Predictably, Jim Wallis’s Religious Left Sojourners blog
dishonored Independence Day by featuring an op-ed
headlined “Why Christianity and July 4th are Incompatible.”
In it, a young pacifist pastor explained why Christians
can’t “celebrate” having “killed thousands upon thousands of
people because they [the British] were taxing us without giving
us representation in parliament.”
Of course, the reasons for the American Revolution were far
more complex than a tax dispute. As the Declaration of
Independence summarized the former colonists’ grievances against
their once monarch:
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our
towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign
mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and
tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and
perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and
totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on
the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the
executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall
themselves by their hands.
Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the American
colonists had already over a decade peacefully resisted various
royalist schemes to tax and exploit them. The Declaration of
Independence came after more than a year into the military
conflict, and the Continental Congress had initially convened
with hopes of reconciliation with Britain. The actual war did not
begin until British troops unsuccessfully attempted to seize both
the arsenal, and local leaders, of Massachusetts, in what
resulted in the Battles of Concord and Lexington. Led by the
royal governor, British troops attempted a similar plot in
Virginia. After failing, Virginia’s royal governor retreated to a
British royal ship and shelled various Virginia coastal towns,
which hardly excited local support for the royal cause. St.
Paul’s Episcopal Church in Norfolk still displays a British
cannonball in its walls.
Animosity towards America’s founding by the Religious and
Evangelical Left is perhaps best embodied by popular Anabaptist
theologian Stanley Hauerwas. Guru to much of the Evangelical
Left, he has pronounced July 4 one of history’s worst dates
because of the ostensible arrogance of founding a nation upon a
premise rather than a culture. The author of the
Sojourners’ piece was young Mennonite Brethren minister
Kurt Willems, who contemptuously asked in true Hauerwas style:
“Is it honorable to kill because people don’t like being
taxed?”
Mennonites, like most in the Anabaptist tradition, are
historically pacifist. But their pacifism historically was
primarily binding on themselves and not wielded as a
sanctimonious and accusatory sword against the vast majority of
Christians, and even against the state itself, for not equally
bending to pacifism. Hauerwas’s anti-Americanism and infallible
pacifism appeal to many on the Evangelical Left, who find it
seductively subversive, despite its separatism from universal
Christianity. It also generates a grossly distorted historical
narrative, in which the United States is the paramount global
villain, whose notions of “freedom” should be idolatrous to
Christians.
“I challenge the idea that my freedom to choose came from
our independence,” Willems insisted. “I am free to choose because
God has given me a free will. Just like the Christians who
suffered persecution during the first century and so on, I have
the ability to choose because of the grace of God.” Well, it’s
true that Christians always have the freedom of martyrdom. But
absolute pacifism insists that even in the face of a genocidal
holocaust, the faithful may only give non-violent witness. In
contrast, nearly all of Christianity has always insisted on the
state’s divine vocation to wield the sword against evil. And most
of Christianity has asserted Christians’ own personal
responsibility to defend the defenseless with more than their own
martyrdom.
Superficially, Willems concluded: “Even if we had not
separated ourselves from England, most likely it would have
turned out pretty good.” After all, “Canada never revolted, and
they are doing just fine.” He cited a decade old column by
evangelical scholar Mark Noll, himself sometimes aligned with the
Evangelical Left, who claimed the American Revolution failed to
meet Christian Just War principles. According to Noll, Americans
“fought a war to gain the kind of freedom that Canada, New
Zealand, and Australia were simply given after not too many
decades,” and establishing an “evil precedent” of America’s
ignoring “classical Christian justifications for warfare.”
Commonly many on the Evangelical Left, claiming not to be
pacifist, interpret Christian Just War criteria so tightly as to
make all armed force morally impossible. But there is also the
sometimes common assumption, almost unique to liberals in
Anglo-American culture, that all will be well, regardless.
Without exertion, America would have gently eased into
independence and democracy like Canada. Likewise, the slaves
would have been freed even without the Civil War, German
expansionism, even Nazism, would have eventually deflated on its
own, and the Soviet Union peacefully collapsed even without
American resolve.
Human history is far more complex than progressive
determinists assume. People of faith trust that Providence
ultimately prevails. But traditionalists also know that
Providence often permits evil to persist for long seasons,
depending on human choices. Would Britain’s dominions have
peacefully achieved their own democracy absent America’s example?
Would Britain itself have expanded its own once highly limited
franchise absent the American Revolution? Didn’t Britain’s own
constitutional freedoms depend partly on the Glorious Revolution
of 1688 and the parliamentary led civil war of the 1640s against
the Stuart monarchy? Absent the American Revolution and
subsequent British parliamentary reforms, would Britain have been
spared the revolutionary violence that shook continental Europe
for much of the early 19th century?
Only Providence truly knows. But America’s Founders
understood that lawful freedom is an exception to human history,
not the norm, and prevails only through great exertion and
vigilance. British premier Lord Lansdowne, who negotiated
Britain’s peace with the new United States, admiringly received
and displayed Gilbert’s Stuart’s famous portrait of George
Washington commissioned specifically for him. Lansdowne, like
many British who cherished lawful freedom, understood the
American Revolution was about significantly more than petty
complaints about taxes.
Will Sojourners feature an anti-Bastille Day
column later this month to excoriate the blood-soaked French
Revolution, which facilitated much of modernity’s worst
barbarities? In October, will Sojourners rail against
the Bolshevik Revolution, whose totalitarian victory ultimately
murdered tens of millions? Almost certainly not.
The historically unparalleled American Revolution,
initiated reluctantly, and led by temperate and mostly Christian
statesmen, created a republic that cherishes private property,
personal liberty, free speech, and religious freedom. They
believed in limited government because they knew that no state
could replicate the Kingdom of God, as utopians so often
disastrously insist. For this reason, among others, the Left,
including the Religious and Evangelical Left, often uniquely
despises the American Revolution and the incomparable republic it
founded.
