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 à 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, apocalypse, 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. Economics followed. Frances Moore Lappé‘s Food First and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer‘s The Politics of Compassion exposed structures of hunger and inequality that conventional economics preferred to ignore. Then years of teaching Great Books at Berea College required me to wrestle seriously with Marx alongside Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Charles Dickens. Little by little, assumptions I had once regarded as self-evident dissolved under the weight of evidence.
But books alone did not transform me.
Liberation theology did.
After earning my doctorate in moral theology, I became fascinated by a movement that insisted theology must begin not from the perspective of the powerful but from that of the poor. Faith, it argued, should be judged by whether it liberates those who suffer, not by whether it justifies existing institutions.
That conviction took me far beyond libraries.
My wife Peggy and I studied and worked throughout Latin America and the Global South—in Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, and Israel-Palestine. We became friends with Paulo Freire, whose understanding of education as liberation profoundly influenced both of us. In Costa Rica we joined the Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, where Franz Hinkelammert and Helio Gallardo became two of my most important teachers.
Neither man simply gave me new information. They taught me something much more valuable: how to see.
They invited me to view history from below—from the perspective of those who bear the consequences of imperial decisions made thousands of miles away. Peasants, workers, indigenous communities, political prisoners, refugees, and theologians throughout Latin America repeatedly described the United States in ways that initially seemed exaggerated to me. Gradually I realized they understood my country’s history far better than I did.
Liberation theology completed what Vatican II had begun. It taught me that the decisive question is never whether a nation calls itself democratic, Christian, or free. The question is always: What happens to the poor? Everything else is secondary.
Seen from that perspective, a different America emerged.
It was a republic built upon slavery and the dispossession of Native peoples. It repeatedly overthrew governments that threatened American corporate interests. It armed dictators while speaking eloquently about democracy. As Martin Luther King Jr. concluded near the end of his life, it had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Eventually I encountered an admission even more startling than King’s. In 1948, George Kennan—the architect of America’s Cold War strategy—explained privately what U.S. foreign policy actually sought:
“. . . we have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population…. Our real task…is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. We should cease to talk about vague…objectives such as human rights…and democratization…. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
For me, that memo confirmed what liberation theologians had already been teaching for years.
So today I find myself agreeing, though for reasons different from Professor Glaude’s opening declaration.
No, I no longer love what is commonly called “America”—if by that we mean an empire built upon military supremacy, economic domination, and stories that conceal as much as they reveal.
But neither have I become cynical.
I still love the American people. I love those who organize, protest, teach, tell the truth, and refuse to surrender the country’s unrealized promise. I love the constitutional ideals that have so often been betrayed. And I love the generations of Americans who have struggled to redeem the republic from its own mythology.
Perhaps that is what Jesus would have understood as well. He loved neither the Roman Empire nor the religious establishment that collaborated with it. His loyalty belonged instead to what he called the Kingdom of God—a social order measured not by wealth or military power but by the well-being of the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, and the stranger. Liberation theology taught me to ask of every nation, including my own, not whether it proclaims itself exceptional, but whether it stands with those people.
If my understanding of America changed, it was not because I became more cynical. It changed because teachers, colleagues, friends, and ordinary people throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East patiently taught me to see history through the eyes of those who pay the price for empire.
For that gift—and especially for the friendships that made it possible—I remain profoundly grateful.
On this Fourth of July, perhaps genuine patriotism begins not with celebration, but with truth.
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