Special Issue: What Are You Celebrating? | War, the Star-Spangled Banner, Frederick Douglass, and the DNA of MAGA

250 Years of American Myth: With God on Our Side? | THE JULY 4TH ISSUE

Happy Birthday. Now Let’s Talk.

Tomorrow, America turns 250.

The fireworks are already planned. The speeches are drafted. The flags are out. Somewhere, a politician is preparing to stand in front of a crowd and tell them that this nation is the greatest experiment in human freedom in the history of the world, and the crowd will cheer, and the band will play, and nobody will ask any inconvenient questions about what the experiment has actually produced, or for whom, or at whose expense.

This is the issue that lands before all of that. Consider it a gift — the kind that makes you think rather than the kind that makes you comfortable.

I have built this series around this one. The Doctrine of Discovery. The Puritans. The Great Awakenings. The Declaration and its parentheses. Manifest Destiny. The Gilded Age. The boarding schools and the bureaucratization of dispossession. All of it is really prologue to this question: when you stand at the fireworks on July 4th, what exactly are you celebrating?

I am not going to tell you not to celebrate. I am going to tell you what you are celebrating. And then you can decide what to do with that.

America Is War

Here is the number nobody puts on the streamer: the United States has been at war for approximately 222 of its 250 years. That is roughly 93 percent of its existence. Scholars count differently depending on what qualifies — declared wars, undeclared military actions, prolonged occupations, covert operations — but by any reasonable accounting, the number is somewhere north of 90 percent. There has not been a decade in American history without armed conflict. There has not been a generation of Americans that did not send its young people to fight, and die, somewhere.¹

This is not a nation that occasionally goes to war. This is a nation that is, structurally, constitutively, at war. War is not what America does when diplomacy fails. War is what America is. It is the operating mode. The default setting.

The list is so long it becomes numbing, which is part of how it survives. The Revolutionary War. The wars against Native nations — dozens of them, running continuously from the 1600s through Wounded Knee in 1890 and beyond. The Barbary Wars. The War of 1812. The Mexican-American War. The Civil War. The Spanish-American War. The Philippine-American War, in which American soldiers killed somewhere between 200,000 and 600,000 Filipinos in a conflict that lasted fourteen years and that most Americans cannot name. World War I. World War II. Korea. Vietnam. The Gulf War. Somalia. Haiti. Kosovo. Afghanistan — twenty years. Iraq — launched on intelligence that was, at best, catastrophically wrong, and at worst, deliberately fabricated. Libya. Syria. Yemen, indirectly, through the weapons and the targeting assistance. And now, as I write this, we are engaged in military action against Iran, and the people in charge have yet to give the American public a straight answer about why.²

They never do, quite. The stated reason is always there — freedom, democracy, national security, weapons of mass destruction, the war on terror, protecting our allies, defending international order. But the stated reason and the real reason have a complicated relationship in American military history, and the real reason, the one that runs beneath every engagement like a river beneath the street, is always some version of what this series has been about from the beginning: access, extraction, control. Resources. Markets. Strategic position. The extension of the operating system to new territory.

We are Rome. Rome with a more colorful flag and a better public relations operation. Rome told itself it was bringing civilization to the barbarians too. Rome believed it. The barbarians mostly disagreed.

The Answer Is Always the Same

People ask, sincerely, why we are fighting in any given place at any given time. The answers that come back from official Washington are always complicated, always partial, always wrapped in the language of values and security and alliance commitments. And people keep asking because the official answers keep not quite adding up.

Here is the answer this series is building toward: the why is always the same why. It is the same why that sent Columbus west in 1492. The same why that drove Manifest Destiny across the continent. The same why that sent the Pinkerton agents to Homestead and the U.S. Army to the Philippines. The operating system requires expansion. Expansion requires resources. Resources are where other people are living. Other people are, in the logic of the operating system, obstacles or inputs or both.

The theology has updated over the centuries — from divine mandate to Manifest Destiny to national security to humanitarian intervention to the war on terror. The terminology cycles through. The logic does not change.

When the answer to “why are we fighting Iran” doesn’t come clearly from the people in charge, it isn’t because the situation is too complex to explain. It’s because the real answer would require the American public to look at the operating system directly, and the operating system depends on not being looked at directly. The myth survives by staying in the background. The moment it has to justify itself in plain language, it is in trouble.

We have been in trouble before. We have not yet found our way to honesty.

The Song They Taught You

At the fireworks, they will play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Everyone will stand. Many will put their hands over their hearts. Some will sing, most will not, because the melody is genuinely difficult and the words of the first verse are hard to remember clearly.

Few will know what is in the third verse. Fewer still know who wrote it and why.

Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that became the national anthem in September 1814, after watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry from a ship in Baltimore harbor. He was moved by the sight of the American flag still flying after the bombardment. He wrote a poem. It was later set to music. In 1931, by Act of Congress, it became the national anthem.

Here is what most Americans are never taught about Francis Scott Key. He was a slaveholder. He was a deeply committed opponent of abolition. He served as District Attorney of Washington, D.C., and in that role he prosecuted people for the crime of distributing abolitionist literature — arguing that encouraging enslaved people to think about freedom was itself a threat to public order. He used the power of his office against the people who were trying to end what he was trying to preserve.³

And the third verse of his poem — the one that is not sung at ballgames, the one that does not appear on the scoreboard— celebrates the deaths of men who had chosen freedom over loyalty to their enslavers. During the War of 1812, the British had promised freedom to any enslaved person who escaped and joined their forces. Thousands did. They were called the Corps of Colonial Marines. They fought effectively. Some of them were at Fort McHenry.

Key’s third verse exults that these men — men who had made the only rational choice available to them, men who had chosen liberty in the most literal possible sense — found “no refuge” from American victory. The verse contains the phrase “the hireling and slave” — meaning British mercenaries and the formerly enslaved men fighting for their freedom — and it celebrates their defeat.⁴

That is your national anthem. Written by a man who prosecuted abolitionists, celebrating among other things the deaths of Black men who had run toward freedom.

Stand for it, or don’t. But know what you’re standing for.

What Frederick Douglass Said

On July 5, 1852 — the day after Independence Day, deliberately — Frederick Douglass stood before an audience of approximately 600 people in Rochester, New York, and delivered what is almost certainly the most honest speech ever given about America on or near its birthday.

He had been invited to give a Fourth of July address. He accepted. And then he said this:

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, ‘may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!’

This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

He went on:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

He delivered this address 173 years ago. The word “slave” can now be replaced by many names. The Indigenous child sent 900 miles from home. The Navajo miner breathing radioactive dust. The Japanese American family with four days to sell everything. The Black man denied a syphilis cure for forty years so researchers could watch him die. The undocumented worker deported from the country his labor built. The Iranian family under a bombing campaign whose justification was never clearly stated to the American people.

Read those sentences again. Douglass was not raging. He was naming. There is a difference. Rage wants to destroy. Naming wants to make visible. He was making visible what the myth depended on keeping invisible — the suffering that the celebration was built on top of, the wail beneath the fireworks.

This Fourth July is yours, not mine. He said it. He was right. And 173 years later, the question of whose it is has not been honestly settled.

The DNA

I want to say something about MAGA and the current Republican Party that will make some readers uncomfortable, and I want to say it plainly because I think it is true.

MAGA is not a corruption of America. MAGA is America being honest about itself for once.

Every element of what is called Trumpism has been present in American political life since the beginning. The nativism. The contempt for treaty obligations. The fusion of Christianity with national identity. The deployment of government power to protect the wealthy and discipline the poor. The nostalgia for a past that was only golden for some. The celebration of dominance as a virtue. The willingness to use violence, or the threat of it, to maintain hierarchy. The conviction that God is on our side, which has always meant: God is on my side, against you.

These are not innovations. They are not departures from the American tradition. They are the American tradition, operating without the usual courtesy of pretending otherwise.

What is genuinely new is that the mask has slipped. Earlier eras of American history managed to hold the myth and the reality in a kind of productive tension — the ideals of the founding documents served as a check on, or at least a goad to, the worst impulses of the operating system. Abolitionists used the Declaration against slavery. Suffragists used it against the exclusion of women. Civil rights leaders used it against segregation. The promise, even when it was a lie, had moral leverage. People could be held to it.

The current moment is the moment when a significant portion of the electorate decided they no longer needed the promise. The mask is not the face, they understood. Let’s show the face.

That is not a departure from the American DNA. That is the American DNA, expressed without the usual self-consciousness. The Doctrine of Discovery said some people have divine permission to take what belongs to others. Manifest Destiny said Providence has willed it. The Gilded Age said the market has ordained it. MAGA says: we don’t need a reason. We just need the power. That is not a new operating system. It is the old one, running in safe mode.⁵

You can be horrified by that. You should be horrified by that. But you cannot be surprised by it if you have been paying attention to the history this series has been tracing. The cruelty is not new. The brazenness is what’s new. And the brazenness is, in a strange way, almost clarifying. It is harder to pretend the myth is something other than what it is when it is standing in front of you with the mask off.

So What Are You Celebrating?

I am not asking you not to celebrate. I farm on Kalapuya land in Oregon. I love this land — the specific soil of it, the Oaks, the Douglas firs, the Chehalem Mountains, the way the light falls in July. I love the people I know in this country, which is most of the people I love. You can love a place and tell the truth about it. These are not opposites.

But I am asking you to think carefully about what the celebration is for, and whether the thing you’re celebrating is the myth or the reality, the promise or the wound, the idea of America or the actual history of it.

Douglass was not finished in 1852. He went on, in the same speech, to insist that the Constitution itself — properly read — was an anti-slavery document, and that the promise of the Declaration was real, even if it had never been kept. He believed, against all evidence, that the promise could still be redeemed. That is not naïveté. That is a harder thing: hope that has looked directly at the evidence against it and chosen to hold on anyway.

You can celebrate that. Not the myth — the reckoning. Not the self-congratulation — the hard, ongoing, unfinished work of becoming what the founding documents claimed this nation already was.

The fireworks are going to be beautiful. They always are. Just remember, while you’re watching them, who paid for the show.

This is a special issue of 250 Years of American Myth: With God on Our Side? — a 21-part series running through and beyond July 4th, 2025, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Next Week we return to the regular issues each Tuesday, Part 4: The City on a Hill is a Land Claim Pilgrims, Puritans, and the Theology of Entitlement (1620s–1640s)

I want to hear from you:

Douglass said, in 1852: “This Fourth July is yours, not mine.” 173 years later — whose is it? Has anything changed enough to change that answer? And if you find yourself wanting to say yes — push on that. What specifically has changed? What has not? I want to know what you actually think.

Notes

1. The 93 percent figure derives from analysis of Congressional Research Service data on U.S. military deployments. Various scholars and journalists have calculated the statistic using different methodologies; the most comprehensive analysis is found in Lorraine Boissoneault, “A Brief History of America’s Perpetual Wars,” Smithsonian Magazine, 2017, drawing on CRS Report RL32170, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2022.” The precise percentage varies depending on what constitutes “war” — declared wars, undeclared conflicts, sustained occupations — but estimates consistently fall between 88 and 93 percent.

2. The Philippine-American War mortality figures remain contested. Estimates of Filipino civilian and combatant deaths range from approximately 200,000 to over 1 million, with scholarly consensus generally in the 200,000–600,000 range. See Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For the list of twentieth- and twenty-first-century military actions, the Congressional Research Service report cited above provides the documentary basis.

3. For Francis Scott Key’s biography, slaveholding, and role as District Attorney, see Marc Leepson, What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, a Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Key’s prosecution of abolitionists, including Reuben Crandall in 1835, is documented in this biography and in the broader literature on antebellum Washington, D.C.

4. The Corps of Colonial Marines and the context of the third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: see Jason Johnson, “Star-Spangled Bigotry: The Hidden Racist History of the National Anthem,” The Root, 2016; and Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: Norton, 2013), for the broader context of enslaved people’s military choices during the War of 1812. The phrase “hireling and slave” appears in the third verse of Key’s original poem, “Defence of Fort McHenry” (1814).

5. The analysis of MAGA as expression rather than corruption of the American founding draws on multiple scholarly frameworks. See Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); and Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), for different angles on the continuity between historical American racial politics and contemporary Republican Party positioning. The “safe mode” metaphor is my own.

6. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Address delivered at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852. The full text is available through the Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress and in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1950). The passages quoted here are drawn from the standard text.

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Part 3: The Prologue America Forgot | Croatoan: The Myth Before the Myth (1587)

Part 2: The Twin Roots | Out of the Enlightenment, and the Doctrine of Discovery — The Renaissance and the Reformation, Evil Twins Born of the Same Mother

Part 1: The Lament | While the Nation Celebrates

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The Film Is Coming. Will You Be Part of It?

Erik and Chris Ewers — thirty years alongside Ken Burns, and the filmmakers behind the just-released PBS Thoreau documentary — are bringing their crew to Eloheh Farm this June to film a documentary short about the Harmony Way.

Erik’s take: Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately. Randy and Edith are actually doing it.

The film is being developed with Sundance in mind. Real distribution possibilities. A story that reaches people we’d never otherwise reach.

Here’s what we need: two more filming days beyond what the production budget covers. That gap is $17,000. We have 60 days.

Every gift goes directly to the film. Not overhead. The film itself.

If Eloheh has meant something to you — or if you believe this story needs to be told — this is the moment.

👉 Support the Eloheh Documentary — www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/donate-to-change-lives-14947

Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice is a registered nonprofit. All gifts are tax-deductible.

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Jesus never intended to start a religion that would justify stealing land, enslaving people, or destroying creation. So how did we get here?

In How Western Christianity Got It Wrong, acclaimed author Randy Woodley, of mixed white and Native American heritage, traces how a brown man from Nazareth who never lost his connection to the whole community of creation became the poster child for empire-building and environmental destruction. The faith that bears his name crafted theologies that rationalize greed, violence, and colonization--everything Jesus actually opposed.

Woodley exposes the ideas that poisoned Christianity’s well, how the Western church won a monopoly on sin and salvation, and how violent atonement theories replaced the healing message Jesus lived. Drawing on Indigenous wisdom that was flourishing on Turtle Island long before missionaries arrived, Woodley reveals what Jesus’s liberating message looks like when freed from imperial frameworks.

Picture communities where creation is family, not commodity. Where healing happens through relationship, not transaction. Where Creator speaks through many voices and welcomes all who walk in love. This is the Jesus Way as it was meant to be--not a system of control but a path of wholeness.

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Randy Woodley is co-author of Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Bring Harmony & Wellbeing and the author of numerous books on decolonizing faith and Indigenous theology. He is a retired distinguished professor emeritus and former Director of Indigenous and Intercultural Studies. He writes from Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice, where he and his wife Edith practice regenerative agriculture and traditional seed keeping.