Washington, USA - Is July 4 a day to celebrate independence—or deliverance? Author Steven Waldman suggests that Americans treat Friday as a holy day of deliverance and reflect on the crusade for religious freedom that distinguishes our nation.
"One of the real points of differentiation between us and other nations and other Western nations is our very unique approach to religious freedom," said Waldman, author of "Founding Faith," a book about the spiritual journeys that shaped the nation.
"We tend to think about [the American Revolution] in terms of taxation and political liberties," he said. "But in their minds political liberty and religious liberty were very closely connected. They felt that you could not have religious liberty without political liberty and vice versa."
Never thought of the 4th of July as a religious holiday? Perhaps that's because the nation's founders have long been misunderstood and misrepresented by activists on the right and left, Waldman said.
He contends that George Washington and James Madison never set out to establish a Christian nation as the religious right would have us believe. Nor did Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin intend to build a wall separating church and state, as some secularists on the left insist. Instead, the Revolutionary War was fought to secure religious liberty—a novel way to promote faith by simply leaving it alone, Waldman said.
"The founders themselves all had fascinating and sometimes circuitous spiritual journeys," he said. "That was part of what they were fighting for . . . the freedom to have a spiritual journey, not just to advocate a particular view."