Remembrance in Full

We are thinking a lot about remembrance, with the 250th anniversary of American independence approaching. How, in this contentious time, should we remember this event? How should we observe the occasion? Do such things really matter?

The last question is the easiest to answer. Yes, they matter, because looking forward necessarily entails looking backward. The two vistas are symbiotically connected in the human soul. Edmund Burke captured this truth when he famously remarked: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” We must connect with both if we are to have a stake in either. We are better able to imagine, and work toward, a future for our children when we remember, with gratitude, that we ourselves are the embodiment of our predecessors’ tomorrows.

For that reason, we must think our way back to the first Fourth of July in 1776, the date on which the United States’ emergence as a free and independent nation was memorably proclaimed to the world. That is what we will celebrate in 2026: the event at the center of our emergence as a distinct and distinctive people—the enduring flame of the American Revolution, which illuminated the imaginations of the brave people who fought, against tremendous odds, to make this country possible and to establish it as a beacon to the world.

Nothing was inevitable about their triumph. When the signatories of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the Patriot cause, they were not speaking rhetorically. Had they failed, the hangman’s noose would surely have awaited them.

Like nearly everything else these days, simply asking these questions ignites controversy. Even the national commission that Congress created to help plan and coordinate activities associated with the 250th has struggled to do its work, buffeted by the cultural and political crosswinds of our time. (Full disclosure: I am a member of that commission.) Serious debate has taken place over how July 4, 2026, should be understood: as a grand celebration, a restrained observance—or a guilty reckoning, with every patriotic cry muffled or rebuked and replaced by a sermon on our national failings.

True, some of these conflicts also surfaced during the bicentennial in 1976, when the radical People’s Bicentennial movement sought to challenge the triumphalist tone of the official celebration. But 50 years later, what was once radical has become mainstream. The outgoing executive director of the American Historical Association, James Grossman, has openly fretted about the alarming possibility that the 250th anniversary might present the public with an overtly unapologetic account of the American past, a peril he hopes can be averted. He has even suggested that this coming July 4, far from being a celebration, should instead become a National Day of Atonement—a secular Yom Kippur, as he calls it—in which we would acknowledge our sins and seek forgiveness for them.

At first glance, the proposal might seem unserious, even preposterous. But the broader idea of setting aside an occasion for sustained moral reflection on the state of our national soul is not a bad one, even if it might brush up against the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishing a national religion. In fact, it inevitably would, because the notion of a “secular” Yom Kippur is a contradiction in terms. On the Day of Atonement, it is God who performs the most essential act of forgiving.

The historian’s idea is not nearly as novel as it might seem. Americans have often done the very sort of thing that Grossman is proposing—but it has not been secular in character. When, by order of the Continental Congress, May 17, 1776, was set aside for “fasting, humiliation and prayer, humbly to supplicate the mercy of Almighty God, that it would please him to pardon all our manifold sins and transgressions,” the act was explicitly religious, and it did not seek forgiveness from men. Nor have the many such public displays in the years since, including Abraham Lincoln’s great proclamation of March 1863, which designated “a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer,” on which citizens were to “abstain from their ordinary secular pursuits” and to unite, in their places of worship and homes, in keeping the day “holy to the Lord” and devoted to the solemn discharge of religious duties.

The same is true of the National Day of Prayer, which endures to this day despite repeated legal challenges from groups such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Those challenges underscore the obvious point: whatever else the National Day of Prayer may be, it is not a strictly secular occasion.

My point is that if a time and a season exist for every purpose under heaven, then 2026 ought to be chiefly a time of celebration and gratitude. The Revolution—and the Declaration of Independence that accompanied it—has always been fundamental to our understanding of what America is and of what it aspires to be. If we want rising generations to understand and appreciate their country, we must ensure that they grasp the essential meaning of the American Revolution. Without that point of reference, we not only forget the succession of historical events, the names and places and stories that form the warp and woof of our common life; we will also eventually forget who we are as a people.

That is not an overstatement. Let me offer an example to explain what I mean—one drawn not from American history but, in keeping with the earlier reference to Yom Kippur, from a practice that originated in the ancient Near East and continues there, and around the world, to this day. I am speaking of the Passover seder.

The Passover seder is the ritual meal at the heart of Judaism. Each year, it involves the retelling of the story of the Israelites’ miraculous deliverance from slavery in ancient Egypt, as recounted in the Book of Exodus. The seder is rooted in the biblical command to transmit that story across generations: “You shall tell your child on that day, saying, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt’ ” (Exod. 13:8). It is a story of grateful liberation, a story that defines a people and has enabled them, through centuries of dispersion and tribulation, to remember who they are.

Note the command: “You shall tell your child.” The retelling of the story plays an essential role in the child’s formation. It is also a personalized directive, an instruction to tell the child “what the Lord did for me”—that is, for the child’s own father. The result is a long chain of deliverance stories, of Exodus recounted and relived in generation after generation.

And that is not all. The Exodus story became a formative part of Western civilization, visible throughout American history. New England Puritans understood their perilous Atlantic crossing in search of religious liberty as a reenactment of Israel’s flight from bondage, leading them toward a new Zion. The Latter-day Saints, who undertook an exhausting and dangerous trek to the Salt Lake Valley under the leadership of Brigham Young in search of refuge from relentless persecution, saw themselves in much the same light. Enslaved Africans south of the Ohio River likewise turned to the Exodus as a prophetic image of their own hoped-for freedom, pleading in song, “Go down, Moses. . . . Tell old Pharaoh, / To let My people go.”

When the time came for the new United States of America to design its Great Seal, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—not among the most religiously orthodox of men—urged that it depict the miracle of the Exodus. Franklin envisioned Moses extending his hand over the waters of the Red Sea as they engulfed Pharaoh’s pursuing army and proposed that the seal bear the motto: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

The idea was not adopted, but the larger point remains. Two of the leading founders, each a quintessential figure of the American Enlightenment, understood the biblical drama of the Exodus as an emblematic expression of humanity’s longing for liberty and dignity: a flight from tyranny and idolatry fully continuous with the hopes the American Revolution sought to fulfill. It is a story that tells us who we are.

The fear that Americans might lose their national soul by forgetting who they are is not new. Abraham Lincoln gave voice to that anxiety in his 1838 Lyceum Address, when he warned that as Americans’ living memory of the Revolution faded, so would the foundations of the republic itself, the “temple of liberty” that the Revolution had made possible.

In our own time, this concern takes the form of a curious paradox: while we “know” more and more about previously hidden details of the American past, we often understand less. As a people, we lack an active sense of the overarching meaning of that history—the kind of meaning that shapes how we live together and how we imagine our future. We lack a mature perspective that can place America’s great achievements in proper relation to its admitted failings and shortcomings.

More than that, we fail to weigh those achievements against the dark and dismal features of most of human history. We lack a shared sense of how remarkable our pioneering experiment in self-rule has been, and of how much despair, want, and inequity have characterized most of the human past, and much of the present, by comparison. We lack a sense of the brilliant light that entered the world in 1776, when, for the first time in history, a nation came into being explicitly committed to the principle that liberty and equality are endowments bestowed upon all human beings. Its very existence asserted, in Jefferson’s words, that “the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

And so the shared memory of these things—and of the battles fought to secure them—is of crucial importance. The French writer Ernest Renan made this point vividly in his celebrated 1882 Sorbonne lecture, “What Is a Nation?,” breaking with those who believed that nations are constituted by blood and soil. For Renan, a nation was fundamentally “a soul, a spiritual principle,” formed by “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories,” of heroic persons and deeds that instill in citizens “the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received.” If he was right, America is not merely a nation built on a set of propositions; it is also a community sustained by a legacy of shared sacrifices and shared memories.

But memory is a tool with a double edge. Some memories are painful to recall, challenging much of what we hold dear.

Here is one of them. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson recorded an extraordinary speech delivered in October 1774 by a Mingo leader known to white settlers as Logan. The speech offers a dignified and restrained account of the abuses and betrayals suffered by Logan and his people, including the cold-blooded murder of his entire family by a white man. Logan’s words are wrenchingly poignant, and it is difficult to improve on the historian Wilcomb Washburn’s response to them: “The American may not have a material past of castles and monuments, but he has a psychological past of wrongs committed and not expiated. The recency of those wrongs gives our emotional past greater strength.”

The evidence for his assertion is visible all around us today. The weight of our imperfect history now presses heavily upon us. Memory is necessary, but so is forgiveness, especially for past deeds that cannot be undone and past debts that can never be repaid. Without it, we become prisoners of the past. We cannot move forward without both memory and forgiveness, and neither can long endure without the other. Our future as a nation, as a people, depends on learning how to remember and forgive. That task has become more difficult than ever in our morally panicked yet militantly secular age.

The phenomenon we imprecisely call “wokeness” is moralism run riot: a monomaniacal preoccupation with detecting and punishing moral fault, past and present, without any sense of humane measure. It leaves no room for forgiveness or forgetting, and it shows little tolerance for the foibles, inconsistencies, and blindnesses to which all human beings are prone.

It plays upon a reflex of all-consuming guilt that has become a central problem in the Western world, a guilt attached to sins of conquest and colonialism, of environmental abuse and despoliation, and of nearly everything that has, directly or indirectly, contributed to the West’s dominance over the human and natural worlds. At times, this logic extends even to fundamentals such as the domestication of animals, which made possible the emergence of settled community life in the Neolithic Age. At times, it seems as though we are on a path toward civilizational self-negation.

Perhaps the clearest symptom of this sickness of soul is the pell-mell rush in recent years to sit in judgment on heroes of the past and to tear down the monuments to them—the George Washingtons, Thomas Jeffersons, Woodrow Wilsons, and the like. Are we really sure that we can no longer tolerate honoring great figures of the past who fail, in some respects, to meet our present-day moral specifications? Yes, the three men mentioned either held slaves or espoused racial views we rightly find abhorrent today. But does that exhaust everything we need to know about them? Does it outweigh the value of everything else they did? Should it render honoring them impossible?

For some, it apparently should. For them, the transformation of history into a weapon requires a brutal simplification of the record, so that George Washington’s ownership of slaves becomes the only relevant fact about him. A genuinely historical use of history would acknowledge—indeed, insist upon—that fact and situate it within the circumstances of its time. It would then go on to consider Washington’s life as a whole, weighing his beliefs and actions carefully and in context.

That is the mature perspective we need to cultivate in our citizens and in ourselves. It remembers that we, too, are imperfect and often blind to our own faults, and that the measure we give to the past is the same measure we will receive from the future.

So what, then, should we say about the all-too-human leaders who brought our American nation into being, a quarter of a millennium ago? We can teach our children this: flawed people are normal. All of us are flawed. What is not normal or usual are those rare moments in history when flawed people come together to produce extraordinary things—not flawless things, but great things nonetheless, worthy of our admiration and gratitude. The men and women who came together at our nation’s beginning, at a pivotal juncture in human history: each contributed something vital to a glorious and consequential outcome.

Even as they sinned and quarreled. You may have noticed that we are still sinning and quarreling today, and yet we have held together. Later this year, we should give thanks for that fact, and pause our present disputes long enough to pay homage to those remarkable souls who made our quarrels possible and who did so much to make Americans the people we are.