Happy 250th, America!
- Jul 7
- 3 min read
We just celebrated the semiquincentennial birthday of the USA.
America is a complicated country of high ideals, filled with a rich history of stunning achievements and abject failures, and reflective of the human condition. It echoes the issues we have with one another when we simply want things to be black and white, good and evil.
This or that. Heroes and villains.
But humans, like the countries they inhabit, aren’t that easy to categorize. Yes, there are legitimate heroes and villains in the universe, but the reality is that most of us are a complex cocktail of both.
Take the disciples.
We all know the flaws of brash and braggadocious Peter. In the heat of the moment, he ends up denying the one he had declared to be the Son of God. Years later, the former Pharisee and convert Paul publicly confronts Peter about his hypocrisy and favoritism toward the “party of circumcision” and his exclusion of the Gentile believers, whom Peter actually felt called to.
Awkward.
But what about Paul himself? The headstrong firebrand had his own interpersonal conflicts within the Church. His “sharp disagreement” with his close friend Barnabas about a mission trip to revisit their church plants could easily be defined as a rage serious enough to send them in opposite directions. And while most of his letters are pleading for unity, he himself inadvertently created factions.
Yet Peter, writing his last letter and knowing death was near, mentions his “dear brother Paul” and how his writings were sometimes “hard to understand” and often distorted by “unstable people” who did the same with “other Scriptures,” implying a remarkable admission in that reference.
Around 95 AD, Roman Bishop Clement, writing to the church in Corinth, refers to holy men and women of the past, then shifts and asks his readers to “consider the noble examples of our own generation”: the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, whom he personally knew.
They were the contemporary heroes of the faith.
But knowing, admitting, and recording their failures and foibles do not make them less heroes, but more human. And that’s the point. Confessing our brokenness doesn’t discount our Imago Dei—it only makes us more honest and, at that precise point, makes us more like Jesus who, being perfect, commands us to be likewise whole and mature—“like your heavenly Father.”
Admitting our humanness puts us on the path of godliness.
And now back to where we started: celebrating the semiquincentennial.
It’s the same way with a collection of people committed to a philosophical ideal—like America. Erasing or ignoring the ugly parts of our country’s history isn’t patriotic—it’s denying our humanness. And it’s in our humanness that we best recognize the perfect: all that we aren’t.
It’s in the striving toward that end that we become more whole.
So wouldn’t it be interesting if we equated building “a more perfect union” to a classic 12-Step program—and looked historically over our failures, the “sins,” of the past 250 years? What if we considered this process collectively? Alcoholics not only deal with their current problems, but also face their entire histories, hence the “make amends” part:
Admit our powerlessness.
Believe in a higher power.
Turn control over to that higher power.
Conduct a fearless moral inventory.
Admit wrongdoing.
Be ready to make positive change.
Ask a higher power to remove shortcomings.
Make a list of people we have hurt.
Make amends to those people.
Continue to take a personal inventory.
Through prayer continue our connection with God.
Carry this message to others.
For Christians who quote 2 Chronicles 7:14 as the answer to all our present issues—and that verse is fraught with theological problems when contextualizing it to America—what if these 12 Steps were the process for the “humble themselves” part?
We can only do that with an honest, publicly admitted history.
Happy birthday, you complex, confounding, and captivating country!
Dave Workman | The Elemental Group
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