[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]I’ve had the privilege of serving[.small-caps] since 2018 on the US Semiquincentennial Commission, the bipartisan organization created by Congress for the planning of events relating to the nation’s 250th anniversary. I call it a privilege, and it is. But I have to admit that the work hasn’t always felt that way, because of the deep divisions among us that are so characteristic of our times, and that seem to find their way into most of our ­professional and social interactions. [.article__paragraph--cap]

A case in point. I recall one commission meeting in which we spent a large part of our time debating a question whose answer one might have thought was a given. Should July 4, 2026, be treated as a day of celebration? Or would it be better to call it a commemoration? An anniversary? Or an even more neutral word, observance? Or something else? Perhaps a day of lamentation and repentance?

We never resolved the issue. It just faded away as the momentum of events overtook it. But it was startling for me to realize that there were duly appointed commissioners who questioned the idea that our nation’s reaching of this landmark, 250 years as an independent republic, ought to be a cause for celebration. One might have thought that this was a baseline, something we all could agree on even in contentious times. Or one might have thought that those who objected would have declined to serve on the commission. But neither assumption was borne out.

These objectors are not alone. This negative point of view is reflected elsewhere in our society, and not least among those who shape and render the most influential accounts of our past. The New York Times’s “The 1619 Project” asks us to consider slavery and racism as the true foundation of the American nation. This interpretation has been introduced into the bloodstream of our schools by means of history curricula funded by the Pulitzer Center. It is a project, which means that it is a plan for accomplishing something.

Another example. The outgoing executive director of the American Historical Association, James R. Grossman, has urged the White House to treat the nation’s 250th birthday as a secular version of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which requires Jews to reflect on their sins, repent, confess before God, and seek God’s forgiveness.

Now, Grossman is a decent and well-meaning man, who doesn’t want us to celebrate the Fourth in a jingoistic or unreflective way. I don’t take issue with that, although I think the danger is less that we will remember the Fourth too favorably than that we will fail to remember it at all. I also don’t take issue with his belief in the value of a nation periodically engaging in moral self-examination. In fact, we used to do just that, and quite religiously. The Continental Congress set aside the day of May 17, 1776, for “humiliation, fasting, and prayer,” and urged citizens to “confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and by a sincere repentance and amendment of life, appease his [God’s] righteous displeasure, and through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.” (It’s worth noting they sought forgiveness from God, not from other groups of people.) And Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of March 1863 designated April 30 as “a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer”:

I do hereby request all the people to abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite at their several places of public worship and their respective homes in keeping the day holy to the Lord and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.

This may not be such a bad idea, even if it does seem to offend the First Amendment’s prohibition of a national religious establishment. But a “secular” Yom Kippur is still inconceivable to me, since it does not acknowledge the God to whom Jews’ repentance is directed.

If there is a season to everything, and a time to every purpose under heaven (Eccles. 3:1), then there are right and wrong ways to observe the landmarks of life. It simply does not make sense for secular authorities to use this extraordinary national birthday as the vehicle for eliciting waves of national guilt and launching a search for means of atonement. Compare this to, say, the way we characteristically observe a human birthday. When someone turns one hundred years old, do we see it as the opportunity for a struggle session, in which we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life? Or do we instead use it as an opportunity for the expression of love, and of our gratitude for the remarkable fact that this person is still among us? To what season does this occasion belong?

[.pull-quote]When someone turns one hundred years old, do we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life?[.pull-quote]

What if we owe our very being to the person being celebrated? The Bible commands us to honor our father and our mother, with the promise that we will enjoy the fruits of longevity if we do. We honor our parents because they are the physical source of our being, without whose act of union we could not have come into existence, and whose nurture raised us to adulthood. The honor due to them is thus fundamental and unchanging, even if it is not all-encompassing. The commandment does not cancel the equally fundamental act of independence in which the man “shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife” (Gen. 2:24). Nor does it cancel the freedom to disagree and criticize. But it forms the primal ground upon which the capacity for a critical spirit must rest.

The comparison is imperfect, since an ­individual and a polity are two different things. And yet it is not inappropriate to point to their similarities, just as philosophers since Plato have done when analogizing the city and the soul. Surely America itself, for whose sake so many individuals have willingly sacrificed so much over the course of so many years, deserves a similar season of gratitude. The recriminations can come later, if they are necessary, and they will be given all the more weight if they have been preceded by love.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]So, then, how do these[.small-caps] considerations affect the way we think about the best way to celebrate the Fourth of July at a time of bitter cultural division?[.article__paragraph--cap]

In the first place, we should recognize and accept the fact that division, dissension, and conflict have been our lot since the beginning of American history. Contentious times are nothing new for us. The American Revolution itself was in many respects a bloody civil war, since roughly a third of the population chose to remain loyal to the British king. The presidential election of 1800 was so fierce and ugly that it seemed to threaten the nation’s future. The controversy over the admission of Missouri as a state in 1820 was “a fire-bell in the night” to Jefferson, tolling the end of the union. The decade of the 1850s was charged with apprehension over the possibility of national disunion. And a brutal civil war in the 1860s produced what is still the bloodiest outcome in all of American military history. And yet the union managed to survive.

[.pull-quote]Division, dissension, and conflict have been our lot since the beginning of American history. Contentious times are nothing new for us.[.pull-quote]

I could go on. There were the enormous social disruptions and labor uprisings that came with rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century. There was the intense controversy over American involvement in both world wars. There were the myriad tensions of the Cold War, which profoundly affected all aspects of society. The domestic upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s were arguably worse than any similar discontent today. In one eighteen-month period in the early 1970s, the FBI recorded some 2,500 domestic bombings. But we survived that disorder, too. Our traditional motto, E pluribus unum, one out of many, has been more than a gauzy truism.

Why have we survived? One of the chief reasons is that we are a land of hope, drawing people from many lands, who share a forward-looking aspiration for a life beyond the boundaries and constraints into which they were born. We have been a land of second chances.

But at the same time, we should remember that looking forward also means looking backward. The two ways of seeing are connected in the human soul. As Edmund Burke said, “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” We are better able to imagine and work toward a tomorrow for today’s children when we remember, with gratitude, that we were children too, and as such, the embodiment of our predecessors’ projections into the future.

And so we must set about thinking our way back, through this chain of causes and effects, to the first Fourth of July in 1776, the date on which the United States emerged as a free and independent nation. There was nothing inevitable about the Founders’ triumph. When the Declaration’s signatories pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, they were not speaking rhetorically. Blasted hopes and humiliation were a real possibility in such a mismatched conflict.

Today we know more than ever before about America’s past sins, thanks to the labors of historians. But we usually neglect to weigh those failings against the dismal history of most of the rest of the world throughout time. We forget how remarkable our pioneering experiment in self-rule has been compared with the want and inequity characterizing most of human history. We forget what an exceptional thing it was when, for the first time in human history, a nation explicitly committed itself to the principle that liberty and equality are an endowment bestowed upon all human beings.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]And so the shared remembrance[.small-caps] of these things, and of the efforts made to secure them, is of crucial importance to us. The French writer Ernest Renan, in his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?,” said a nation is fundamentally “a soul, a spiritual principle,” constituted not only by “present-day consent” but also by “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories.”[.article__paragraph--cap]

Renan opposed the idea that nations should be united by racial, linguistic, geographical, religious, or material factors. Neither was the principle of active consent sufficient, without the added substance of the past in which that consent was embedded. Yet Renan was no Pollyanna. He was well aware that nation-making is not without its dark side, and that remembering is likely to be accompanied by forgetting. Here is how he put it:

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality; the union of northern France with the Midi was the result of massacres and terror lasting for the best part of a century.

One thinks here of the famous words of Walter Benjamin: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

This is part of what we struggle with in American history, the realization that we have buried or forgotten a great deal to get to where we are now. How much of that should be remembered and even litigated? Remembrance is necessary, but so, too, is forgiveness. We cannot live without both. Our future depends on learning to remember but also on remembering rightly. I wonder if our inability to celebrate arises from guilt-ridden hearts that cannot bear their guilt except by projecting it onto others, particularly those in the past.

[.pull-quote]Perhaps on this auspicious anniversary we should take time out from our current quarrels long enough to raise a toast to those who made our quarrels possible.[.pull-quote]

This reflex of all-consuming guilt has become a central problem facing the Western world, whether the guilt involves sins of conquest and colonialism, sins of forced nationalization, sins of war and mass murder, sins of wealth, sins of environmental abuse and despoliation, sins relating to almost everything that has served directly or indirectly to aid the West’s dominance over the human world and the natural world, even things as fundamental as the domestication of animals, which made possible the turn toward settled community life in the Neolithic Age. At times, it seems we are on a path of self-negation, made interesting only by watching the intramural games by which individuals and groups try to excuse themselves from the condemnation that is due to all.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]What, then, should we say[.small-caps] about the all-too-human leaders who brought this nation into being a quarter of a millennium ago? We can teach our children this: All of us are flawed. The Founders were not exceptions to that rule. Neither are we. But what is not normal or usual are those rare moments in history when flawed people come together to produce extraordinary things. Not flawless things, but great things, things worthy of our admiration and gratitude. The collection of remarkable men and women at America’s beginning, at this remarkable juncture of human history, each contributed something to the outcome, even as they sinned and quarreled. Perhaps on this auspicious anniversary we should give thanks for their vision and sacrifice, and take time out from our current quarrels long enough to raise a toast to those who made our quarrels possible. And to one another, whose job it is to carry on. [.article__paragraph--cap]

We will do that job better if we take to heart a venerable idea, counterintuitive though it may be, that needs to be instilled time and again in each new generation. It is the concept of a loyal opposition. We can be utterly convinced of the rectitude of our position, and yet understand that others may disagree – that in fact, we may even be wrong – and the strength and durability of our democratic institutions is more important than our triumph on any particular matter. At some point, a larger loyalty will be asked of us, one just as large as our loyalty to our own convictions. We need to develop the capacity for that larger loyalty if our democracy is to survive and thrive. It is a capacity that, looked at properly, is a form of love.