After I got back from a trip to Scandinavia last month, I shared my five favorite things about that region. So this Fourth of July, it only seems fair that I write an equivalent post about my native land.
While I’m not a nationalist, I am rather patriotic. I love many things about the United States, without necessarily seeing those qualities as unique to this land — or the result of divine blessing or covenant.
“Spacious skies… amber waves of grain”
Diversity will be a recurring theme today, and the first version of American variety that enthralls inhabitants and visitors alike has little to do with humans. It’s not just that the boundaries of this country contain everything from sublime mountains to sparkling waters, it’s that the former vary from the lush greenery of the Appalachians to the towering majesty of the Rockies, the latter from rolling rivers to Great Lakes. In part, that variety is a function of sheer size, but you can even find it within individual states like North Carolina, where you’re always less than a few hours’ drive from the mountains in one direction and the ocean in another.
Or in New York, where idyllic countryside soon turns into the world’s quintessential modern city… which encloses one of the world’s most famous green spaces. Americans haven’t always taken good care of their biodiversity, but the movements that have produced parks and protected wildernesses reflect some of our noblest instincts and best ideas.
“Out of many, one”
Then there’s America’s diversity of people and cultures. Scandinavia is less homogenous than it used to be, but spending days amid the relative1 sameness of Norway and Denmark brought into relief how much I cherish the many ways that immigrants from around the world have contributed to the United States.
As much as I respect what my own Swedish, German, and English ancestors did in coming to this country in the late 19th century, I’m grateful for the people from the Global South who have more recently made a home in the frigid north that is Minnesota. I’m proud that our state has offered sanctuary to so many refugees from places as diverse as Southeast Asia (Hmong and Karen) and East Africa (Somali), and my highlight of 2024 was getting to preach (in translation) to a Spanish-speaking congregation made of of immigrants from around Central and South America. Hard-working and entrepreneurial, such immigrants enrich our economy as well as our culture.
While xenophobic resentment of such newcomers remains the potent factor in our politics it’s long been, this American admires the patriotism of people who chose a country that was but an accident of birth for him. And this Christian is especially excited about the ways that such population movements are energizing the church in this country — and teaching followers of Jesus how to live hospitably alongside people who hold other beliefs.
The spirit of voluntary association
Of course, finding unity out of its diversity has always been a challenge for Americans, one made harder in recent years by the convergence of political tribalism and expressive individualism that
discussed this week at Substack. But historically, one way that Americans have turned many into one is through the application of a principle that French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville observed almost two hundred years ago:When you allow [people] to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it.
I doubt that Tocqueville had in mind anything like the open-air production of High School Musical that our family attended last weekend. But watching that community theater troupe did demonstrate how his core idea endures: left free to associate as they see fit, Americans of differing ages, backgrounds, and beliefs come together out of shared interest or need to found an astonishing variety of associations. The IRS currently recognizes nearly 2 million tax-exempt organizations and charitable trusts that produce plays, play pickleball, pressure politicians, and practice piety (among many other activities).
Best of all, in my particular experience, Americans have gathered together to offer each other’s children higher education. Much as I appreciate our public institutions of higher learning, what’s most astonishing about the variety of the country’s 4,000-some colleges and universities is that the majority of them are private organizations, founded out of distinct educational (and often religious) impulses to offer more and more options to more and more students.
Music!
I’m also a big fan of the voluntary associations that have no purpose other than to make music, like the community band one of my sisters-in-law plays in and the children’s and women’s choirs another sister-in-law directs. And such groups sure have a vast repertoire to choose from, even if they stick to homegrown music.
One of the best things I did as a college student was to take a general education course on American vernacular music. I can’t remember every unit, but the class covered everything from zydeco to klezmer, conjunto to hip-hop. We encountered virtuosos everywhere from bluegrass to jazz, but we also listened to field recordings of amateurs singing shape-note hymns and playing blues on guitars made out of cigar boxes. And while some traditions started out of immigrants’ desires to preserve the cultures of homelands, American musics have collided and combined in unpredictable and fascinating ways.
Those new and constantly evolving genres let us not only yearn for the past but describe the present and envision possible futures. Indeed, I daresay that American music is the best embodiment of Americans’ commitment to free expression, conveying everything from love of God to love of a more romantic sort to love of country.
“The belief that America is not yet finished”
But here too, there’s diversity. American patriotic music, for example, doesn’t just ask God to bless this land, but challenges Americans to critique and improve their country. The music of protest and dissent expresses my last favorite thing about the United States: that for all their blindness to injustice and capacity for cruelty, Americans are also capable of self-criticism and self-improvement, social reform and national renewal.
Undoubtedly, the most remarkable version of this national trait emerges in response to the nation’s original sin: white supremacy, institutionalized in slavery, segregation, and other systems.
“Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones five years ago this summer, in the Pulitzer-winning essay that opened The 1619 Project. And that “ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended.”
Yet “for generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.” To read the full book that grew out of Hannah-Jones’ controversial project is to encounter an idealism that has survived inequality and injustice to improve America with boundless creativity — in the arts and religion, language and food, but also in politics and law. “No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it,” continued Hannah-Jones. “And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good,” just as their historic struggle for equal rights “laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle.”
So let me close this 4th of July post with my favorite expression of American patriotism, Barack Obama’s attempt to explain the significance of what protesters like John Lewis did in Selma, Alabama in 1965 — not just for the civil rights movement, for all of the United States. Fittingly, this section of his 2015 speech closes with America’s first Black president quoting white slaveholders who could never quite realize the ideals they espoused:
As we commemorate their achievement, we are well-served to remember that at the time of the marches, many in power condemned rather than praised them. Back then, they were called Communists, or half-breeds, or outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse –- they were called everything but the name their parents gave them. Their faith was questioned. Their lives were threatened. Their patriotism challenged.
And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place? What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people –- unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many, coming together to shape their country’s course?
What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?
That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or a static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents: “We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
“Relative” being a key word here. Our local guide in Oslo was an immigrant from Venezuela, and that city (like Copenhagen) offered plenty of international dining variety. But Sweden is even less like the blonde-haired, blue-eyed stereotype — at least a quarter of its current population consists of immigrants or their children.