July 4th: What Made Me Stop Loving "America"

>

Every Fourth of July Americans are invited to celebrate freedom, democracy, and the birth of the republic. This year, on the nation's 250th anniversary, I find myself unable to join the celebration.

A few days ago, listening to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, I heard Princeton historian Eddie Glaude utter words that startled me by expressing exactly what I had been struggling to admit to myself: "I do not love America, and never have, especially now." Those words open his new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries, which examines what our official commemorations leave out as much as what they include.

Unlike Professor Glaude, however, I cannot say that I never loved America. Quite the contrary. I was raised to love it instinctively. My journey has not been one from radicalism to disillusionment. It has been the reverse: from unquestioning patriotism to reluctant dissent. It was a conversion I resisted almost every step of the way.

I grew up in what I would call a quietly Republican family. My parents usually described themselves as independents, but I suspect they voted otherwise. I admired my Uncle Ben because, unlike my other uncles, he worked downtown in Chicago at the First National Bank. Success, respectability, and patriotism all seemed to fit naturally together.

My education reinforced those assumptions. I spent nine years in Catholic elementary school, thirteen more in Catholic seminaries, and another five years studying theology in Rome as a young priest. When Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed the Vietnam War, I remember wondering why he had wandered into foreign affairs. As far as I was concerned, civil rights were one thing; Vietnam was another.

When Senator Joseph McCarthy died, one of my favorite seminary professors remarked, "A great man died today." That simple sentence reveals how conservative my early formation really was.

My first presidential vote was cast for Barry Goldwater.

Reality, however, has a way of intruding on ideology.

The Vietnam War was my first great awakening. I remember reading in Time magazine-- of all places-- that American leaders opposed internationally supervised elections in Vietnam because Ho Chi Minh would almost certainly have won. I can still remember arguing with my father about what that implied. If democracy was our highest value, why were we preventing democratic elections?

At almost the same time Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council and announced his intention to "open the windows" of the Church to the modern world. I resisted that as well. I defended traditional Catholicism against classmates who seemed eager to dismantle it. I even found myself defending Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ against criticism.

Yet resistance gradually gave way to curiosity.

I immersed myself in the documents of Vatican II. I read theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and even the young Josef Ratzinger, then one of the Council's progressive voices. Even more important were the scripture courses taught by our remarkable professor Eamonn O'Doherty. Under his guidance I learned that the Bible is not a single literary form but a library containing myth, poetry, legend, law, debate, parable, allegory, apocalypse, riddles, jokes, folk wisdom, and theological reflection. To read every passage as straightforward history is to misunderstand Scripture itself.

That realization liberated me from biblical literalism. More surprisingly, it also taught me to read secular history differently. If biblical texts required careful attention to genre, perspective, and purpose, why should national histories be treated as transparent accounts of objective fact?

That question changed everything.

History came first. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's The Untold History of the United States, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth revealed an America I had never encountered in classrooms.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).