Grace, Humility, and the Fourth of July

     The Fourth of July is coming up soon.  That means I’m supposed to be excited and patriotic and revel in how amazing the United States is and in the genius of the men who created it.

Instead, I feel ambivalent.  I feel ambivalent every year.  

It’s not just that I’m not all that into crowds and fireworks.  The American brand of patriotism itself makes me uneasy.  It’s not just a thankfulness for our country or a love for home, it’s also an arrogance and hubris that says we’re better than everyone else in practically every way.  Fox News personality Sean Hannity once summed up many of our attitudes by saying that “America is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.”

That’s a pretty strong statement.

It’s also a prime example of the unbridled pride and self-righteousness that are hallmarks of American patriotism.

As we questioned why terrorists would attack us on 9/11, many Americans said, “They hate us for our freedom.”  Conservatives were enraged at the thought that Barack Obama might “apologize for America,” as if we have nothing to seek forgiveness for.  Democrats and Republicans alike proclaim that “America is the greatest nation on Earth” with dizzying frequency.  Anyone too critical is accused of hating America and being ungrateful for its blessings.

At this point, some of you are sorely tempted to stop reading.  “Oh great, here goes another liberal, dumping on America again!”  That’s really not my point.  I like America – our ideals of freedom, equality, and democratic government enshrined in the Constitution are inspiring – but we also have to own up to our faults if we want to live up to our highest ideals.  

In Matthew 7:3-5, Jesus tells his disciples,

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when there is the log in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

I write this with plenty a log in my own eye, and we celebrate our country’s founding on Wednesday with our own national logs clouding our collective vision. My point is not to dump on America, it’s to plead for humility, grace, and self-reflection as a nation.

What is greatness, anyway?  Is it political or economic domination?  Wealth? Freedom?  Equality?  The strongest military?

At several points, Jesus’s disciples argued amongst themselves which of them were the greatest or would be when Jesus inaugurated his kingdom.

But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.  It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant,  and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25-28)

I’m not sure to what extent to apply this idea to the nation-state, but it’s clear that God’s standards of greatness are different from those of the world we live in.  Perhaps a better measure of our greatness than military power or GDP is how we care for one another.

In Matthew 25:40, Jesus says “Whatever you do to the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do to me.”

So how do the least among us fare? 

While the United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, that wealth is distributed highly unequally.  According to Oxfam, “The three richest people in the US own the same wealth as the bottom half of the US population (roughly 160 million people).” Drawing on numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, a recent United Nations report found that “about 40 million [Americans] live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty.“  A whole 21% of American children live below the federal poverty line and another 22% live in low-income households, affecting not only their health and development, but also their ability to learn and succeed in school.  As of 2015, almost 1.5 million households in the United States subsist on less than two dollars per day.

Meanwhile, our politicians enact huge tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy and then try to balance the national budget on the backs of the poor, the sick, and the elderly by making cuts to our social safety net.  Huge corporations reap billions of dollars in profit while their employees struggle on food stamps, because they aren’t paid a living wage for their labor.  

American poverty is not a foregone conclusion.  We have enough for everyone, but we hold it back.  We have the resources to address the systemic problems that allow poverty to thrive, but we still hold them back.  Our neighbors need help, and whether you ultimately prefer a social safety net in the form of government programs or private charity, we are holding back.  

St Basil the Great preached:

Is not the person who strips another of clothing called a thief?  And those who do not clothe the naked when they have the power to do so, should they not be called the same?  The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy.  You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.

As for the sick, the American healthcare system can be precarious.

My son and I both have a congenital heart condition called Tetralogy of Fallot.  In 2015, the year I had my most recent open-heart surgery (I’ve had four now), I racked up over $400,000 in medical bills.  My son Elliot is only nine months old and his care has already cost at least three quarters of a million dollars.  Thankfully, my family has good insurance through my wife’s employer, but many of us are not so lucky.  Tens of millions of Americans lack any health insurance at all and others remain underinsured and still at risk of financial disaster from medical costs.  Unlike the United States, our peers in the developed world provide comprehensive universal coverage.  Here the Trump administration is even taking aim at regulations in the Affordable Care Act that mean that people like my son and I can’t be denied health insurance or charged higher premiums due to preexisting conditions.

And while many white Americans like to believe that we now live in a post-racial society, the reality is that equality is far from having been achieved.

In 1852 former slave Frederick Douglass was asked to speak at a Fourth of July event.  His speech was an indictment of the gross injustice of antebellum America:

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

Many African Americans still feel this way, that the Fourth, the flag, and the anthem are not theirs, that America’s promise is not for them.  Slavery is over, but are racial minorities even now equal participants in America’s freedom and prosperity?  The old Jim Crow is illegal, but segregation still reigns in cities like mine, where redlining, racially restrictive housing covenants, and white flight left blacks clustered in well-defined and economically depressed areas that remain fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, so much so that one can move between drastically different neighborhoods almost just by crossing the street.

Despite only accounting for 5% of the global population, the United States incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners, and a hugely disproportionate number of these prisoners are African Americans, who are incarcerated at five times the rate of whites overall and up to ten times as often in states like Oklahoma and New Jersey.  Our criminal justice system shows a disturbing racial bias against African Americans at every level, from police interactions and arrests to charges, convictions, and sentencing, and our society at large operates with an assumption of black criminality.

Furthermore, researchers have found that job applicants with whiter-sounding names and experiences on their resumes were twice as likely to be called back as those whose resumes suggested the candidate was a member of a racial minority.  And Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute gives the following statistics about racial disparities in income and wealth in America:

In 2016, the most recent year for which all of these data are available, the median black worker earned 75 percent of what the median white worker earned in an hour; the median black household earned 61 percent of the income the median white household earned in a year; and the value of net worth for the median black family was just 10 percent of the value for the median white family. Related to these relative proportionate differences is also a wide range of absolute differences. While median hourly wages vary by a few dollars ($14.92 for black workers, $19.79 for white workers), the difference in median household income is tens of thousands of dollars ($39,490 for black households, $65,041 for white households), and the difference in median family net worth is hundreds of thousands of dollars ($17,600 for black families, $171,000 for white families).

For the United States today, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of racial equality still remains a dream.

The prophet Amos condemned those in his day who lived in luxury while they exploited the poor and maintained structures of inequality and injustice:

They sell the innocent for silver,
    and the needy for a pair of sandals.
They trample on the heads of the poor
    as on the dust of the ground
    and deny justice to the oppressed. (2:6b-7a)

…you who trample the needy
    and do away with the poor of the land,

saying,

“When will the New Moon be over
    that we may sell grain,
and the Sabbath be ended
    that we may market wheat?”—
skimping on the measure,
    boosting the price
    and cheating with dishonest scales,
buying the poor with silver
    and the needy for a pair of sandals,
    selling even the sweepings with the wheat. (8:4-6)

According to Amos, God vehemently rejected these people’s worship:

“I hate, I despise your feasts,
    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
    I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
    I will not look upon them.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
    to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

But let justice roll down like waters,
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (5:21-24)

“Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!”

Are our politics, our business practices, our criminal justice system, and our society at large overflowing with justice or do we trample on the poor and the downtrodden?  

What should we make of America as we celebrate the Fourth of July?  We do have much to celebrate, but we also have cause for honest introspection.  Perhaps we might set aside our hubris and self-righteousness.  Maybe if we are honest about our faults, we can be learn to be great in more of the ways that matter most.