Celebrating America at 250 | Article 1 of 3
by Paul Grenelle
This year marks 250 years since the founding of America, and a lot of us are struggling to celebrate. Most of that struggle has both a real cause and a misdiagnosed one. The real cause is the actual brokenness around us. The misdiagnosis is thinking that America is the source of it.
America has demonstrably been a source of injustice and oppression to some people throughout its history. While it may have been great, it has not been great for all those who have walked its land or called it home.
Even today, it's been hard for many of our younger generation. Wages haven't kept pace with the cost of a home. Institutions we once trusted, like the media, government, and even parts of the church, got caught lying and kept their jobs anyway.
The last couple of administrations have done things that genuinely troubled us, and not because we picked a side, but simply because we were paying attention. The grievance is real, and pretending otherwise only insults the people carrying it.
The church was not immune. A strain of woke Christianity and Christian nationalism has grown loud enough in the last decade that some of us have wondered whether our own faith is being hijacked by people who want political power more than they want the gospel. None of this is imaginary.
I recently taught through Ecclesiastes, and Solomon's perspective on all of this is blunt:
there is nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9).
Our disillusionment feels unprecedented. God’s Word says it is not, and that matters more than it sounds like it should.
The real problem goes back further than any election. It goes back to the source of our brokenness, the Garden of Eden.
God built Eden as a finished, ordered, flourishing world, under His direct rule, with nothing crooked in it. Then we broke it. We broke it. God cursed the earth, and He cursed it perfectly and completely (Gen. 3:17-19). The brokenness is seen in our hearts, in the earth, and in every corner of creation.
Paul tells us creation has been groaning under futility ever since, waiting on a redemption it cannot produce for itself (Rom. 8:20-22). That word, futility, is the same idea Solomon spent an entire book chasing under a different name: vanity, vapor, or, in Solomon's words, hevel.
Solomon had the resources to actually run the experiment most of us only run emotionally. Houses, vineyards, gardens, pools, wealth, pleasure, wisdom: he built all of it, further than you or I ever could, and discovered
"there was nothing to be gained under the sun" (Eccl. 2:11).
His verdict still stands:
"What is crooked cannot be made straight" (Eccl. 1:15; 7:13).
Some brokenness cannot be fixed by effort or government, in any nation, this side of eternity. As long as we are under the Garden’s curse and our own depravity, the evidence of brokenness, injustice, and suffering will be present.
Why, then, do we keep expecting otherwise?
Solomon answers that too:
"He has put eternity into man's heart" (Eccl. 3:11).
We were built with eternity inside us, and we keep trying to stuff that eternity into something finite: a marriage, a career, a country.
The ache you feel watching America fail to deliver the utopia of Eden is not proof that America is uniquely broken. That is eternity colliding with a vessel never built to hold it.
The flaw lives in our theology of history, not America's. Blame the country for not satisfying a hunger only eternity can satisfy, and you will stay disillusioned no matter who wins the next election or what country you find yourself calling home.
Here is the fix, and it has to hold two things at once, or it collapses.
Nothing we build will overcome or solve depravity completely; that is the totality claim sitting inside Ecclesiastes 1:15. Yet just because the work will be unending does not excuse us from the work itself.
Moses told Israel the poor would never disappear from the land, and used that permanence as the reason to keep opening your hand to them, not a reason to stop (Deut. 15:11). Jesus says nearly the same thing centuries later (Matt. 26:11). A rabbi named Tarfon said it plainly two thousand years ago, outside Scripture but worth hearing anyway: finishing the work was never your job, and neither is setting it down.
Every generation inherits chaos and brokenness from the one before it, and despite their best efforts, their depraved nature means they, too, will pass both on to the next generation. Ours is not the exception.
Every American generation has carried its own version of this disillusionment: the betrayed promises of Reconstruction, the bread lines of the Depression, the injustice of Jim Crow laws, the body counts that came home from Vietnam, the slow erosion of trust that followed Watergate. None of those generations got to live in Eden either, and none of them were owed it.
Our situation is real, but it is not some unique tragedy. It carries both the universal tragedy of sin and our assignment, and it's meant to point us somewhere specific: to the cross, and to Christ's return. That is the only place that can handle our wanderlust for our eternal home. Jesus is the only one who can give us rest from our work and the only one who could truly say, “It is finished!”
So what we see is not America’s flaws but rather a reflection of our own, our brokenness, depravity, and misplaced hope. The good news is that since the flaw is ours, we can do something to correct it.
That still leaves the obvious question. If no nation will ever be Eden, and America never was and never will be either, is there still a case for celebrating its 250th anniversary at all, or is the only honest posture grief?
That question deserves a real answer, not a slogan, and it's where we turn next article.
Application & Reflection
Before reading further in this series, take an honest inventory: which of your own frustrations with America are really frustrations with brokenness itself, the kind no nation escapes, and which are specific, nameable failures worth continuing to address?
Naming that distinction is the first step toward neither despairing of your country nor expecting it to be your salvation.
Subscribe to our email Here and get more from Dr. Mann delivered to your inbox, plus his free resource: 3 Ways to Know We Can Trust the Bible as God's Authoritative Word.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Bible say a nation can ever be perfect?
No. Ecclesiastes 1:15 states that "what is crooked cannot be made straight," and Romans 8:20–22 teaches that all creation is subject to futility until Christ returns. No nation, including America, is exempt from this.
What does "there is nothing new under the sun" mean for today's political disillusionment?
Solomon's point in Ecclesiastes 1:9 is that every generation faces its own form of brokenness. Current disillusionment with America is real, but it is not unprecedented; it is the same fallen condition prior generations faced in a different shape.
Why does Ecclesiastes say God put eternity in the human heart?
Ecclesiastes 3:11 teaches that people were created with a built-in longing for permanence and perfection that nothing in this world, including any nation, was designed to satisfy. That longing is meant to point toward God, not toward political fulfillment.
Is it sinful for a Christian to feel disillusioned with their country?
No. Naming real brokenness honestly is not sinful. The error is in locating the ultimate cause of that brokenness in the nation rather than in humanity's fallen condition, which no nation can fix.