This year, the Trump administration dispatched a fleet of six Freedom Trucks, traveling across the country to promote the story of American exceptionalism on the United States’ 250th birthday. Many visitors report the exhibit champions a sanitized version of U.S. history focused on the founding American value of human equality. It tells the story of slavery’s abolition and the late 18th century ordinance barring the seizure of “Indians … lands and property,” but omits any mention of the suffering of the enslaved for hundreds of years or the widespread theft of Native land.
Kristopher Norris
Such efforts to advance a whitewashed and even propagandized version of American history follow Trump’s order to remove references to slavery or the genocide of Native Americans from National Parks grounds and the administration’s skirmishes with academic freedom. These efforts have taken on new life as the semiquincentennial approaches.
The Freedom Truck exhibit actually references Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” a withering critique of American hypocrisy during slavery. The exhibit quotes Douglass’ appeal to the Declaration of Independence in his case against slavery but fails to mention any of his criticisms of American founders, religion or values.
“It’s our 250th birthday, and no one seems to know what we’re celebrating.”
On the whole, this year’s America 250 celebration has felt muted, even forced, amid deeply partisan division. As an Atlantic journalist put it, “It’s our 250th birthday, and no one seems to know what we’re celebrating.”
The national festivities have been almost completely overtaken by Trump’s partisan Freedom 250 commission, to MAGA and evangelical zeal, which includes a UFC fight on the White House lawn, a sparsely-attended State Fair on the National Mall, and the Freedom Truck brigade. But it began as a bipartisan effort to celebrate 250 years of American history, a history that despite a wall of separation is fraught with the entanglement of patriotism and faith.
What should we do?
Which raises the question: How ought moderate and progressive white Christians to think about this moment?
We live in a period fueled by partisan mistrust and fear. One recent survey found a majority of Americans think their fellow citizens are “bad people,” the only nation in the study that held such negative views. And we can’t agree on how to understand or teach our history. We are caught in a cycle of reactive histories, with conservatives and evangelicals responding to the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s that highlighted the struggles of the marginalized and oppressed. Now fueled by those in power, conservative politicians and pastors gloss over the country’s sins out of fear that reckoning too closely with the darker aspects of our nation’s past will continue to erode its patriotism.
Douglass declares early in his speech, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” A day in which white Americans celebrating a freedom withheld from African Americans only revealed the nation’s hypocrisy, that “America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” Douglass claims America does not need a light to shine upon the pristine city on a hill, but a refining fire to strip away all the false pretense.
Current efforts to neglect the unsavory parts of our history like slavery and plantation life, Jim Crow and lynching (or to even redeem them), and the concrete effects of this history that linger on into the present, enable beliefs in an equality achieved — that everyone stands on level ground, at the same starting line. But these are efforts to erase collective memory, with the consequence of suppressing the voices of and opportunities for those who have been oppressed by it, often to the raucous approval of Christians.
But it’s also important to confess that the darker parts of our story don’t just lie in the past.
Just this year, 165 school children were killed by a U.S. bomb in Iran; detention warehouses with documented inhumane conditions are packed with immigrants who’ve been ripped from their families and communities. Such atrocities may cause us to blame the incompetence and cruelty of the Trump era and wish for the quiet presidency of Obama, the steadfast leadership of FDR, or the moral witness of Jimmy Carter. But we must remember none are immune from the temptations of American empire and the harms inflicted persist across administrations. They are baked into our leadership and our national identity.
The white American church
Douglass places blame for such injustice squarely on the white American church, which he says more than any other institution should understand the evil of slavery and racism but is one of its most ardent supporters. His words to the church 170 years ago still ring true to congregations, pastors and Christians still comfortable within our “anesthetizing stained-glass windows” (to borrow a phrase from King), while injustice continues to reign around us.
“Your sounds of rejoicing, … your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings,” he says, sounding like the prophet Isaiah, are “mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy.” He argues churches that regard Christianity “simply as a form of worship” inevitably favor “the rich against the poor, which exalts the proud above the humble,” and end up siding with the oppressors.
“For churches, avoiding politics is a myth; staying neutral is choosing a side.”
A reminder that, for churches, avoiding politics is a myth; staying neutral is choosing a side.
This article was inspired by, and in some ways is a response to, my friend David Gushee’s excellent piece in BNG last week. Gushee laments being swayed by what he calls “white liberal Christian optimism,” the ability “to recognize that the U.S. was damaged by its original sins, certainly, but also believing the U.S. was making considerable progress toward recognition and repair.” Now, however, he understands that being white allowed us the privilege of that optimism.
Gushee’s revelation reminds me of a book by Miguel de la Torre in which he recommends that Christians, especially privileged white Christians, embrace a hopelessness — by which he means “an act of courage to embrace reality and to act even when the odds are in favor of defeat.” This is a rejection of the false history and glorified optimism of Freedom 250. It is not despair but a sober recognition of our sins and a brave assertion of “faith without certainty.” As de la Torre says, sounding a lot like Douglass, “Hopelessness is the precursor to resistance and revolution.”
An excavation of our history
If de la Torre and Gushee are correct, that only by shedding a naïve optimism can we be of any use to the oppressed and that a faith without certainty breeds revolution, then that faith can only begin by a serious and sober excavation of our complete history, not the Freedom Truck variety. As Gushee says, “Our history and culture have white racism baked in. Think of a big 250th birthday cake. … The poison is in the cake. It always has been in the cake.” But the cake conceals.
Theologian Angela Sims begins her book Lynched with a story of a lynching tree now hidden within an upper-income, mostly white neighborhood. The elderly pastor of a nearby Black congregation tells her the memories of that tree are seared into his mind, but now faded behind cookie-cutter suburban homes. I cannot think of a more apt metaphor for a nation celebrating 250 years of freedom while detaining immigrant families seeking the American Dream and gutting voting rights for Black Americans.
“The 250-year-and-beyond history of America is the history of whiteness.”
As I’ve written elsewhere, the impact of whiteness — and let’s be clear, the 250-year-and-beyond history of America is the history of whiteness — is to create the conditions to forget our past. As Applebaum writes in the Atlantic article, whether one promotes a revisionist history that celebrates homogeneity and sees immigrants and minorities as threats or a history that reflects the harms inflicted by systemic racism, both perspectives “agree that the history of the United States has been defined by whiteness.” The only way to resist falling into Douglass’ “false past” and leaning into a “false future” that perpetuates the same sins is to rightly remember.
As Christians, we are practitioners of a faith with remembering at its center. After delivering the Ten Commandments, Moses tells the Israelites, “Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” They are not only commanded to recall God’s salvation but also their sins. Later Moses says, “Remember and do not forget how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in the wilderness.”
In his letter to the Ephesian church in Revelation, John calls the congregation to “remember from where you have fallen” as the first step toward their repentance. In Holy Week, we remember a Passion journey from an upper room where Jesus tells his followers to eat and drink in memory of him to his death on a Friday that we call Good, and we don’t look away. “This Do in Remembrance of Me,” reads the inscription on the Communion tables in front of the altar of nearly every Christian congregation.
Christianity is a faith that calls on the faithful to remember the good and the painful and to allow all of it to shape our character, buttress our faith and bind us to one another.
What to the white Christian is America 250? It is an opportunity. To remember, to atone, and to empower those that have been marginalized since before 1776. It is an opportunity to cultivate practices of remembrance — retelling the collective history of our nation, fully — in order to truly see the way it still has impacts today. True repentance and repair can begin only after rightly remembering both the light and the dark.
“The conscience of the nation must be roused,” Douglass proclaimed. “For it is not light that is needed, but fire.”
Kristopher Norris is author of several books in theology, including Liberating Jesus: Christian Ethics for Privileged People, Virtue and Liberation in the Ethics of Bonhoeffer, and Witnessing Whiteness. A former Baptist pastor, he earned a Ph.D. in Christian ethics from the University of Virginia and currently works with the Shalom Project of Winston-Salem, N.C.