|
A Message From Faith in Action:
Dear Friends,
As we approach the Fourth of July and the beginning of America’s 250th year, we are invited to ask a deeper question than how old this nation is. We must ask how close we are to becoming the democracy we have long claimed to be.
This anniversary should not be an exercise in nostalgia. It should be an invitation to imagination.
This week reminded us that American democracy remains unfinished. The Supreme Court reaffirmed that birthright citizenship belongs to every child born on this soil, preserving a constitutional promise rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment. At the same time, the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, sending families back toward instability and danger, even as many have built lives, churches, businesses, and communities here. Together, these moments reveal a tension that has always shaped this nation: the promise of belonging, expanding and narrowing in the same breath.
As people of faith and organizers, we refuse to confuse legal victories with liberation. Laws matter. Court rulings matter. But justice is measured by whether people can live with dignity, safety, and belonging.
Our task is not to celebrate an unrealized democracy but to help realize it. We are called to imagine and organize for a country big enough and moral enough for all of us, where citizenship is more than a legal status, where freedom is more than a slogan, and where every person can flourish.
Frederick Douglass asked, “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?” This year, perhaps each of us should personalize the question:
- What is the Fourth of July to today’s Black American?
- To the African, Asian, or Latino immigrant?
- To the Haitian?
- To the Palestinian?
- To the Jewish neighbor?
- To the Muslim neighbor?
- To religious nones?
- To atheists?
- To the Indigenous community?
- To the transgender child? To the low-wage worker? To those still waiting for democracy’s promises to reach them?
Insert your own community into the question. Let us not be disillusioned by that which has oppressed us but be reminded that whatever democracy is, we are those who contributed to it and imagined it!
The answer is not meant to produce despair. It is meant to awaken imagination and responsibility. The work before us is not preserving an idealized past, it is building the America that has always been possible but has never fully arrived.
That is the work of organizers. That is the work of people of faith. That is the work of the next 250 years.
However you observe this complicated birthday, let’s wake up on the other side committed to being architects of a new America.
Yours in Faith, Justice and Liberation,
Rev. Dr. Cassandra Gould
Political Director, Faith in Action
| 
