July 3, 2026

America turns 250 this week, and the church is arguing — again — about what that means. Christianity Today draws a line from Moses to Washington, both warning nations that forget God. The Gospel Coalition says Christians can love their country without worshiping it — dual citizenship is the frame. Neither piece is wrong. But Frederick Douglass's question, raised by Christianity Today, won't stay politely in the background: what does the Fourth mean to those the founding excluded? Albert Mohler is asking something adjacent — whether courts can carry the moral weight Americans keep loading onto them. They can't. That's his point. Relevant Magazine says the whole conversation is almost impossible to have now — patriotism has become so politically sorted that Christians can barely name their discomfort without being claimed by a side.

Mere Orthodoxy cuts through some of the noise: America's Christian heritage rests on an idea, not bloodline. That's a harder thing to celebrate than ancestry, but it's more defensible. Ligonier traces the Scottish Presbyterian spine of the revolution — useful history, though it risks becoming the kind of origin story that flatters rather than forms. The BBC piece notes that the American Dream is surviving at 250 even as faith behind it fades. Which raises the real question underneath all of it: whether Christian gratitude for America can stay honest — about the Douglass problem, about the idolatry problem, about the gap between the founding ideal and the founding reality. We've been watching this tension surface in different forms for weeks. It hasn't resolved. It won't by July 4th.