Celebrating America at 250 | Article 2 of 3
by Paul Grenelle
Yes. America is worth celebrating on its 250th anniversary, but only with the lens that it is a flawed vessel God has used for real gospel good, not as a nation that was ever Eden, ever will be Eden, or owed us one.
In the first part of this series, we made the case that no country, including America, will ever return us to the utopia of Eden this side of Christ's return. That is not a uniquely American problem. It is the human condition. But it raises an honest question. If no nation will ever be innocent, is celebrating one still defensible, or does honesty require nothing but lament?
Start with the concession because skipping it makes everything that follows sound like propaganda. America is not innocent. No nation is.
"Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins" (Eccl. 7:20)
And that verdict applies at the national level as much as the personal one. Do not go looking for a clean ledger. You will not find one, not here, not anywhere. Every lineage carries blood on its hands, ours included.
Now look at what God has done through America anyway.
Religious liberty has run unbroken in America for 235 years, which is rare in history; most such experiments do not survive this long. The First Amendment has protected the free exercise of religion without interruption since 1791. State-church entanglement, not freedom, has been the historical norm; disestablishment was the experiment, and it is still running.
Out of that liberty, America sends more missionaries abroad than any other nation, by a wide margin. That lead is narrowing in a good way: Brazil, South Korea, Nigeria, and the Philippines are now sending more missionaries than they did a generation ago, often building on training models American seminaries helped export. That is not a threat to America's record. It is the record doing exactly what it should, multiplying rather than hoarding. The goal was never an American monopoly on missions. It was the gospel reaching people who had never heard it, by whatever nation God chose to use to get it there.
Americans gave $592 billion to charity in 2024, two-thirds of it from individuals rather than the government. Religion was the single largest giving category, funding a missions enterprise with a $5 billion annual budget paid for almost entirely by ordinary church members, not Washington. Globally, only about one in twenty pastors has any formal theological training. America holds a disproportionate share of the seminary infrastructure built to close that gap, training pastors for a world that desperately lacks them.
None of that makes America Eden. It makes America useful: a vessel God has chosen to pour real, if imperfect, good into the world.
This good has come from the Christian ideals on which we were uniquely founded. Here is the thing about ideals carried by sinful men: the ideal does not die when the men fail it.
Christians should know this well. The Crusades and the Inquisition do not refute "love your enemies" (Matt. 5:44); they betray it. Slaveholders quoting Scripture to defend chattel slavery do not refute "there is neither slave nor free" (Gal. 3:28); they violate it. The gap between the ideal and the practice indicts the practitioners, not the ideal.
"All men are created equal" survived slavery the same way. Abolitionists did not import some outside standard to condemn it. They pointed straight at the Declaration's own words and said you have betrayed your own claim. That the ideal could be used to correct its own violation is proof it was real in the first place, not proof it was hollow.
If your own family's story includes the wrong end of one of these failures, slavery, internment, broken treaties, that history is not erased by a missions statistic, and it should not be. It does not have to be erased for it to also be true that the ideal survived its own betrayal, and that the ideal is still worth claiming and working toward, including by you.
None of that is abstract. If you sit in a pew that supports a missionary family, give to a relief fund this year, or were trained at a seminary that exists because of this country's religious liberty, you are not a bystander to these numbers. You are one of them, whether you feel like celebrating or not.
That is the case for the ideals on which America was founded. We can and should celebrate America for the Christian ideals upon which it was founded and still works to realize. We celebrate America for how God has used those ideals and the freedoms they afford us to bless the world with the Gospel, even if imperfectly.
But ideals do not write themselves into a constitution. Men do, and the men who wrote America's Constitution were not inherently righteous men. They were slaveholders and statesmen, believers and skeptics, men of genuine courage and real, documented sin, often in the same person. That is where the harder question lives. It is easy, 250 years later, to assume we would have done better: written a cleaner document, fought a cleaner war, avoided every pitfall they did not. So, should we celebrate a country whose forefathers and leaders were so flawed?
Before answering that, it is worth asking what Jesus actually said to people who made that exact claim about their own ancestors. That answer is not flattering, and it is where we turn next article.
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If you missed the beginning of our series "Celebrating America at 250 ” find the article links below
Read Article 1: Why Is America's 250th So Hard to Celebrate?
Frequently Asked Questions
How many missionaries does America send compared to other countries?
The United States sends more missionaries abroad than any other nation, by a wide margin, according to the World Christian Database, though sending nations such as Brazil, South Korea, and Nigeria have grown significantly in recent decades.
How much do Americans give to charity each year?
Americans gave an estimated $592 billion to charity in 2024, with roughly two-thirds coming from individual donors rather than government, and religious giving as the single largest category.
What percentage of pastors worldwide have formal theological training?
According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, only about 5 percent, roughly one in twenty, of the world's pastors and priests have any formal theological training.
Does a nation's historical sins disqualify its founding ideals?
No. Scripture teaches that the gap between an ideal and the failures of those who held it indicts the people, not the ideal. The Crusades do not refute "love your enemies," and slavery did not refute "all men are created equal"; both betrayed those claims rather than disproving them.