Pastor's Corner: Interrogating our freedom

Do you feel free?

This weekend, our nation celebrates Independence Day. Fourth of July holiday rituals are central to the production of the American mythos — what our nation attempts to tell itself with all the cookouts, parades, and fireworks is that we are free, a nation governed by the people for the people. All the hot dogs slathered in condiments and the carefully matching red, white and blue outfits aren’t just holiday paraphernalia; they are gestures that in some way attempt to enact and proclaim the famous declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But, as Martin Luther King Jr., memorably observed in his “I Have a Dream” speech, the Declaration of Independence was not a report on something already achieved, but “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” Our democracy, our governance by the people for the people, recognizing the equal dignity and rights of all persons, has never been fully realized, but is always in the process of a long, painful, contradictory becoming. When you watch the fireworks this weekend, think of the celebrations not so much as “Mission Accomplished,” but hopeful signs that the best is yet to come.

Now doesn’t necessarily seem like a particularly hopeful period in the experiment of American democracy. The continued wave of protests around our country for the basic dignity of black lives remind us that we still have so far to go before we have fully lived into the to declaration that all persons are created equal with certain unalienable rights. The recent calls for Juneteenth to become a national holiday are another sign that free and equal status under the law for the majority of our citizens — women, people of color, poor white men, and youth — was not inherent to our republic’s founding but something still in the process of being achieved at great cost all these years later. And while we reckon with the injustices of our history, the threat of COVID-19 continues, generating its own matrix of concerns about personal liberty and communal obligation.

If you do nothing else this weekend, perhaps as an act of civic dedication spend some time reading Frederick Douglass’ powerful 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass, a once-enslaved person who taught himself to read and write and became one of America’s greatest men of letters, challenges Americans to live up to the high ideals of our founding. Even as he is painfully honest about the ways our republic fell short of its own principles, Douglass insists: “The principles contained in (the Declaration of Independence) are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

The freedom proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence won’t be realized until we embody it in our body politic, when with all the strength and sinews of our populous we care with equal attention to all persons whom God has created equal.

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Pastor Megan Hoewisch

First Lutheran Church