The Church at 250

The United States is preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There will be ceremonies, speeches, flags, fireworks, and the usual invocations of liberty. The Episcopal Church, with its long and complicated relationship to the American republic, will inevitably be part of the observance.

The question is not whether the church will mark the anniversary. The question is how.

An Episcopal News Service article recently posed that question through the image of a quarter. On one side is George Washington, the first president of the United States and an Episcopalian. On the other is the Rev. Pauli Murray, civil-rights lawyer, advocate for women’s equality, co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and the first Black woman ordained an Episcopal priest.

It is difficult to imagine a better symbol.

Washington represents the church near the center of national power. Murray represents the church being called to account by someone whom both church and nation had marginalized. One side bears the image of establishment. The other bears the image of prophecy.

The Episcopal Church and the United States were born in the same historical moment. Thirty-four of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence belonged to the Church of England. After the Revolution, American Anglicans had to create a church independent of the British crown. Clergy could no longer swear allegiance to the king. The prayers for the monarch had to be removed from the prayer book. Bishops had to be consecrated. A constitution had to be written.

The result was a church shaped, in part, by the political imagination of the new republic. The Episcopal Church developed representative structures, a bicameral legislature, and a constitutional order. The church and nation grew alongside one another, each confident that ordered institutions, public virtue, and enlightened leadership might secure a flourishing future.

For much of American history, Episcopalians imagined that they had a special role to play in the nation’s public life. Washington National Cathedral is the most visible symbol of that aspiration. It is an Episcopal cathedral, but it was conceived as a national house of prayer. Presidents worshiped there. National tragedies were mourned there. National aspirations were blessed there.

There was dignity in that role. There was also danger.

A church close to power may gain influence, but it may also lose its freedom. Access can become accommodation. Respectability can become silence. The church may discover that it is welcome at the national table so long as it does not ask too many questions about who prepared the meal, who is permitted to sit, and who remains outside.

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, quoted in the article, suggests that The Episcopal Church has largely abandoned its former ambition to serve as the religious wing of the nation. That abandonment may be one of the more hopeful developments in recent Episcopal history.

The church does not need to be the nation at prayer. It needs to be the church.

That distinction matters as Christian nationalism becomes more visible in American public life. Christian nationalism identifies the nation with the purposes of God. It imagines the United States as a chosen people with a special divine destiny. It turns Christianity into a badge of cultural identity and political belonging.

The problem is not that Christians love their country. Love of country can be a genuine virtue. The problem comes when love becomes idolatry, when the nation is placed beyond judgment, and when the cross becomes an ornament for national power.

The church can pray for the nation. It can give thanks for liberty. It can honor sacrifice, seek the common good, and participate in civic life. But the church cannot confuse the United States with the kingdom of God.

Every nation is temporary.

Every flag flies beneath the judgment of God.

Every constitution is a human document.

Only the reign of God endures.

The article is especially strong when it turns to the contradictions embedded in both the American and Episcopal stories. The Declaration of Independence proclaims equality and inalienable rights, yet those words were written within a society sustained by slavery. The church proclaimed the Gospel while benefiting from the same social order.

This is more than a story of occasional failure. It is a story of competing narratives.

The United States has always contained both liberty and domination. The Episcopal Church has always contained both Gospel proclamation and institutional self-protection. The question is not whether one story is true and the other false. Both are true. The question is which story we will continue.

That is why Pauli Murray belongs on the coin.

Murray did not reject the nation’s ideals. Murray insisted that the nation take them seriously. Murray did not abandon the church’s claims. Murray demanded that the church live according to them. Equality, dignity, justice, and freedom were not dismissed as hypocrisy. They were reclaimed as promises that had not yet been fulfilled.

The prophetic voice often comes from the people whom institutions have pushed to the margins. Absalom Jones understood the church’s claims more clearly than the church that segregated him. Anna Julia Cooper understood the promise of Christian education more clearly than many of the men who controlled it. The Philadelphia Eleven understood the church’s doctrine of vocation more faithfully than the canons then permitted.

Institutions eventually honor such people. Their portraits are hung. Their feast days are observed. Their names are placed on buildings. Their images appear on coins.

But institutions generally honor prophets only after they have ceased to be dangerous.

The harder question is whether the church can hear its prophets while they are still speaking.

The 250th anniversary will invite Americans to tell stories about themselves. Some of those stories will be true and worthy of gratitude. The American experiment has made possible real goods: constitutional government, religious liberty, the expansion of political participation, and movements of reform that have drawn upon the nation’s own professed ideals.

But gratitude without truth becomes sentimentality.

Celebration without confession becomes propaganda.

The church should be able to do something better. Christian worship teaches us to give thanks and confess our sins in the same service. We praise God for gifts we did not create, and we acknowledge what we have done and left undone. We are neither innocent nor without hope.

That may be the church’s particular contribution to America at 250.

The church need not despise the nation. It need not flatter it. It can love the nation truthfully.

Such love will remember the Declaration of Independence, but it will also remember the enslaved people who heard its words and remained in bondage. It will remember the Episcopal founders, but also those whom the church excluded. It will remember national achievement, but also national suffering. It will give thanks for liberty while asking who has not yet fully received it.

The Pauli Murray quarter places establishment and prophecy in the same hand.

Perhaps that is where the church now finds itself.

We inherit a history of influence and exclusion, faithfulness and compromise, noble ideals and moral blindness. We cannot choose whether that history belongs to us. We can choose what we do with it.

The question for The Episcopal Church at the nation’s 250th anniversary is not whether we once sat near the center of American power.

The question is whether we now have the courage to stand where Jesus stands.