America turns 250 this year. And the argument we keep having — over who gets to celebrate, over what the founding meant, over whether the promise was ever real — is not new. It is older than the republic itself.
I have been a pastor long enough to know that you cannot understand America without understanding the theology that shaped it. And I have been an attorney long enough to know that words on paper mean nothing unless someone is willing to enforce them. America has always been the tension between those two realities: what was written down and what was actually done.
So let me say something plainly, as both.
Frederick Douglass Did Not Say What People Think He Said
Frederick Douglass stood before an audience in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852 — the day after Independence Day, deliberately — and delivered what is arguably the most honest and demanding speech ever given about this country. He did not say the founding documents were lies. He said America needed to live up to them.
He called the Constitution a “glorious liberty document.”
He was a man who had been enslaved. Who had been beaten. Who had escaped with nothing. And his primary argument was not that the American ideal was a fraud. It was that the American ideal was real, that it demanded fulfillment, and that the men who wrote it while owning human beings were accountable to every word of it.
I am reclaiming Frederick Douglass today. Because the people who invoke him most often right now are making the opposite argument. They are using him to say America is broken at its foundation and cannot be redeemed. That is not what he said. That is not what he believed. And representing it that way does him no honor.
Celebrating with Your Whole Chest
Voices like Joy Reid tell us the Fourth of July is not for everyone — that the founding was so fundamentally compromised that those who celebrate are either naive or complicit. I understand where that argument comes from. The historical grievances underneath it are not fabricated.
But here is what that argument gets consistently wrong: it measures America by a standard it applies to no other nation on earth.
No country in human history has been founded without sin, built without exploitation, or governed without corruption at some point. What is unusual about America — what is genuinely rare in the long history of nations — is that it wrote down a set of ideals that could then be turned around and used to hold it accountable. Abolitionists did that. Civil rights leaders did that. Generations of reformers have picked up those founding documents and wielded them against the very people who claimed to believe in them.
That is a remarkable thing. That is worth understanding. And on the occasion of 250 years, that is worth celebrating.
Celebrate with your whole chest. Not blindly. Not as if the country has never failed. But with the full knowledge of what freedom costs and how rare it actually is. Most people who have ever lived on this earth never had it. They never had the chance to hold it. The least we can do is understand what we are holding.
The Promise Is Still Real
People still risk their lives to get to this country. They cross deserts. They board overcrowded boats. They leave everyone they know. They heard something — that you can build something here, that you can be something here — and they believed it enough to bet their lives on it.
That does not happen in nations without promise.
America at 250 is not finished. The founders said so themselves. They built in a mechanism for change — amendments, elections, courts, protest, persuasion — because they understood that the work of self-governance is never done. The phrase “a more perfect union” means exactly what it says. Not a perfect union. A more perfect one. An ongoing project, requiring every generation to take it up again.
The question at 250 is not whether America has been perfect. It has not been. The question is whether we still understand what we have and whether we are willing to do the work of keeping it.
A Word to the Church
The Black church in America has never had the luxury of separating faith from politics. From the abolitionist movement forward, it was the Black church that took seriously the claim that every human being is made in the image of God — and demanded that American law reflect that reality. They did not reject the founding ideals. They weaponized them. They held America to its own words.
That is a theologically grounded, constitutionally literate, morally serious posture. And it is exactly what the Church needs to be doing right now.
What we cannot do — what the Church of all institutions cannot afford — is retreat into either blind nationalism or reflexive cynicism. Neither one is honest. Neither one is useful. And neither one honors the people whose sacrifice purchased the freedom we are holding this week.
America at 250 is still worth fighting for. The promise is still real. And the Church has a role in keeping it that way that no one else can fill.
Episode 60 is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at marclittleshow.com. New episodes every Tuesday.
Marc Little is a pastor, licensed attorney, and political commentator. He is the host of The Marc Little Show — Faith, the Law, and Politics — and the author of The Prodigal Republican: Faith and Politics.