For my siblings and me Independence Day is a dual celebration, the birth of our nation and the birth of our mother, Josephine. So, we are doubly grateful for this holiday, for the blessings we have enjoyed as a nation and as a family.
The weeks proceeding this July 4th have been marked by protest and marred by violence. The right to peaceful protest is enshrined in the founding documents of our nation and, when exercised responsibly, can effect welcome change in the ways we as a nation conduct our affairs. Violence is another matter. As with the American Revolution or the Civil War it is understandable when oppression becomes intolerable and there is a clear objective to the violence it engenders. However, when violence is mindless or purposeless it is insane. Worse, when it is a self-serving means to power it is sinister.
Which of these two sorts of violence does the ongoing wave of iconoclasm represent, mindless insanity of sinister manipulation? Is the destruction of statues of such disparate personages as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, St. Junipero Serra, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt random vandalism? Or, does is it evidence a not so subtle effort to kick from beneath us the ladder on which our nation has risen as we strive for a more perfect union? Are these proliferating attempts to eradicate our past made in order to render us so rootlessly uneducated that we are easily swayed by any ideology, or the absence of one?
Beyond the calls for law and order these events should provoke serious reflection. Even within the lifetime of many of us such behavior was unthinkable. What has changed? Recall the ‘sacred honor’ pledged by our founders in their declaration of independence. Where has the sacred gone? Where has the honor gone? In these cynical times such questions seem ingenuous. Perhaps the pertinent question is: where has our shared belief in the American experiment gone?
In what used to be called western civilization a creeping nihilism over the last five decades has been diluting our once shared allegiance to ‘the laws of Nature and Nature’s God’. As natural law and the awareness of a Supreme Being it promotes are erased from our societal mindset – unconsciously or otherwise – there is no ultimate, universally respected authority appeals to which hold us together. A formless void results. The alarmingly rapid spread of iconoclasm these past weeks is the fruit of this growing void. Why revere past lessons learned and struggles overcome when there is no Truth to which they point, no Purpose for which they serve?
Our celebration of independence ought to include a more than superficial consideration of its significance. How do we answer the question Fr. Richard John Neuhaus raises in his book, American Babylon: “Can freedom be formless? Or, is freedom either liberation from or aspiration toward form?”. How do we twenty-first century Americans answer this? Many of us are the product of stunted education. We learn the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ but are never exposed to the ‘why’. It is in this last dimension we come to grasp reason’s ‘form’ which unites us with the past, the present and the future.
Curious, isn’t it, how in today’s academies and newsrooms science and religion are considered antithetical? How ironic this is, especially since once in our ‘pre-Enlightened’ history theology – the study of God – was hailed as the ‘Queen of the Sciences’.
As we send fireworks into the skies let us also send our prayers that the beliefs we treasure in our Judeo-Christian heritage inspire and undergird our nation’s shared commitment to the future.