Semisesquicentennial

Reflections on the Lectionary for July 5th

The signed Declaration of Independence, National Archives. Public Domain.

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When people gather for church this Sunday, the United States of America will be 250 years and one day old. At least, that’s how old it will be, by a certain kind of counting: if we count from the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There are other ways we might count. We might count from the moment when all adult citizens were theoretically allowed to vote, which was after the passage of the 19^th Amendment—though of course Jim Crow prevented many from doing so—and we might say that the United States is only 106 years old. We might count from the first voyages of Christopher Columbus, the first rapacious forays of European seizure and control into the Americas, and say that America is about 534 years old. We might count from the final ratification of the current Constitution, which makes America 237 years old. We might count, as many do, from the first commission of America’s original sin, and say that it has been 407 years since the first enslaved Africans were imported to these shores. We might count from the conclusion of the Civil War, and say that America is 161 years old.

America has had many foundational and founding occasions, but none is as defining and widely celebrated as July 4^th. And this week America will celebrate the semisesquicentennial of that event: the 250^th anniversary of an idea and a work in progress. It is a complicated moment.

The moment is complicated in at least two ways. The first way that this moment is complicated is the most obvious. Right now, at the cusp of America’s 250^th birthday, this country is not well. The fabric of the nation is badly frayed. The President cares little about the institutions, traditions, laws, and values that have long stood at the center of a consensus about what makes America worthwhile. The current administration and its judicial and legislative allies are gutting government, hollowing out longstanding rights, rolling back the Civil Rights movement, and engaging in brazen grift to enrich themselves and entrench their power in defiance of majorities of voters. Even if the President were a normal person and not morally and intellectually vacuous, Americans no longer seem to share a common understanding of what America is for—what function our Republic would serve, if it were to suddenly become functional. It is a bleak and harrowing moment in American history, but it is not the first such moment, and hopefully it will not be the last.

The second way that the moment is complicated, though, is more concerning, if that’s possible.

The second way that the moment is complicated is the way that America has always been complicated, which is that it has never managed to form much connection between what it is and what it claims to be.

The United States of America was begun in profound contradiction, and it has lived that way ever since. The Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, but that lofty ideal was penned by men who owned slaves and fought for the ability to build empires on the backs of enslaved people. The Constitution purports to speak for We the People, but it proceeded to marginalize most of the people to the benefit of the few. The history of the United States is the history of a halting struggle to embody a shadow of its own founding principles, only to undermine and beat back that same struggle with retrenchments into Whiteness, into capitalism, into many grotesque forms of liberty for some at the expense of many. This nation has ever lived in the space between intention and reality, between big ideas and big injustices, between great promise and a frustrating talent for self-sabotage.

And that is where Romans 7 comes in.

The lectionary this Sunday includes ten verses from the seventh chapter of Romans. Perhaps no book of the Bible has been as influential in the history of the United States as Paul’s letter to the Romans, because Romans holds such a central place in the history of Protestantism, and Protestant Christianity holds such a central place in the history of this country. These facts have not always come as good news—and I say that as a Protestant. To be breathtakingly simplistic about it, Romans offered Protestants a roadmap to a kind of deed-less spirituality, complete with rituals of the self and a creed of self-concern. A certain reading of Romans, popularized by Martin Luther and exported all over Europe and eventually to the Americas, held that faith—belief—was all that was required of Christians, and that that belief was a private matter between God and individual persons. A specific way of reading Romans convinced millions of Protestant Christians that salvation happened one person at a time, and that my salvation has nothing particularly to do with yours, and that our redemption was always immaterial—that it always took place in the realm of the heart and not of the body. And so the letter to the Romans gave Christians permission to compartmentalize their Christianity, to separate their souls from their bodies and their minds, and to see themselves as morally neutral or even good, to see themselves as saved, even as they perpetrated genocide, even as they frequented the slave-traders’ auction block, even as they criminalized and shamed poverty at the same time they institutionalized it, and even as they worshipped at the altar of profit. Romans is only one piece of the infrastructure of American thought, but it might be the most important book behind one of the most consequential forces to have shaped American life. In that drama of American contradiction, in the essential conflictedness of this country, Romans is not innocent.

And yet Romans is also the foundational text of what one scholar has called the Introspective Conscience of the West—the pattern of contemplation and self-examination that can foster self-reflection and produce great insights. Perhaps Paul did not invent that kind of contemplation and introspection, but he gets a lot of credit for it, and there’s no doubt that Romans has been influential in its practice.

I do not understand my own actions, Paul writes in Romans 7:15. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. A few verses later, Paul digs deeper: For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, he says, but not the ability.

Perhaps these words resonate for many of us. Perhaps many of us can relate to this experience of failure, and the frustration of being unable to live as the people we wish we could be. Wretched person that I am, Paul writes, his angst palpable at a distance of two thousand years, who will rescue me from this body of death? This is the introspective conscience: the struggle to reconcile intentions with behavior.

There is no time for introspection like a birthday or an anniversary. America has very frequently done the thing that it purports to hate, to paraphrase Paul in Romans. America has often betrayed its values and aspirations by the actions it has chosen. I do not think that it is unpatriotic to acknowledge this, any more than it was a betrayal for Paul to notice and name the distance between his desires and his choices. America has given in to the sin that dwells within, as Paul put it, and we have never, or perhaps only very rarely, fulfilled the desire to do the good that lies close at hand. I am speaking of slavery and racism of course, but also of the abandonment of the poor, the isolationism in the face of injustice, the fetishization of individual liberty at the expense of communal rights and well-being, the addiction to violence, and the denial of truth that so often clings closely to the heart of American life.

Now this latest anniversary—this latest birthday—arrives as We the People are mired in yet another fistfight over what kind of people we ought to be, and who gets to be included in that peoplehood. We meet this moment with a fresh round of ethnic nationalism, a new flirtation with authoritarianism and kleptocracy, and convulsions of anti-democratic sentiment. If we measure the distance between intention and action, between aspiration and reality, then we are probably no closer to achieving our highest ideals than was Thomas Jefferson, the slaveowner who drafted the Declaration and wrote that all men are created equal, even as he knew that he had never had the conviction to live as if that were really true.

We don’t actually know much about the things that made Paul feel like his actions were at odds with his wishes. Working only from the writings he left, there is much to criticize about Paul, but we don’t know what, specifically, made him feel like the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh, as he writes in 7:18. We don’t know much about Paul’s personal life at all, when it comes down to it, or about any of the moral failings that might have put him at odds with whatever better angels he was trying to heed. Maybe he was insufficiently prayerful. Maybe he was lustful in some way that he found unholy. Maybe he was too quick to anger, or too violent, or too proud, or too comfortable with power. Maybe he just wasn’t good enough. He didn’t tell us what it was, and so we just don’t know. And because of that, there’s no way to evaluate whether Paul’s introspective conscience ever did him any good, whether it ever led him any closer to the person he wished he could have been. Did he ever get any better at being the person he wanted to be? Did he ever close the gap between what he was and what he wanted to become? Do any of us ever become any better, or do we always stay who we already are?

That is the question facing the United States on this, its 250^th birthday. The current moment—the current President, the current administration, the current rattling gasps of White Supremacy, the current ineffective spasms of war, the current fever-dream of bigotry and bullshit—it will either kill us or we will get over it, but either way it will have been temporary. Afterwards, we have that second form of complication to contend with—that problem of America’s perpetual failure to be who we aspire to be. We will still be faced with the distance between our aspirations and our realities, between our rhetoric and our history, between our better angels and our truest selves. And when that time of introspection comes, when that moment of contemplation arrives, we might find ourselves crying out, as Paul does, who will rescue me from this body of death?

For all his manifest flaws—both the flaws on the page and the flaws that have remained hidden from us for two thousand years, the ones he was talking about in Romans 7—Paul seemed to have understood the value of taking a hard look at one’s self, and undertaking a frank assessment of the distance between what we are and who we want to be. He knew that introspection is the most important way of being human, and that the capacity and desire for change is holy and that it comes from God.

In the moments when I feel patriotic, it is rarely because I think America is good. When it comes to my country’s actions at home and across the world, I have long ago been disabused of the fantasy of American exceptionalism. I hold few illusions about America as a force for good, about America as a beacon on a hill, about America as a melting pot or a welcoming shore or as the greatest country on earth. But when I feel patriotic, it is usually because of what America has wished it could become—what America claims to want to be. I still sometimes believe us when we say, despite all the evidence, that we believe in the will of the people, that we believe in the rule of law applied equally, that we will welcome the immigrant and the refugee and that we will stand up for the weak and the oppressed and that we still believe that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. I feel patriotic when I think about what America has aspired to be, in its purest moments of introspection.

The distance facing America, at its semisesquicentennial, is the distance that Paul faced twenty centuries ago in Romans. It is the distance between desire and ability, between aspiration and reality, between who we are and what we wish we could become. Perhaps, in our next quarter-millennium, America can close that distance. Perhaps America can begin to become what it has always tried to be.