Published February 20, 2025
In 2026, the United States will celebrate our semiquincentennial; 250 years is a long time in terms of one human life. But it is not so very long a lifespan for a people, a nation. I say nation, not government, because I take it that there is such a thing as an American nation, which predates our Constitution and the government it established.
Not that it is easy to define a nation as something distinct from its government, particularly in the American case. An Englishman can list the many forms of government under which the English nation has existed. Same for a Frenchman or a Pole. In the latter case, the Polish nation managed to survive more than a century of partition during which no Poland appeared on a map and there was no Polish government.
America is no longer young, but neither is she particularly old, at least not compared to many of our European cousins. A nation young enough to recall its own birthday can’t possibly be that old. America is certainly not old compared to some nations of the East, say, China or Japan. A people whose history as a people extends back into legend and myth is an ancient people, indeed.
One wonders if there can ever again be such ancient peoples or have the last of those nations already come into the world. Can a nation whose origins are recorded in contemporary newspaper accounts, whose youth was captured in photographs or on newsreels, ever really be old? Barring some great cataclysm, there can be no new peoples founded in myth and legend, only nations founded in history. We remember too much. We record too much.
We Americans date the beginning of our nation from a particular day in July of 1776, though one could argue that the Declaration of Independence no more created our nation than a birth certificate creates a newborn. It was the announcement of an existing (if disputed and previously unrecognized) reality. But the Declaration was not in itself an act of generation.
America as a nation had already begun to exist as a thing distinct from the British Empire. It was a new nation, but it was already alive – in utero, so to speak – well before its birth into the world.
By contrast, and whatever its aspirations, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, while it undoubtedly led to the alteration of both the French nation and the French government, marked neither the end of the French nation nor the arrival of a new one. One declaration heralded a natural (if difficult) birth after a long gestation; the other ushered in desperate acts of national self-mutilation.
Whether the American nation – again, positing that such a thing really exists – would survive a dramatic change in its form of government (as France underwent in 1789) or through a long partition (as Poland did) is an interesting question. Whether we already have survived such changes, and how many times, is another interesting question.
In his final address as president, Ronald Reagan quoted a letter he had received, in which the writer observed the following: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
There’s something to this, surely. Abraham Lincoln spoke of our being “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This is true. Yet, if it takes more than blood and soil (or even perfect French) to constitute a people, neither are shared ideals, however noble, quite enough to constitute a nation. All men are more than beasts and less than gods. Being both flesh and spirit, we must share something with both.
So America is neither young nor old. Is she in her prime? She seems to have wandered into middle age at least.
Sometimes I wonder if we, as a nation, aren’t going through a midlife crisis. Our youth is gone, and we miss it. At the same time, the brashness and ambition of our youth, which served us so well when we were settling the frontier or playing the plucky underdog on the world stage, have not always served us (or others) so well as a global superpower.
Meanwhile, we are fairly choking on nostalgia. Though it is rarely put in such words, much of our contemporary politics seems driven by disparate attempts to ask and answer that most middle-aged of questions: “What has become of us?” Understandable, perhaps – though not necessarily indicative of the self-mastery, self-possession, or self-confidence becoming of a nation as generously blessed as our own – is the question that almost always comes next: “And who is to blame?”
Adversity and adversaries (foreign or domestic) play a strange role in the identity and character of a nation. For example, no one will ever convince me that an Englishman really makes sense unless there exists, somewhere, a Frenchman. Russia has long been defined, in part, by her alternating love and hate, admiration and resentment, for Europe to her west. My Ukrainian friends tell me that Vladimir Putin has, by his miserable war, become the great consolidator of the Ukrainian nation. It is a “blessing” that comes at a terrible price, but they say as much nonetheless.
As for America – this maddening, beloved, riotous, beautiful nation – as we hurtle toward 250, it is worth pondering what still binds us together. Sometimes, in the past, it has been common adversity. Sometimes it has even been a common enemy. The noblest bond, most worthy of our aspiration and hopes and efforts, remains a shared love.
When it comes to building, defending, and elevating such bonds of love, there is no institution more suited to the task than the Church. Indeed, she is irreplaceable. As citizens, there is no greater birthday gift we can give to our nation than to live our faith well.
Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. White’s work focuses on the application of Catholic social teaching to a broad spectrum of contemporary political and cultural issues. He is the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic (Liguori Publications, 2016).
