Rededication at 250.

To what are we rededicating ourselves?

We hear calls for a “rededication” for the 250th anniversary of the American Founding.

Ok. A rededication to what?

Some say a “rededication to God”. I’m for that, provided the understanding of God is authentic. But on that point, we find disagreement. In some cases, it’s major disagreement.

Interreligious conversation and ecumenism, properly understood, can allow people with significant religious differences to find enough commonality to stand together for a “rededication to God”. Sure. Unfortunately, some folks don’t do interreligious and ecumenical stuff well.

Count me skeptical then about how such a “rededication to God” with such folks will work. Skeptical but eager to have my skepticism overcome with good fruit. We will see.

Then there are those for whom “rededication” at the 250th anniversary of the Founding means rededication to our founding principles. These folks aren’t necessarily opposed to a “rededication to God” as well, but they tend to leave that to the private sphere of each person’s own religious beliefs. No, they focus on the principles of the American Founding itself. The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God are for them not the stuff of public conversation.

A rededication to the principles of the American Founding is also a tricky matter. Some people believe the American Founding was so corrupted by social injustice that it’s hardly worth revisiting, unless the focus is to show what was wrong with it. I don’t think there’s much to say for that approach. If that’s how you feel then the 250th anniversary of the American Founding can only be a “celebration” that distances us from the Founding and each other.

Among those who really truly do want to celebrate the American Founding, without denying the problems involved with it, there remain significant differences of interpretation. That can be OK, even itself something to appreciate, if a certain core of common understanding exists. Does it? Can we Americans of 2026 read together the Declaration of Independence, and find enough of common understanding that our 250th anniversary celebration will mean more than simply a celebration of social-political arrangements that let you get what you want, and me and mine to get what we want, and we all call it the American way? Is that all there is to it, not to deny any value to such a neat arrangement?

Is that worth a rededication? Or is there an essential agreement available about the good life, about what is rightly entailed by “the pursuit of happiness” that we can rededicate ourselves to it? And might this involve the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the one whom the Declaration describes as our Creator, who endowed us with certain rights and who, by implication, also holds us accountable for how we fulfill our responsibilities, to him and to one another?

If such essential agreement is lacking now, perhaps we can rededicate ourselves to seeking to recover it.