Friday Roundup (7/4/25)
Happy Birthday America! I'm on vacation
Hey friends, I’ve been on vacation this week in Florida. Hope you are wishing America a happy birthday today as we like to do: eat lots of food, stay up late, allow thousands of amateurs to set off explosions in their backyards, and hope for the best!
Celebrate the 4th today by:
Reading some Walt Whitman. Hate him or love him, he understood America about as much as anyone who has ever lived. Here he is, speaking on behalf of the country as a whole back in the 1800s:
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,
One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,
A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;
At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,
At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,
At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,
Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,)
Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,
A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.
I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)
Reading the beginning of the Declaration of Independence in full! We should never take for granted how incredible (and rare!) it is, historically speaking, to live under a government in which we have a say. These are some of the most explosive and consequential words ever put to pen:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
Watching JFK’s inauguration speech from 1961. One of the clearest articulations of the missional nature of what it means to be American. The speech reveals a lot of the deep Christian assumptions we bring to the democracy in which we live:
Checking out this Firebrand article about the Americanization of Francis Asbury. A lot of Methodists were loyalists, against the separatist cause for independence. Bishop Francis Asbury, born in England, was one of the rare bishops to become fully Americanized, though he too was not fully supportive of the war. But by the end, he had come around to the colonists’ cause:
When word came on May 10, 1782, that Britain had at last acknowledged American independence, Asbury responded simply by writing, "May it be so! The Lord does what to Him seemeth good." For even as hostilities ended, Asbury's chief concern for his land was not its political fortunes but the "gracious revival of religion." "O America! America!" he opined in an August 1783 letter to George Shadford. "It will certainly be the glory of the world for religion."
Only one year after the final treaty that formally recognized the United States of America was signed in Paris, in Baltimore a new and fully independent religious body was birthed as well, the Methodist Episcopal Church. No longer muzzled by Maryland laws, Francis Asbury was present and, perhaps to absolutely no one's surprise, Asbury was consecrated by Thomas Coke as a bishop of the American church that he had come to serve only thirteen years earlier. Imbibing the democratic spirit of the age, however, rather than simply accept Wesley's appointment to serve in such a capacity, Asbury insisted that it first be voted upon by his fellow preachers, and so indeed it was. His "Americanization" was largely complete.
That’s it for today! Enjoy the 4th, be thankful for your freedoms and those who defend them, and thank God for all of it.
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