Christians and 250 Years of American Freedom

This is a reflection I shared with our church on Sunday, July 5th at our Independence Day lunch reflecting on America 250.

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It’s often said that those who fail to remember their history are doomed to repeat it. We’re Baptists — we mostly make a big deal about Jesus here at Cornerstone. But I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to appreciate what it means to be Baptist than right now, on the 250th birthday of this nation.

Here’s why: Baptists’ greatest gift to the American experiment was religious freedom — the First Amendment’s guarantee that the government has no right to tell us how to worship.

Now, that might sound strange to you at first. 

We’re Christians. We don’t want people worshiping just anything — we want them worshiping the right thing. But Baptists have always stood in a long line of religious dissenters. 

Four hundred years ago, the modern Baptist movement was born in England, and from the very beginning, Baptists objected to the idea that the government had any business telling people how to worship. We argued that every person has the right to worship according to their own conscience — and that being on the right side of God and being on the right side of the government should never be confused with one another.

That conviction didn’t come cheap. Baptists had watched more than a century of bloody religious wars tear Europe apart, and we learned the hard way that the state is simply not qualified to determine the destiny of anyone’s soul. Our Baptist forebears were beaten, jailed, and drowned for believing that.

So when it came time to adopt a new Constitution, Baptists showed up. In the late 1700s, a Baptist preacher named John Leland personally persuaded James Madison to support a federal Bill of Rights guaranteeing religious liberty. Madison had originally thought the Constitution didn’t need one. Leland — and Baptists across Virginia — changed his mind. That conversation helped give us the First Amendment.

America is a beautiful experiment because it’s built on an idea, not on blood or soil, not on skin color or country of origin. And many of the ideas that make America great are rooted in Christian conviction.

The Declaration of Independence rests on the claim that every person is endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That’s not a throwaway line — it’s a theological claim. It’s the doctrine of the imago Dei, from which we derive the concept of human dignity. It might be dressed in political language in Declaration, but it means every person bears the image of God, and therefore every person has worth that no government granted and no government can take away. President Lincoln understood this. At Gettysburg, he called America a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

As Christians, we believe in that dignity. That’s why we fight for religious liberty. It’s why Christians opposed slavery and oppose racism. It’s why we oppose abortion and defend the sanctity of human life at every stage. The same conviction runs through all of it: every person is made in the image of God, and that changes everything about how we treat one another.

America is not a perfect nation, and we don’t have to pretend otherwise. Across 250 years we’ve had moments of triumph and moments of tragedy. In the 19th century, this country nearly tore itself apart over our original sin of slavery. In the 20th century, America helped liberate the world from tyranny. The 21st century is still being written. But on the occasion of our nation’s 250th birthday, this is a good time to pause, reflect, and thank God for His grace on this land. There is hardly another nation, or another moment in history, that has offered more opportunity and promise to more people than these United States.

If I’m honest, I think a lot of Christians in my generation grew up watching people confuse being a patriotic American with being a Christian, and we overcorrected. We got so worried about not conflating the two that we forgot how to simply be grateful. Too many people in my generation have been too slow to say thank you — for this nation, for our freedoms, and for the promise it holds for our children.

But here’s the one truth I want to leave you with today. I don’t remember who first expressed it. But it has stayed with me for a long time: As Christians, we are Americans best when we are not Americans first. We love this country. But our deepest allegiance belongs to Jesus, and it always will.

And because of that — as Americans, let us live with abiding gratitude for the incredible privilege of calling this land of liberty our home. Let’s seek the welfare of the city. Let’s keep defending the freedom to worship, for our neighbors as much as for ourselves. And let’s never stop being grateful for those who risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to secure these rights for us.

God bless America.