The pacifist perspective on the Revolution goes all but unheard today, as patriotic hymns are queued up for this Sunday’s service. Indeed, for many American Christians, the rightness of the Revolution — a conflict between two majority Christian armies that, in the general way of war, valued wealth and power above love and unity — goes without question. With President John Quincy Adams, much of the modern American church affirms in deed if not in word that, after Christmas, Independence Day is our “most joyous and most venerated festival,” a day to celebrate what is perceived as a major accomplishment in God’s plan for the world.
The trouble is that the pacifist churches were right. As theologian Greg Boyd has asked, “How can a holiday that celebrates one group of mostly professing Christians violently overthrowing another group of mostly professing Christians be venerated by people who are called to love their enemies and to be peacemakers, even if they happen to find themselves on the side that won?”
That’s not to say that I wish we were British or even that I won’t watch any fireworks. America is my home. I’m thankful to live in a nation that from the start has placed a historically high value on freedom and individual rights, and I, too, object to taxation without representation. As a libertarian, my views on the appropriate role of government are almost certainly closer than average to the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers that Independence Day commemorates.
But it is to say that I can’t celebrate, even indirectly, the unknown tens of thousands of deaths that were the price of independence.
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