its people lay claim to a Judeo-Christian ethic, we are remarkably deficient on feeding the hungry, caring for the elderly, healing the sick, paying just wages, narrowing the inequality between rich and poor, welcoming the immigrant, and pounding swords into ploughshares.
Moreover, some political leaders are on a path to deny our history and suppress its access to students. They have also targeted the transgender community for electoral gain. Hate speech and hateful actions flourish. We have buried civil dialogue in a grave of acrimonious political discourse.
Our struggle for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in community has been tortuous. Too many people have been murdered over the years or brutally clubbed and beaten, fighting for these rights on behalf of everyone. We cannot sit back and let false patriotism tear our democratic fabric. We owe it to them and to those who come after us to help America be what it should be.
Our country suffers from a dearth of moral leadership. Few are the political, religious, and community leaders who summon us to the task of building community so that all share in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They ignore our mutual pledge to make the dream real for everyone.
Rather than calling us to “our better angels,” as Abraham Lincoln once did, many in leadership roles lack the courage to move us toward the communitarian message of our Scriptures. Whatever our faith tradition, the message is the same: we are community.
In the Christian tradition, rugged individualism has no part. In fact, quite the opposite; the community is central. You wouldn’t know this by listening to many political leaders, even those who wear Christianity on their sleeves.
We have an uncanny way of “flattening” the 4th of July, that is, limiting it to something festive, rather than looking at the challenges the day presents for us to be better Americans and accomplish the goals for which we have declared ourselves.
Our task as Americans is to fill the moral leadership vacuum. We must move the discussion forward on examining ourselves as a nation and how to recommit ourselves to our ideals. That is true patriotism.
