Eight Guidelines for Christians on Independence Day
- Celebrate ideals more than achievements.
Give thanks for the ideals of liberty, equality, democracy, and the dignity of every person, while recognizing that these ideals remain unfinished tasks rather than completed accomplishments. - Remember that every person bears the image of God.
Let the Declaration's claim that "all are created equal" deepen into the Christian conviction that every human being possesses God-given dignity, regardless of race, nationality, religion, wealth, political affiliation, or immigration status. - Practice gratitude without idolatry.
Love your country, but do not worship it. Give thanks for its gifts while remembering that your ultimate allegiance belongs to God and God's kingdom of love, and God's will that it emerge "on earth as it is in heaven." - Tell the truth about the past.
Celebrate the courage, creativity, and sacrifices that have shaped the nation, but also acknowledge slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, racial injustice, and other failures. Honest memory is a form of patriotism. - Welcome the stranger.
Remember the vision expressed by Emma Lazarus at the Statue of Liberty and by Jesus himself: to receive the stranger, care for the vulnerable, and refuse to define neighbors by fear or suspicion. - Declare independence from destructive spirits.
Use Independence Day as an opportunity to free yourself from resentment, hatred, greed, propaganda, and the temptation to dehumanize those with whom you disagree. - Work for the common good.
Patriotism is more than displaying a flag. It includes strengthening neighborhoods, serving the vulnerable, protecting democratic institutions, caring for the earth, and seeking justice for all. - Follow the lure of your better angels.
Ask which visions of America awaken your better angels and which awaken your darker impulses. Choose the lures that call you toward truth, compassion, beauty, courage, and hope, trusting that God's future is always more generous than our fears.
Cloud Cuckoo Land & Independence Day
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - Declaration of Independence
There is something crazy—or at least unempirical—about the idea that all human beings are created equal.
Equal in what? Wealth? Physical strength? Charisma? Good looks? A happy family lIfe? Social acceptance? I know that some might say "equal in opportunities" for pursuing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But this is not true. Look at America today.
Perhaps there is a deeper meaning of "equal." Perhaps it means what Catholics mean by "the dignity of persons." That translates into treating all people with respect and caring for their well-being, because they are made in the image of God. It is an astonishing claim. It certainly was in 1776, and in many ways it remains so today. It is also a profoundly Christian claim. It means that every human being is created in the image of God and possesses an inherent dignity that does not depend on intelligence, wealth, race, nationality, productivity, social status, or usefulness to others. Every person matters, simply because he or she exists in the eyes of God.
Is there a land in which this equality is truly respected? Is it crazy, too?
The literary-minded might be reminded of a land called Cloud Cuckoo Land from the Greek playwright Aristophanes' The Birds, first performed in 414 BCE. His comedy tells the story of two disillusioned Athenians who become weary of the politics, lawsuits, and endless conflicts of their city. Escaping to the countryside, they persuade the birds to build a magnificent city in the sky—a place suspended between heaven and earth where a new and better society might flourish. The city's Greek name, Nephelokokkygia, is usually translated as Cloud Cuckoo Land.
The image carries within it two themes: the unconventional craziness of people who have utopian dreams and the absurdity of attempts to build them in the sky. Today, the expression "living in Cloud Cuckoo Land" usually suggests someone whose head is in the clouds, detached from reality by unrealistic dreams. "He's gone cuckoo," we say.
Yet the contemporary novelist Anthony Doerr has given the metaphor a richer meaning. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, a lost ancient tale about the mythical city passes from person to person across six centuries, linking children and adults living in vastly different times and places—from the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, to a public library in present-day Idaho, to a generation aboard a spacecraft bound for another world. Each of the novel's central characters faces violence, displacement, loneliness, or catastrophe, and each is sustained in some way by the story of Cloud Cuckoo Land. The imagined city becomes less a symbol of foolish escapism than of the human capacity to preserve hope in the midst of suffering. It is an imaginative horizon—a vision that helps people endure, create, and remain human.
The metaphor thus contains a profound ambiguity. Some Cloud Cuckoo Lands lure us away from reality; others lure us toward a reality that has not yet come into being.
Perhaps, then, we should hesitate before dismissing Cloud Cuckoo Lands. Some of the greatest moral advances in history began as ideas that appeared naïve, impossible, or absurd. The abolition of slavery. Universal human rights. Democracy. The equal dignity of women. Religious freedom. The conviction that enemies can become friends. Jesus' command to love our enemies. All of these sounded like Cloud Cuckoo Lands to many of their contemporaries.
The question, then, is not whether we should inhabit Cloud Cuckoo Lands. The real question is which Cloud Cuckoo Lands deserve our allegiance. They are not merely fantasies floating above the earth. They are imaginative visions that hover between possibility and actuality. They dwell, as it were, in the clouds, but they beckon us toward the earth. They invite us to become different kinds of people and to build different kinds of societies.
Some call forth the better angels of our nature; others awaken our darker impulses.
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As Independence Day approaches, many Americans find themselves in a Cloud Cuckoo Land of sorts, and with deeply conflicted feelings. We are invited to celebrate the birth of our nation and the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence at a time when it seems that America itself has become captive to a collective fantasy. A significant portion of the population has embraced a mythic past and an idealized future, animated not simply by hope but by grievances, resentments, fears, impulses to exclude others, and greed—all in the name of recovering an America they believe was once great.
This imagined America is quite one-sided. It overlooks slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the long struggle to extend liberty and equality beyond a privileged few. It transforms the founding era into a kind of national Eden from which we have fallen. Ironically, many who invoke the Declaration of Independence as the charter of this imagined America, waving their American flags, have never seriously read it or wrestled with its soaring aspirations and profound contradictions.
The consequences are now visible all around us. We see corruption at the highest levels of government treated as normal. We see the emergence of a billionaire class that shamelessly accepts obscene inequalities between its own way of living and that of millions of ordinary people. We see wealth mistaken for virtue and power celebrated as though they were moral achievements. We see attempts to remake parts of America—including the nation's capital—in the image of gaudiness, narcissism, spectacle, and self-celebration rather than public service and civic dignity. We see immigrants and minorities, especially with dark complexions, treated as threats rather than neighbors, and many deported. We see truth subordinated to political expediency and loyalty rewarded more than integrity. Whether these developments are causes or consequences of our national Cloud Cuckoo Land, they reveal how easily imagination can become detached from justice, compassion, and reality. They remind us how destructive some illusions can become.
Many people have surrendered something precious: not only their generosity of heart but also their independence of mind. They have entrusted both to a leader who promises that he alone can "Make America Great Again." He offers not simply a political program but a Cloud Cuckoo Land—an alluring narrative of a lost golden age and a glorious future that dwells more in the imagination than in history.
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That is why celebrating Independence Day has become emotionally complicated for many Americans. We continue to cherish the ideals of liberty, equality, democracy, and human dignity. We are proud of those ideals. We see them embodied in many places, in small and caring communities that celebrate and live out diversity, equity, and inclusion. And we see the ideals of the poem in the Statue of Liberty, where Emma Lazarus gave them unforgettable expression:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
These words express one of America's most beautiful Cloud Cuckoo Lands. They are not simply a description of who we have always been; they are a vision of who we might become.
But we also recognize how often these ideals have been betrayed, both in the past and in the present. We love our country enough to celebrate its highest aspirations and enough to grieve its failures, protest the injustices and "make good trouble" to improve the lot.
The question, then, is not whether we should inhabit aspirational Lands. We always will. The real question is which ones deserve our allegiance. Which stories call forth the better angels of our nature, and which awaken our darker impulses? Which inspire gratitude rather than grievance, humility rather than arrogance, compassion rather than exclusion, truth rather than propaganda, and hope rather than fear?
These are the questions that lead me, somewhat unexpectedly, to process philosophy. At this point I find myself turning to Alfred North Whitehead. His philosophy helps explain why aspirational Lands possess such extraordinary power. They are what he calls lures for feeling—imaginative possibilities that beckon us toward one future rather than another. Some lure us toward beauty, truth, justice, and compassion. Others lure us toward fear, domination, resentment, and greed. The question is never whether we will be lured. The question is by what.
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The best aspirational Lands we have available to us today are not those of greed, resentment, isolation, and cruelty. They are not that kind of crazy. They are another kind of crazy - a craziness which is, after all, the world's best and only hope. A hope that we hear the call of our better angels and respect all people, taking care of them. 'strangers' very much included.
If I hold my hand over my heart as a flag passes by this Independence Day, I will do so for the sake of this better hope. I will do my best to declare independence from greed, hatred, divisiveness, and confusion, so that I can be a better American.