How I spent my summer vacation and some thoughts on Independence Day

As legions of do-gooders (or people looking for a free concert) descended on Philadelphia this weekend, the wife and I took the opportunity to beat it out of there for some R & R.

We ended up in Jim Thorpe, PA, a town of about 5,000 souls in the foothills of the Poconos. The town, formerly Mauch Chunk, was renamed after Olympic athelete Jim Thorpe in a kind of publicity stunt/business deal with Thorpe’s widow who was looking to create a monument to her husband. The IOC had stripped Thorpe of his Olympic medals after it was disclosed that he had played semi-professional baseball. Thorpe’s medals were reinstated some thirty years after his death.

The town was at one time home to some of the richest people in America, including shipping magnate Asa Packer. On Sunday we worshipped at the Episcopal church of St. Mark and St. John, and it was evident that the church was at one time very well-endowed. The altarpiece was a hand-carved replica of one from Notre Dame Cathedral and the sanctuary featured a couple of Tiffany stained-glass windows. The early Eucharist we attended was in the small chapel, though the church warden gave us a tour afterwards.

It was also evident that the congregation has shrunk considerably, and, in fact it’s the result of two congregations (St. Mark’s and St. John’s) that had merged. Makes you wonder how long they’ll be able to keep up the marvelous old church building.

Anyway, the weather was perfect, and the town, nestled among some pretty spectacular hills, is close to Lehigh Gorge State Park, so we did some hiking on Sunday and spent most of the rest of the time enjoying the quaint little town. I also picked up a nifty book called The Study of Anglicanism from the local used bookstore. It’s a collection of essays from Anglican scholars on the various aspects of the tradition (history, theology, worship, etc.).

I don’t know that I have any particularly profound thoughts on the occasion of Independence Day. Here’s an interesting perspective from a couple of years ago from Frederica Mathewes-Green.

Mathewes-Green writes:

Give me liberty or give me death. Or give me something else. Staying alive, but under the rule of another nation? Yeah, that sounds all right, too.

Scandalous thoughts, especially this time of year. I’m a conservative Christian, born an American, born into the idea of faith intertwined with freedom. But I’ve been thinking over something I read recently. During the Jewish rebellion against Rome in the first century, religious leaders were the last to join the cause. They worked for peace and opposed revolution because, as one historian put it, “Roman rule presented no serious threat to Jewish religion.” In other words, overthrowing an oppressive government wasn’t a requisite of the faith.

This was a startling idea to me. But as I looked in my Bible concordance, I saw that the terms “freedom” and “liberty” are much rarer than I had thought and usually refer to freedom from sin or the Law. Political freedom is not presumed to be an unmixed good. Self-governance could lead to carelessness with the faith, while life under oppression could bear spiritual fruit. Perhaps the Jewish priests’ resistance to war against Rome was mere pragmatism; as it turned out, the rebellion was suicidal and Jerusalem was destroyed.

But Jesus, speaking at the same time, took it further. He taught his followers radical detachment from earthly power: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He taught them not just to endure but to love their enemies. America under the control of England, Israel under the control of Rome–how do they stack up? On one side, we see Patriots mowing down rows of Redcoat soldiers; on the other, we hear Jesus saying we should obey a Roman soldier and even offer to carry his pack a second mile (Matthew 5:41). On one side, Patriots are tossing tea into the harbor in defiance of British taxes; on the other, Jesus miraculously produces a coin to pay his Roman taxes (Matthew 17:27).

Yes, the Revolutionary War and the teachings of Jesus: They go together like a cake and a bowling ball.

It’s a good question: should Christians support wars of secession and/or national liberation? Pacifists will obviously say no. Okay, so what about non-violent movements of national liberation? Is that a legitimate goal for Christians? Christian pacifists often admire Gandhi, but wasn’t he a “constantinian” in his own way?

The question, it seems to me, boils down to this: is national independence a good thing? Surely for Christians it can’t be the greatest good, but if it is at least a penultimate good, then isn’t one justified in pursuing it (by just means of course)?

I’m not saying that there isn’t much to admire in the story of our nation’s birth. The liberation of our nation required great courage, and the establishment of our unprecedented government required genius. I’m very grateful that I was born in this land in freedom. No, I don’t want to go back to England, where everything, even toast, is cooked by boiling, and babies are afflicted with those wispy names, like Nigel, that were too feeble to cross the Atlantic.

However, it looks like the biblical teaching is that liberty is not necessary to the spiritual life–not even all that important in the larger scheme of things. The establishment of the American democracy isn’t an illustration of biblical principles. It’s rather an illustration of “the course of human events”–the kind of thing that happens in human history. At regular intervals, people have wars, and somebody wins and somebody loses. The one who wins gets a bonus prize: He gets to interpret what just happened. From his point of view, of course, what happened was just plain wonderful. Justice was served. Everyone on our side was heroic, and everyone on the other side was dastardly.

We are taught these views early and absorb them without question. It seems right for Yankees to rebel against England but wrong for Confederates to rebel against Yankees. It seems right to fight to set slaves free, but wrong for Native Americans to resist our taking their land. From the perspective of the winner, however things turned out is exactly the way they should have. A naive reader of history would find it a delightful story, because there is a happy ending every time.

Mathewes-Green is surely right to critique a naive “progressive” reading of history and that the spiritual life can still be cultivated under oppressive conditions. But surely that doesn’t mean we should court oppression! For every Solzhenitsyn how many Russians had their faith ground to dust under the wheels of Soviet oppression?

The fact that no political regime can bring in the justice of God’s kingdom shouldn’t prevent us from making comparative judgments about their relative merits. Augustine could favorably compare the earlier Roman Republic with the Rome of his day without confusing either with the City of God.