Yes, America is the greatest country in the world. Christians should celebrate it.

“America is the greatest nation in the history of the world.” Does that statement make you cringe? Does it feel like pride, vanity or ignorance? Does it immediately bring to your mind all the sins that didn’t make America great, from slavery to Jim Crow to abortion? If so, you’re in good company. According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2023, only 20% of Americans still believe America is the greatest nation on earth, a number that has been steadily ticking downward by a few percent per year over the last decade. 

The trend is everywhere. Red, white, and blue are considered kitsch–something you break out once a year at a barbecue. Even among right-leaning Americans, love for the country is often limited to a blustery jingoism, delivered, of course, with an ironic millennial wink–like wearing a tank top worn on July 4th featuring Ronald Reagan atop a velociraptor while firing machine guns in the air. 

Churches that light up their stages red, white, and blue or sing patriotic songs on the 4th of July are laughed off as dorky culture warriors at best, or idolaters at worst. Unabashed love of America is thought to be a foolish sentiment of low-IQ working men. Not even our Evangelical leaders have been immune to this elitism, although many drape their snobbery with spiritual lingo about “shadow kingdoms” and finger-wagging about “lust for earthly power.”

This year, as we celebrate the birth of the United States on July 4th, 1776, I’m here to tell you that America is the greatest nation on earth and that it’s ok for Christians to proclaim it loudly. This doesn’t come from a place of pride, primal patriotic sentiment, historical denialism, or delusion. It comes from knowledge about the truth of our history–a truth that has been deliberately hidden from millions of American children over several generations. I believe it’s possible to have a patriotic affection for America from a place of knowledge. I believe that warts and all, America is great, and it is the duty of every believer who loves his neighbor and desires human flourishing to know exactly why.

When we celebrate the Revolution each year, we often think of the muskets, redcoats, and “bombs bursting in air,” but we rarely think of the days of humiliation, fasting, and prayer. That is because this truth of our history has been deliberately hidden from us. In our public education, the Protestant Christian tradition that birthed American freedom has been excised from our national memory. GK Chesterton lamented the same phenomenon as it happened in 20th century Britain: “We have made our public schools the strongest walls against the whisper of the honour of England.” Today we watch the results as Britain loses its national identity, slowly falling to godless lawlessness and Islamism. America is just a few decades behind. 

If we want to begin reversing this deadly trend, we should recall to our national memory a few forgotten truths:

The American founding was steeped in fasting and prayer to God. 

Few Americans know the role fasting and prayer to God played in the founding of America. The first proclamation was made by Thomas Jefferson in 1774 in response to King George, who had just closed Boston’s port as punishment for the Boston Tea Party. Jefferson’s Day of Prayer and Fasting Resolution was supported by Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and George Mason, and passed unanimously in the Virginia House of Burgesses. The local British Governor was reportedly so enraged by this resolution that he dissolved the House of Burgesses. George Washington then met colonial leaders in a local tavern where they voted to form the first Continental Congress.

The Prayer and Fasting proclamation was sent throughout the colonies. Citizens were asked to cease all work and gather at their local church, where the proclamation was read by their pastor. It was on this special day that George Washington wrote in his diary: “Went to church, fasted all day.”

In 1776, the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, kicking things off with yet another prayer and fasting proclamation that called on Americans to: “with united hearts, confess … our manifold sins and … by a sincere repentance … appease his righteous displeasure, and, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.”

From 1775 to 1784, sixteen similar proclamations were made, in which America’s leaders and her citizens stopped to call on God for wisdom, support, and mercy. Each time, the country stopped and gathered in churches to seek the Lord and express thanksgiving. 

The Christianity of the founding fathers and citizens of America has been virtually erased from the history taught in our schools. The founders are often written off as “white slave owners,” “opportunists,” and non-religious “deists.” In reality, the vast majority of the founding people of this nation were more devout protestant Christians than the vast majority of today’s Evangelicals.

When’s the last time you fasted and prayed for America? Perhaps it’s time to bring that back.

Contrary to popular belief, the Christians of America were the first to ban slavery.

That’s right—Christians in America banned slavery decades before Great Britain did. 

Slavery is often the trump card used by America’s detractors to undermine everything one might consider “good” about our country. “America was built on slavery,” we are told, and it's the original sin that will forever taint the founding and everything that resulted. To this day, it's still cited by Leftist revolutionaries as proof that America has been rotten from the beginning and needs to be dismantled. 

In truth, the abolition of slavery was stirring in America when the colonies were still under British rule. Slavery is the oldest human institution besides marriage, going back thousands of years. By the founding of the United States, slavery had existed in every human society. 

American Christians were the first to organize against it. 

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson expressed his anger that King George had blocked all American colonial efforts to ban slavery: “[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” 

From Jefferson’s statement, we learn America was founded in part so that the colonies would be able to ban the slave trade without interference from King George. 

In 1777, just one year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Vermont ended the slave trade in their territory. Pennsylvania was next in 1780. By 1804, all northern states had banned the slave trade—over 30 years before Great Britain ended slavery in their empire, a hard-won victory of British Christians.

Liberty, not slavery, has been in America’s DNA since its founding. Almost 100 years later, after decades of hard toil by Evangelical Christians in America and the violent deaths of 700,000 white men in the Civil War, America eradicated mankind’s oldest institution from the West. This is a good reason to love this country. 

A time of thanksgiving

So this year as you fire up the grill, gather by the pool with friends and family, and rock that obnoxious tank top, feel free to unabashedly love and appreciate this great country. 

Your love doesn’t have to be the blind patriotic love of a child, you can love this country with full knowledge of how she began and what she stands for. You can laugh at the cynical lies of those who hate Christ, his followers, and a country founded in humble prayer and fasting.

And perhaps, when you’re done feasting, consider having your own day of prayer and fasting. Ask the Lord that he will protect our Christian nation from her enemies, ignite spiritual revival among her citizens, and restore freedom and virtue for our posterity.