What is July 4th To the Upset and Fed Up?
An Independence Day call to action and reflection.
“These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind”.
Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
3 Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
4 So the law becomes slack,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous;
therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
Habakkuk 1:2-4
Frederick Douglass, as a latter-day Habakkuk of sorts, justly read the American clergy of his day for filth on the issue of enslavement in a purportedly religious country. Over thirty-five years after New York State abolished slavery, while disrespectfully encouraged its celebration on July 5th, rather than the 4th, to preserve Americana convenings for white individuals, Douglass delivered his storied oration in Rochester, New York. We can imagine Douglass, again with moral indignation akin to the prophets of Scripture, wondering why the U.S. Constitution proved “too slack” to federally abolish slavery in 1852, why justice up until that point had not prevailed while “strife and contention” arose around him.
Instead of promoting freedom, American churches in Douglass’ day stood, in the main, on the side of enslavers, made religion a “cold and flinty-hearted thing”, and seemingly possessed “neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion”.
America’s political culture in 2025 - much of it established and abetted by American churches — continue the shameful, unjustifiable legacy that Douglass, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and their abolitionist peers regularly and righteously denounced by lecture, by activism, and by agitational activities of a thousand varieties.
There is, in the wake of the big, ugly bill that the U.S. House just signed, tons of “cold and flinty-hearted” public policy about which to be fuming mad, filled with grief, keeled over in sorrow.
We could, therefore, ask with good reason and good evidence for the inquiry: What is the Fourth of July to the upset and fed up?
To what use can we put a holiday of independence in a nation that bends over backwards to coddle the rich, while spitting on children, effectively, through its mean-spirited, miserly fiscal policy?
I won’t hold you long. And I won’t hold your attention with a sustained counsel of despair.
Instead, for your July 4th consideration, I’d offer some steps of actionable reflection for those who are just, beside themselves with anger, directly impacted frustration, and neighborly solidarity, about the cumulative effects of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, federal agencies being shuttered by DOGE, and a game-changing budget bill that consolidates a policy regime of inequity that could take a full generation to undo.
We down so bad, that it can only be up from here. Here’s a few thoughts on how we can go up, together.
Link Up: Join an organization that advocates for justice, equity, and participatory democracy in meaningful ways. I’d highlight Black Alliance for Peace, a local NAACP chapter, a mutual aid organization. Recommit to, or engage for the first time, a community-based institution that can aggregate the talent, relationship, financial resources, and issue-based advocacy of its members towards an end that you’d recognize as just. When the country is going bananas federally, our federalist system is designed to enable local powers, purse strings, and independent civic action to blunt and block some of the worst aspects of that foolishness. Every thing, sadly, can’t be stopped or averted, but linking up with like-minded, freedom-minded folks is the only viable, rational basis on which to preserve our communities against the raiding of America’s social safety programs.
Study Up: Research, study, and sustained reflection are necessary for justice work. Subscribe to Hammer and Hope, a journal for transformative black politics and culture. Read the Black Agenda Report. Review mainstream outlets like Vox, the New York Times, the Washington Post, perhaps the Wall Street Journal’s editorial section on occasion, to retain a feel for public and economic affairs in the halls of power. Alongside granular review of credible media sources, study also the tradition of our people. Quality time spent with poets and essayists like Audre Lorde and June Jordan, historians like Manning Marable and Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, religious voices like Delores Williams and Dorothee Solle, repay the investment of imaginative, detailed readers.
Pray Up: Praying without ceasing is among the most enduring moral-devotional directives from the earliest written text in most New Testament collections of Christian literature, 1 Thessalonians. Praying without ceasing is inherently ethical, everyday practice. The only way to praying without ceasing - well, the only sustainable, healthy way — is to praying through joy and sorrow, in sanctuaries and sidewalks, within moments of celebration and activist agitation for justice. Praying without ceasing, as I argue in Plenty Good Room, is a foundational, forming routine of confrontational contemplation. I actually think prayer happens too infrequently, with too limited moral vision, too little sense of the stakes. Prayer, to be worthwhile and not a massive exercise in self-deception, actually happens before and after we say Amen and/or Ase. The formal moments of prayer aren’t the main point, actually. They should, ideally, be the cresting moments of rededication within a life already, and in all places, dedicated to God and God’s people.
Listen Up: Listening is an act of justice. Listening well is also, as Paul Tillich argues, an act of love. Everyone has a theory about why we’re in the political mess we’re in. Some diagnostic reasoning is needed, valuable, and in order. But we really need, I think, to perform the patient politics of actually sitting with, hearing, and learning from one another. Why is it the case, that Generation Z reports such high levels of mental health crisis? How can our society take care of entire populations of family members aging in place, in cities with outdated, worn-out infrastructures of transit, healthcare, and of course, thoroughly unsuited for rising sea levels? What tools might we access to strengthen our common life? Here I have in mind the basics of community organizing that covers things like developing confidence, rather than angst, in conversation on politics, posing follow-up questions for deeper understanding, and resolving to take mutually agreeable action steps. Dr. Ruha Benjamin talks about the importance of public listening, and not simply public speaking, as foundational to cultivating the kind of imagination needed to revitalize our democracy and build a society rooted, in increasing measure, on fairness, justice, and ideals reflecting a more equitable society. It’s important to listen beyond our comfort zone as well. As one example, I learn about libertarian traditions when I hear free market enthusiasts and anarchists, or political autonomous persons, articulate their quite different, yet not entirely dissimilar visions of the world. Bracketing those disagreements, I note well the shared interest in mutual aid, volunteer-run efforts of crowdsourced fundraising to help families and individual in need, the experimentation with different decision-making structures that rely on consensus, rather than law and coercion, to make social decisions.
Scale Up: Getting involved in local, community-based organizations that remain at that level isn’t enough. What’s needed are organizing efforts that attain scale, depth, and reach quickly. Take for instance the State of the People organizing efforts, convened by Angela Rye, an attorney, longstanding activist, and incredibly effective organizer of organizer. As a non-participant, but deeply celebratory observer, I became abreast of Rye’s commendable efforts through my wife, Rev. Dr. Gabby Cudjoe-Wilkes, who served as the Newark city lead on a 12-city State of the People: Power Tour to elevate political consciousness, connect black folks with social service resources, justice organizations, and their peers seeking to advance some notion of racial justice, the common good, and to preserve as much of our democracy as we can. To date, this effort has reached over 200 organizations that have a documented, vested interested in the well-being, survival, and freedom of black people. As with any coalescing of this magnitude, folks don’t always agree on every finer point, but the animating agreement that we need a network with some power, and therefore with scale across geography and organizational silos, is a point well proved by the State of the People work, its already impactful results, and the work that’s to come.
Show Up: I find that the hardest path of sustaining justice work is the will to show up, virtually, physically where possible, and psychologically, and to resist despair through action. It’s difficult spiritual work, I think, to advocate for a future whose realization cannot be empirically guaranteed. But it is worth it for ourselves, for our people, for the enjoyment of public goods that can, should, and by God’s manifold grace, will be ours. But only if we assert our human agency in blessed concert with divine agency and show up for this fledging, beleaguered democracy. Show up at protest. Show up at membership drives. Show up at justice-centered congregations that blend praise and protest. Show up for voter registration drives and community board meetings. Show up at virtual committee hearing that discuss mundane seeming, yet consequential matters of public policy that shape details directly touching on your lived experiences — or those of your neighbors and fellow community members. I’m talking about that bread and butter stuff: whether you have medicine when sick, a roof over your head should employment get shaky, some retirement security for your grandmama, and some decency in our conscience that such as our ability and understanding goes, we poured it into ensuring that our common life together is less rotten. more fair. Less frustrating, more fulfilled by working together to advance the common good.
To the extent that we do such things, we who are rightfully upset and fed up, may just help to mutually prop up this democracy. Cause right now this thing needs to be propped up on its many, many leaning sides of structural instability.
If we can mutually prop up and dare I posit the notion, associate with ourselves towards a more perfect union — not necessarily of the country, which would be too small a moral ambition — but of ourselves within this land, while also maintaining an internationalist perspective, guiding by our actions, our faith, our hearts, we just might, with sufficient time, chart our way out of this mess. But only together, only with concerted effort across electoral and business cycles, only with, to my mind, God being our helper, are we making it out of this protracted, decades in the making dilemma that our politics, macroeconomic choices, and cultural habits have brought us towards. It’s a way out of this, but not without struggle, not without a fight, not with a prayer embodied in our work for an actual, tenable, ever-increasing freedom. Such would be independence, and we can have it, if we strive for its realization, together.