Here’s a short story about how millennials like me came to have a complicated relationship with America.
Those of us who attended public school grew up with a sense of civic patriotism. There was the daily Pledge of Allegiance, flags in every classroom, and the national anthem at every sporting event. We learned the great stories that shaped the American mythos: the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and more. Many of us had veteran grandparents who also embodied a love of America, motivated by their experience fighting Nazi and Communist ideologies. America’s unique balance of pluralism, freedom, and the rule of law led to prosperity for all, making this the greatest country that ever existed.
Things changed in high school. We were old enough to begin studying the difficult aspects of America’s past. We learned and understood how badly American slaves were treated. We studied the Trail of Tears and the list of broken treaties made with the tribes of the Great Plains. We discussed contemporary American failures, like the Japanese internment camps during World War II and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Our image of America’s unquestioned goodness began to crack.
Universities drew on the failures of America’s past to reject the entire American myth. The Founding Fathers were businessmen who saw revolution as a way to make money. Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite who believed in “unalienable rights” and still owned slaves. Studies of the Jim Crow South questioned the progress made in extending America’s freedoms to its black citizens. By this point, it was not just unfashionable or ignorant, but morally dubious, to love America and its founding principles.
Many of my peers from my generation have stayed here, and I hope things will change for them. I have come to believe that America is, as they say, the greatest country in the world, and it took three more events in my twenties for me to realize that.
The first event was a trip to China in 2008. You may have heard that China is now embarking on a mass internment program for its Uyghur (pronounced WEE-gher) citizens. My time in China took me to a region heavily populated by Uyghurs, a region I remember and love 16 years later. Hearing that modern nations are still ready and capable of such tyranny against people I know made me all the more grateful that such practices are an American heresy. Sometimes you don’t know how good you are until you realize how bad it is for others.
The second event in my life was studying religious history in seminary. It is impossible to understand the American policy of deinstitutionalization of religion without studying the wars that pitted Catholics against Protestants in Europe. The founders wanted to protect the nation from religious violence, and through deinstitutionalization, America is one of the only nations in world history to have avoided the scourge of large-scale religious violence. It is an example of pluralism that remains the model for the world, a puzzle of peace that the founders found a way to solve.
The third event in my life was a conversation with a social justice activist. The conversation, cordial and stimulating, took a turn when I asked her about adoption by people of mixed race. My wife and I had begun to consider fertility treatment and were considering adoption in our future. The activist stated that white Americans had oppressed black Americans to the point that adoption was simply stealing their children, a patently absurd conclusion to anyone who understands how adoption works. From that conversation, I learned that the critical race theorists who sought to destroy the American myth had nothing worth replacing it with. To criticize America for its lack of progress is to ignore the progress it continues to make. No nation has failed, reflected, repented, and realigned itself to work through its past sins like the United States.
It’s been 248 years since the most successful social experiment was conducted to solve the world’s most serious problems: sectarian violence, fundamentalist oppression, cultural misogyny, income inequality, racial hatred, poverty, state tyranny, and more. The stories I was told as a child may be more complicated than I was led to believe, but these great myths point to a larger reality. The world needs more America, not less, and this Fourth of July, I am grateful to celebrate the freedoms it rightly guarantees.
NOTE: Pastor Bryan will not be attending his religious duties and publishing this column during the month of July. New columns will continue to be published in July; however, Pastor Bryan will not be available until August 1st.
