Happy Birthday, America!

Here in my office, I have a folded American flag. Old Glory draped the coffin of my grandfather, buried with full military honors in 2006. Grandpa Yagoda, a first-generation immigrant whose mother escaped the pograms of Eastern Europe and came to America, grew up dirt poor on the South Side of Chicago. He used to regale me with stories of how he’d jump on the back of deliver trucks and hop off at the local butcher to collect scrap and throwaway meat for meals for his family. “We didn’t even know we were poor,” He’d say. This was during the Great Depression.

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, Grandpa enlisted in the U.S. Army. He went on to fight in the Pacific as a tank commander, sleeping under his tank, fighting malaria and mosquitoes in the swamps, and narrowly escaping death in these fierce battles. Grandpa is a hero to me. I never heard him complain about anything. He was one of the first people who instilled in me a deep and abiding love for this great country.

As America celebrates 250 years, there is a lot of angst. Some are so focused on our many challenges that they have succumbed to cynicism about the future. Others wonder if patriotism is even appropriate, given America’s many sins. But I’m both bullish on the country, based on the challenges we’ve overcome before, and I think it’s good and right to celebrate what God has given us.

America is unique in the world. It’s a nation founded on an idea, shaped by deeply Christian ideas, an experiment in “ordered liberty.” The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence and eventually the Constitution were not mere revolutionaries. They were courageous statesmen who forged from the Revolutionary War, to quote Abraham Lincoln, “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

As I argue in my book, In Defense of Christian Patriotism, it is good and right for Christians to love America, to be grateful for the freedoms we’ve inherited, and to steward it so that it is as good for the next generation.

This week I’ve got a few articles and essays in various places, elaborating on this idea of patriotism. For Southwestern Seminary, I wrote about the idea of celebrating America and honoring Christ:

In Jeremiah 29, the prophet told the exiles to “seek the welfare,” or flourishing (shalom), of their city. They were exiles in a strange land, yet rather than huddle and seek safety and escape, they were to build and plant, marry, have children, and make Babylon better, with whatever little influence or power they had. Today, American Christians can relate. In many ways we feel out of step with the culture, the way we are called to live as ambassadors of Christ’s kingdom. And Scripture even says we should think of ourselves as “strangers and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11; Hebrews 11:13). Yet like the people of God in Babylon, that doesn’t mean indifference or apathy about the place where God has called us to live. Can we see the shalom of a country we despise? I don’t think so.

At its most basic, patriotism is a love for the people, the place, and the ideals of the country. It does not demand of us that we blindly accept every policy from a particular administration or whitewash the dark spots in the nation’s history. Sometimes patriotism requires us to speak up. At the heart of patriotism is gratitude. It is thanking God that He has allowed us to be Americans and allowed us to live in a land as free and prosperous as this one. Gratitude is essential for a Christian (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

Here is the entire piece.

For National Review, I wrote about the necessity of a recovery of gratitude in this current moment:

For many, freedom and prosperity have become so familiar as to become passé. When we grow accustomed to seeing only the familiar, problems seem all the more obvious and blessings get overlooked. I often experience this contrast when I talk to the immigrants or children of immigrants who attend the school where I teach. They and their parents are among the most patriotic people I know, and it is not hard to understand why. If you’ve escaped from totalitarianism or communism, if you’ve left behind grinding poverty with no hope of upward mobility, if you’ve ever lived in a place where religious freedom was not a reality, America seems too good to be true.

Yet today, from our politicians, in much of our history books, and increasingly, on popular podcasts, all we hear about is that the only story worth telling in America is one of injustice, exploitation, and white supremacy. Our children are often taught that America has been mostly a force for bad, not a beacon of hope for those who yearn for freedom. Our politics is now organized around resentment, our parties are collections of increasingly narrow subsets of groups. And online, the way to get rich is to maximize grievance. Gratitude rarely goes viral.

You can read it all right here.

Lastly, the wonderful folks at Logos Bible Software asked me to write on patriotism and the Bible for their wonderful blog, Word by Word. I outlined four ideas:

• Love is not a binary choice

• Love of country is necessary for Christian exiles

• Love of country is an expression of gratitude

• Love of country is limited

Read more here.

I do also have a piece forthcoming for the folks at Modern Reformation. That will be published sometime this summer, I believe.

I’ve also been doing quite a few interviews and podcasts about America 250. Here are a couple:

• For the good folks at The Baptist Review, we talked about patriotism and worship—can churches acknowledge America’s birthday while also honoring Christ?

• At Southwestern, I had a great conversation with Chandler Snyder and my pastor, Ben Bolin, on Christianity and patriotism.

I hope you and your family are enjoying a wonderful 250th, thanking God for our freedoms, doing as John Adams insisted, and watching fireworks, and will bring your gratitude tomorrow to church as you worship Christ.

I leave you with these words of thankfulness by Abraham Lincoln:

“No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”