America's Recovery
Recently, I admitted that I am in the camp that is not proud of the United States. I don’t see how one can be, especially when comparing the United States of 2022 to the same country of almost any other year in its proud history.
Yes, I said “proud history,” because this nation’s history gives cause for admiration and pride. Even celebration. America was the greatest nation man ever built—when we built it for the greater glory of God.
On this July 4th, our only hope is in the name of the Lord. Man and nation thrive only when doing God’s will. America once understood this, and it can again.
How?
By remembering why we’re here. Why we are alive as individuals, and why we were set apart as a great nation protected by vast oceans with resources beyond imagination. Our founding was meant to please God, and our founding documents seemed to have won His favor.
For the first 150 years of American independence, we relied on God’s will to guide and God’s grace to nourish us. We turned to God in times of peril and times of joy. As the narrator said in Frank Cappra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, “On V-E Day, they prayed and wept. On V-J Day, they prayed and wept.” The b-roll shots for both of those events was Holy Mass inside a Catholic Church.
We are one nation only when under God. When we try to climb above Him, we are disbursed, frustrated, and hindered.
Just read the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic if you want to remember the place we once reserved for the Almighty. Bear in mind, this was a cry for victory during the Civil War written by a woman, Julia Ward Howe in 1861:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.
CHORUS:
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps,
His day is marching on.
CHORUS
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His Judgement Seat.
Oh! Be swift, my soul, to answer Him, be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
CHORUS
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me;
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
CHORUS
If those words do not give you chills and bring a tear to your eye, you do not understand America’s purpose. Its purpose is to march with God as a nation so that the hearts of every American pass the sifting at the seat of judgment. Our greatness as a nation is measured, not by GDP, but by the number of souls who squeeze through the narrow gate.
Now, let’s look at that glorious final stanza more closely.
Most choirs alter that stanza. They change a key word and ruin the song. As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free is what Julia Ward Howe wrote. It’s what choirs sang for a century until a weak and timid generation decided it’s bad to die for anything. They replaced “die” with “live” and changed the entire meaning of the song. They declared nothing, especially not freedom, is worth dying for. Your human life, which will end some day, is worth more than any cause or any conflict.
But, if nothing is worth dying for, then nothing is worth living for. Thus, we have the highest suicide rate in the history of our species. We have thousands dying of drug overdoses. Amidst unprecedented comfort, we are miserable and sniping. Because we would give our lives for nothing, we know we will die for nothing.
If America is to deserve her sons’ and daughters’ pride, we must, as Charlie Daniels sang in In America, “put her feet back on the path of righteousness and, then, God bless America, again.”
The Charlie Daniels Band debuted that song at the 1979 Country Music Awards. And America listened. We did try to put her feet back on the righteous path by electing Ronald Reagan—a man as reviled and hated by the left as Trump ever was. For a time, we could see America as a shining city on a hill. Until we squandered it.
Destiny now calls us—the remnant—to take to heart the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the CDB’s In America. We must place our national pride, not in ourselves or our history, but in the cross and the blood that was shed by Our Savior so that such a nation might exist at all. We glory in what we suffer for Christ’s sake, in rebuilding a nation founded on faith but crumbled by reckless pursuit of the here and now.
So, while you might have thought America’s Humiliation was the end, it was not. America’s Humiliation was only the beginning. And the solution to our malaise is as old as the Bible. First, turn our individual hearts to God and open our ears to His Incarnate Word. Then, let the Holy Ghost guide our actions to make our nation a tribute to His justice and mercy.
And, finally, let’s just make these lines our cri de coeur:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Happy 4th of July, 2022. Let’s take a little stroll down memory lane.
(He was such a great president. Future generations will never understand why some reviled him.)
On this day we must celebrate our independence by becoming slaves to Jesus Christ.