Where at Least I Know I'm Free

A bit of history and a bit of reflection in celebration of America's 250th

Hey there. One programming note here: I’ll be taking a break from the newsletter for the month of July, as we’ll be doing a bit of traveling as a family, and I’ll be working on some other projects. I plan to be back with weekly writing the beginning of August. Enjoy your July!

-Chris

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This weekend the United States of America will celebrate 250 years of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago a group of men—lawyers, land owners, physicians, and the like—declared independence¹ from England, agreeing that dying for liberty was a risk worth taking when the alternative was living under tyranny.

I am grateful to be an American. I hesitate to say I am proud to be an American, because I’m already prideful about too much, to be honest with you.

I don’t want to be proud about anything—least of which things I can’t control. So I suppose I can say I am unintentionally proud to be an American, and being proud to be an American has been humbling for no small portion of my life.

In his iconic song “God Bless the USA,” Lee Greenwood sings at the beginning of the chorus:

And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me

I have been thinking a lot about freedom lately for a handful of reasons, in part because of this important birthday for America. Freedom from tyranny of all kinds is what ultimately undergirds the United States and its first Declaration of Independence. Today, we Americans still love to find ways to declare independence every day from any number of smaller tyrannies. Freedom is good, it is of God, and I am grateful to live in a place where, as Greenwood says, at least I know I’m free.

In 1776, Private Lemuel Haynes, a free black man, heard the Declaration of Independence read aloud at Fort Ticonderoga following its adoption. He wrote after hearing it read, “Liberty is a jewel which was handed down to man from the cabinet of heaven.”

As a Christian, I praise God for freedom and likewise feel the weight of freedom. It comes with its own chains, however glittering they may be. But before we reflect on freedom and how we handle freedom as Christians, I want to explore the American Revolution itself.

The Impossibility and Inconsistency of the Revolution

I love studying early American history and its characters. I’ve read most of the major biographies out there of Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin, and the like. I’m in the middle of watching Ken Burns’ The American Revolution for a second time.²

The American Revolution feels simultaneously impossible and inconsistent.

The more I learn about the American Revolution, the harder it strikes me just how divisive the idea of independence actually was among the colonists.

Forget how improbable it was for the colonists to actually win a war against the British—first, they had to not tear themselves apart in deciding whether or not independence was worth the fight. At the same time, across the pond, England itself was in conflict about whether or not the war was worth fighting. By the middle of 1776, it was clear that quelling the colonists would require a sacrifice of humanity and wealth that many British leaders and citizens could not stomach.

Beyond the latent disagreement about fighting for independence in the colonies, the American fighting force was inexperienced, under-resourced, and under-populated. The British forces were made up of tens of thousands professional soldiers who had all manner of ammunition and supply at their disposal—though, it should be noted, they also had little experience in actual war. The American forces were made up of some regulars, but also of volunteer local militiamen—farmers, often—who took up arms against the British.³ The Americans were almost always scrounging for the supplies needed to sustain a war against the British forces, which, though far from home, included the best navy on the planet.

We could keep going, but it should be clear if it wasn’t before: that a bunch of insurgent colonists would agree to fight for independence from Great Britain—and then succeed at doing so—seems like an impossibility. It feels miraculous in the most literal sense of the word.

At the same time, it must be said, that the American revolution feels wildly inconsistent. Most of the brave men and women who decided it would be better to risk dying for freedom than continue to live under oppression were unwilling to grant freedom to the humans they owned.

Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, agreeing that “all men are created equal,” 41 of them owned slaves. How could a movement so bent on freedom and equality for all people maintain such a hypocrisy? By believing their slaves to not be people at all, of course. In the mind of the Revolutionary slaveholder, it isn’t inconsistent to own slaves and say “all men are created equal,” if the slaves are in fact things and not men.

The matter of slavery played a central role in the fight for independence, especially with regard to troops and who could fight.

Lord Dunmore was the British Royal Governor of Virginia when the colonists began to rebel. In 1775, following the escalation of the war, Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation that declared martial law and offered freedom to slaves who were willing to abandon their American masters and join the British forces in the fight against the colonists.

Dunmore’s proclamation established a specialized unit called the “Ethiopian Regiment” among the British forces, but perhaps more importantly, it riled many colonists who were not in favor of the fight for independence to join the Patriots up with the cause. They were appalled at the idea that the British were going to free slaves to fight.

The British were by no means abolitionists at this point—Dunmore himself owned slaves and did not free them—but they were pragmatic, and they knew that encouraging slaves to rebel against the American rebels was a shrewd tactical move.

Though plenty of slaves—including some of George Washington’s own—took up the offer from Lord Dunmore, the tactic didn’t produce the desired result in the end. In fact, many in Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment endured horrific conditions, with most of them likely succumbing to small pox in the summer of 1776 due to their tight quarters and poor conditions amid its outbreak in the colonies.

The tactic did, however, lead Washington and the Americans to allow African Americans to join the fight on the Patriot side if they wanted to do so, which was previously not allowed. The Americans refused to compel slaves to join the fight for freedom from the British. Even their seared consciences could recognize the inconsistency behind the notion that slaves would be compelled to fight for the freedom of their masters from tyranny, but not be allowed to be free themselves.

It brings to mind this quote from Dr. Samuel Johnson, a British literary figure and loyalist to the monarchy:

These lords of themselves, these kings of me, these demigods of independence. It has been proposed that the slaves should be set free, an act which the lovers of liberty cannot but commend. How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

The American patriots fighting for freedom from British tyranny could not bring themselves to recognize the innate, justifiable desire for freedom among the slaves they bought and sold. African-American poet Phillis Wheatley wrote:

In every human breast, God has implanted principle which we call love of freedom. It is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance. I will assert that the same principle lives in us.

And let’s be clear, it’s not like slavery was the only sin rampant among our American forefathers. Virtue itself was suspect throughout the colonies, despite the widespread trappings of Puritanical culture—so much so that it led John Adams to write this to his friend Mary Warren in 1776:

…there is so much rascality, so much venality…so much avarice and ambition such rage for profit and commerce among all ranks and degrees of men in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public virtue enough to support a republic.

All of this is to say: the Patriots who fought for the freedom we celebrate were not perfect men and women. But that’s because they were real people.

We need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that we cannot be grateful for people and the work of people who do not meet our moral standard. Or, at least, we should be able to be grateful for the ways God worked through broken people—lest we forget our own brokenness.

The American fight for freedom was wildly inconsistent in its underlying values and highly improbable to succeed, but thanks be to God for how he can work through such mess to bring about his good will for the whole of his creation.

The question we should ask, as Christians, is, “What am I going to do with this freedom?”

Free for What?

It is likely that when you think of freedom, you think of “freedom from” something.

As Christopher Watkin writes in Biblical Critical Theory, “It is negative liberty that prevails in public discourse today.” We most often think of freedom in terms of being free from some kind of commitment or restriction. We think of freedom as escape. Freedom is no longer having to do something or not being beholden to something. People on the political left want to be free from oppression. People on the political right want to be free from government regulation.

The problem with this is love. Our obsession with freedom as a means of release collides with our calling to consider others as more important than ourselves. Freedom and love can coexist, but the prevailing kind of freedom we celebrate often enables selfishness and inhibits selflessness.

Watkin continues:

The ethic of love is antithetical for both left- and right-inflected understandings of freedom, because both set freedom over against the sort of attachments and commitments that love engenders.

….

To be free from attachment and constraint is to forfeit the possibility of ever knowing love.

To love, by contrast, is to renounce the freedom of being an island, of keeping one’s options open. But love’s open secret, as all true lovers know, is that there is a greater, richer freedom in the love relationship than could ever be experienced in the serial encounters of noncommitment.

….

Love always involves a willing enslavement, a from of self-dispossession or self-giving.

….we are not forced to choose between freedom and love. The choice is between brute freedom, which reveals itself to be slavery to potential and is caught in its own narrow circle of self-justification, and self-giving love, which reveals itself as true freedom in pouring itself out for the other.

….freedom is a master more wicked and unforgiving than love.

I am so grateful to live in a place “where at least I know I’m free.” And I won’t forget the men who died to give that right to me, no matter how venal they were. But what I need to remember is this:

The freedom that was bought by the blood of Patriots enables me to share the greater freedom bought by the blood of Christ.

The freedoms I enjoy are not meant to terminate in my own self-interests, but are meant to be enjoyed and shared for the good of others. Otherwise, in the words of President Adams, I could be ravaged by the “rascality” in my own heart and its tendency to sinful self-serving “rage for profit.”

I share the sentiment of Joseph Warren, an American Patriot who died at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In 1772, Warren delivered the following benediction at the annual Boston Massacre Oration, commemorating the tragedy of two years prior:

May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole Earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the whole world in one common undistinguished ruin!

Amen.

1. In principle—the Declaration of Independence wasn’t actually signed until August 2, 1776.

2. If you’re interested, it’s free to watch on the PBS streaming service through July 13. Many of the quotes I’ve cited here I first encountered in that documentary.

3. The French came to our aid as well, of course, led by the likes of the Comte de Rochambeau and the Marquis de Lafayette.