Tomorrow the country will set off about two hundred million dollars worth of fireworks, grill enough meat to feed a small nation, and post the flag emoji somewhere between a sale on patio furniture and a barbecue recipe. None of that is wrong. A free people are entitled to enjoy themselves, and a hot dog on the Fourth is close enough to a sacrament that I will not quibble.
But somewhere in the smoke and the potato salad it is worth stopping for a minute to ask what the day actually commemorates. Not the cookout. The document. And not the document as a greeting card, but the document as the men who signed it understood it — which was as a death warrant they were signing with their own names.
The Line Nobody Reads Out Loud
Everyone can quote the opening. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Self-evident truths. It is the closing line that nobody puts on the bumper sticker, and it is the only line that actually cost anything.
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Read that the way they meant it. Fifty-six men put their names on a piece of paper that the most powerful empire on earth considered an act of treason. The penalty for treason was not a strongly worded reply. It was the rope. Every man who signed that document understood he was making a personal wager — his life, everything he owned, and his name — against the chance that a ragtag collection of colonies could defeat the British Empire.
A good many of them lost the bet and paid in full. Some had their homes burned and their property seized. Some died in poverty. Some watched sons die in the war the signature started. They knew the odds when they signed. They signed anyway. That is what the word pledge meant to them. Not a slogan. A debt they were prepared to pay with their bodies.
We have turned the sacred honor of fifty-six condemned men into a three-day weekend with good parking. They would forgive us the cookout. I am less sure they would forgive us forgetting what the cookout is supposed to be standing on top of.
The Wall They Built On Purpose
Here is where I am going to lose the folks who have been cheering for the last few weeks, so brace up.
Those same men — many of them serious Christians, some of them skeptics, a few of them something harder to categorize — did something that an awful lot of their self-appointed heirs have spent the last few years trying to undo. They built a wall between the government and the church. On purpose. Not because they hated religion. Because they had read enough history to know exactly what happens when the two get into bed together.
They had the example in front of them. They knew about the established churches of Europe, where the state picked the religion and the religion blessed the state and dissent from either got you jailed, exiled, or burned. They knew about the religious tests that kept men out of office for believing the wrong things. They knew about the Church of England, against which a good many of their own grandparents had fled across an ocean. They had seen what an institutional church does when it gets the sword in its hand, and what the state does when it gets the pulpit. They wanted no part of either arrangement on these shores.
So they wrote it down. No religious test for office. No establishment of religion. The free exercise of it protected, and the government forbidden from running it. It was one of the most radical things in the entire founding — the deliberate separation of the holy from the powerful, by men who in many cases were genuinely holy and genuinely powerful and knew better than to combine the two.
What That Wall Was Actually For
Now understand what that wall was protecting, because the modern argument gets it exactly backward.
The wall was not built to protect the government from the church. It was built to protect the church from the government — and to protect the church from itself.
The founders understood something this blog has spent all summer documenting. An institution that gets handed worldly power will use that power to protect its own arrangement, every single time, regardless of what it claims its mission is. They had watched the established churches of Europe do exactly that for centuries — bless the king, sanctify the war, brand the dissenter a heretic, and call the whole filthy bargain the will of God. They did not want the American church anywhere near that temptation, because they had seen what it does to a church to win that kind of power.
A church that needs the state to enforce its doctrine has already admitted its doctrine cannot stand on its own. A faith that requires the magistrate’s sword to compel belief has stopped being a faith and become a department of the government. The founders knew it. The framers of the First Amendment knew it. And they built the wall not as an insult to religion but as a kindness to it — to keep it free, voluntary, and uncorrupted by the one thing that has corrupted every institutional church that ever grabbed for it.
The Merger They Tried To Prevent
Which brings the whole summer full circle, and I did not plan it this way, but here we are.
For weeks now I have written about the merger — the fusion of the political machine and institutional religion into one apparatus that serves itself and answers to no one. I have written about the Johnson Amendment falling, about politicians of both parties renting out pulpits, about a sanctuary in Atlanta turned into a campaign stop with a donate button stapled to the sermon. I have taken fire from both directions for it, which is generally how you know you are standing in about the right spot.
Here is what the Fourth of July has to say about all of it.
The men we are celebrating tomorrow built a wall specifically to prevent the thing we are now watching happen with our own eyes. They separated the church and the state because they understood — from blood-soaked European experience — that when you merge the two, you do not get a holier government. You get a corrupted church and a tyrannical state, each using the other, and a people who can no longer tell where the worship ends and the politics begins.
We are tearing that wall down from both sides and calling it patriotism on one end and prophetic witness on the other. The founders would recognize exactly what we are doing. They crossed an ocean and signed a death warrant to get away from it.
What Is Actually Worth Celebrating
I am not telling you to skip the cookout. Grill the meat. Light the fireworks. Wave the flag, and mean it, because there is still plenty here worth meaning it about. The experiment those fifty-six men signed their lives away to begin is the most successful attempt at self-government in human history, and the fact that it is currently being strained does not erase what it has been or what it still could be.
But when you look at that flag tomorrow, remember it was raised by men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor — and who understood that some walls are built out of love, not hostility. The wall between the altar and the throne was one of them. They built it because they loved both the country and the church too much to watch them devour each other the way they had devoured each other everywhere else on earth.
The question for us, two hundred and fifty years on, is whether we have the sense to leave a load-bearing wall standing — or whether we will keep knocking it down for the short-term pleasure of seeing our own team in the pulpit, and find out the hard way why they built it in the first place.
Happy Independence Day. Read the last line of the Declaration before you light anything. It is the only part that ever cost anybody anything.
Truth Over Comfort. Always.
