Every year at this time, we stop to thank God for your birth. And when I do, I thank God for those women and men who brought you into this world so long ago. God blessed them—and us—not only with bravery, but with prescience. Democracy still was an embryonic experiment, but they managed to look through the future and to see how it could be used to ennoble and empower their descendants across the centuries.
Through your 236 years, you have bestowed bountiful blessings upon this world.
Your warriors have battled for freedom, and not just for those of us fortunate enough to have been born within your borders. They have fought, and died, for freedom of folks they never would know, whose languages they never would speak. Our planet is a better place because of their passion and sacrifice.
Your geniuses have conferred inventions, medicines, surgical procedures, art, music, literature and all manner of blessings upon not just your own citizens, but also friends and foes alike.
Seeing beyond their own beliefs, your founders guaranteed religious liberty for all people who call you home. Today, that includes people whose theological imaginations would have stupified the framers of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. But they're protected, too, just like everybody else. Some people want to tear down that "wall of separation" you built between church and state. What they desire is for the government to prop up their kind faith and to limit the practices of people they can't seem to understand. Thanks for writing a First Amendment that's far broader than those narrow minds. Because of our freedom and responsibility, faith flourishes here like no place else. Sure, we've got our share of kooky religion, but nobody intrudes between God and the American conscience. What a blessing!
Of course, not all is well on your 236th birthday. Some people say we're a more divided nation today than at any time since the Civil War. That's quite likely. We still suffer from some racial and ethnic divisions. Despite what I just said about religious liberty, we're still divided along faith lines, too. But the biggest divide today seems to be along class and political boundaries. We've got two large and fairly evenly split groups of people who see very different visions of America. They interpret the Constitution differently. They see our major institutions and businesses differently. They want different outcomes in our short-term future.
The most discouraging aspect of all of this is the fact we cannot cultivate leaders capable of guiding us past this divide. In fact, the political apparatus rewards dividers, not uniters. People who prey on fear and suspicion get elected. And they get re-elected by perpetuating those fears.
So, for your birthday, America, I want to make a wish. I pray God will bless us with a new cadre of leaders. We need women and men from both political parties who love country more than self, who value the common good more than political victories, who have the courage to seek what's best for all people and not the ascendancy of their party.
Is that too much to ask? Absolutely not.
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Will it change our future? I pray to God it will.
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