A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Two hundred and fifty years in, the miracle isn't that America is perfect. It's that America is still here — and that you get to live in it.

Tonight the fireworks will go up over every small town and big city from Bar Harbor to San Diego. The flags are already on the porches. And today — right now, this Saturday morning — the country turns 250 years old, with a hymn rising in its throat.

Two and a half centuries. Think about that. When the Declaration was signed in that hot Philadelphia room in 1776, most of the world was ruled by kings who inherited the right to rule you. The idea that a farmer in Virginia and a cobbler in Boston could sit down and govern themselves — that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed — was not a well-worn political theory. It was a wager. A dangerous, treasonous, God-haunted wager.

They staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on it. Most of them lost at least one of the three.

And here we are. Still arguing. Still voting. Still worshipping freely in a thousand different sanctuaries on a thousand different Sundays. Still writing letters like this one without asking a censor's permission. Still able to criticize our own president in public without vanishing in the night. That is not normal. In the sweep of human history, that is a rounding error. A small, luminous rounding error we happened to be born inside.

Christians should be the first to feel the weight of it. Not because America is the New Israel — she isn't — and not because the flag belongs anywhere near the cross — it doesn't. But because we, of all people, know what a gift looks like. We know that nothing good is deserved. We know that a country, like a life, is grace before it is anything else.

The founders were not saints. Some owned human beings while writing that all men are created equal. The republic has bled its way toward that sentence ever since — through Gettysburg, through Selma, through a thousand quieter reckonings in ordinary lives. That the promise outran the men who made it is itself a kind of proof that the promise came from somewhere higher than the men.

Two hundred and fifty years. A quarter of a millennium of an experiment most of the world said would fail by Tuesday.

So today, before the news cycle drags us back into whatever we're supposed to be furious about, stop. Stand on your porch. Look at the flag, or the neighbor's flag, or just the sky over your street. Say a real thank-you — to God, first, and then to the long parade of farmers and soldiers and mothers and preachers and immigrants and reformers who kept the thing running long enough to hand it to you.

Benjamin Franklin, walking out of Independence Hall in 1787, was reportedly asked what kind of government they'd given us. "A republic," he said, "if you can keep it."

Two hundred and fifty years later, the question is still ours.

🇺🇸 Keep it. Love it. Pray for it. Pass it on.

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