Two Cities, Two Birthdays
Those of us who are Catholic spend most of the year in Ordinary Time. It’s the liturgical season of everyday life, those routine weeks in which our daily choices and actions collide with what we claim to believe each Sunday in the Nicene Creed.
Of course, for Christians, there’s really no such thing as “ordinary” time. Everything about the human experience, including the meaning of time, changed on the morning of the first Easter. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the center of history; nothing is more important than that radically transformative fact. Jesus himself is the alpha and omega of Creation, the Word of God made flesh.
This is what the Easter season, which we began just days ago, remembers. It celebrates our redemption with all its implications, both in the past and present. And those implications are not just personal: they’re also vastly wider.
Rémi Brague is one of the premier philosophers of our era. He specializes in the history of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought. In The Law of God, he notes that among the three great monotheistic faiths,
the two religions with a “political” dimension did not acquire it in the same way. Christianity gained ground in the ancient world against the political power of the Roman empire, which had persecuted Christians for almost three centuries before itself adopting the Christian religion. Islam, after a brief period of trials, triumphed during the lifetime of its founder. It then conquered, by warfare, the right to operate in peace, and even the right to dictate conditions of survival to the adepts of other religions “of the Book.” In modern terms, we might say that Christianity conquered the state through civil society; Islam, to the contrary, conquered civil society through the state.
The Christian message “appeared as political, even subversive” because “it created a new type of social organization,” the Church, with obligations in this world, but loyalties to a “City of God” higher than any specific political order. Christianity reshaped the social and political landscape of the Western world. But politics was never—and is still never—the heart of a Christian life well lived. It is a byproduct.
Earthly power is always infected with sin. Thus “from the start,” Brague writes, “Christianity set itself outside the political domain, and its founding texts bear witness to a mistrust of things political.” In practice, the virtue and witness of a Christian in public life can improve, even greatly improve, the City of Man. But it can never perfect it. Our destiny lies outside of this world.
This differs sharply from Muslim belief:
For Islam, the separation of the political and religious has no right to exist. It is even shocking, for it appears as an abandonment of human affairs to the power of evil or a relegation of God to a place outside of his proper sphere. The ideal city must be here below. In principle, it already exists: It is the Muslim city.
So where am I going with this? In less than three months, July 4, 2026, we will mark the quarter millennium of our nation. America is the child of a mixed marriage: biblical belief and Enlightenment thought. But even the Enlightenment flows from the Christianity it tried to outgrow. The United States has never been a formally “Christian” country. It didn’t need to be. Protestant Christianity was the faith of most citizens. It was the moral framework for our public life and institutions and it still provides the background radiation for much of our daily discourse. Christian Smith describes elsewhere how biblical religion was muscled aside as a guiding national spirit starting in the late nineteenth century. But the result of all these factors has been a nation of historically unique rights, laws, and individual freedoms. These, in turn, have produced great material success and global power. And even now, along with its flaws, America still has a deep reservoir of good.
Simply put: as Christians, we have much to take pride in and much to be grateful for as our homeland nears its 250th birthday. We owe our nation our love and loyalty to its best ideals. Yet having said that, what we think of ourselves and our country can be a very different thing from what others—including allies—think of us, looking in from the outside. We remember Athens as a beacon of ancient light and the cradle of democracy, but its colonies and allies often had a darker view. They experienced the uglier side of Athens and its dominance.
In that light, we all could profit from reading James L. Nolan’s 2016 book, What They Saw in America. Nolan, a distinguished Williams College scholar, wrote the book for a variety of reasons. Among them was answering the question, “Why do they hate us?” The author tracks the nineteenth and twentieth century journeys in the United States of four visitors: Alexis de Tocqueville, G. K. Chesterton, Max Weber, and Sayyid Qutb. Each has admiring things to say about aspects of American life. But they also have penetrating criticisms, including a perceived American addiction to money-making and commerce at the expense of nature, beauty, higher things, and deep relationships. Tocqueville sets the tone by suggesting that Americans live in “perpetual adoration” of themselves. Thus “only foreigners or experience can make certain truths reach [their] ears.”
As Nolan observes:
Although Tocqueville may have been the first to identify the paradoxical tendencies of individualism, conformism, and voluntarism in American society, all four visitors touched on these related topics in some manner. A common image invoked by the visitors to describe Americans’ conformist habits and acute sensitivities to the opinion of others was the tendency among Americans to form a herd … [The visitors from abroad] discovered both the “bright threads” and the “dark strands” of the American ethos, a sort of ambivalence that one still finds in contemporary perceptions.
Chesterton, for his part, was annoyed by American cheerfulness and vapid optimism. He claimed that Americans “have been deliberately and dogmatically taught to be conceited.” They’re “educated in a theory of enthusiasm, that [degrades] into mere egotism.” The American accepts “as a sort of religion the notion that blowing his own trumpet is as important as the [trumpet ]of doom.” A character in our current political climate may come to mind.
Easily the harshest critic—and most relevant to us right now—is Sayyid Qutb, who traveled through the United States for the Egyptian Ministry of Education in the 1940s. What he saw radicalized him. He found Americans obscenely materialistic, and he was appalled by the American lack of shame, indifference to the sanctity of death, disregard for beauty and nature, and loose relations between the sexes. On his return home, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He later became one of the major (and most dangerous) ideological architects of modern Islamist thought.
So how do we change such impressions? How do we reaffirm and communicate our nation’s best ideals on its quarter-millennium birthday?
We start with ourselves. To borrow from Rémi Brague: Christian faith once conquered a hostile state through civil society. And civil society changed through the sustained witness of Christians actually living their faith with confidence and evangelical zeal. What happened once can happen again, but only if we examine our hearts. Is Easter just another holiday, or is it the anchor of our lives? And which is really the more important birthday: a nation’s independence, or that of a believing Church called to sanctify the world? Easter and Pentecost, the dawn of our redemption and the birthday of our missionary vocation, are inextricably linked.
We’re meant to be active leaven in the world. In the time it’s taken me to write these brief words, thousands of Christians globally have suffered death, imprisonment, or discrimination rather than deny their faith. As Robert Royal shows so eloquently in The Martyrs of the New Millennium, Christianity is now the most persecuted religious faith on the planet. And if suffering Christians abroad can bear their burdens in service to Jesus Christ, we can at least live in a way that mirrors their faith and restores the soul of our nation. We can be Christians first, for the sake of the country we love.
If we do only that, we might finally, one day, be the “city upon a hill” John Winthrop hoped for, and a model of human dignity to the world.