I Love to Tell the Story
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Every religion has its meta-narrative. Meta-narrative is a fancy, obfuscating word for story, a story that puts one's fundamental concerns and beliefs in context. Our meta-narrative is a simple one, creation, fall, and recreation. Meta-narratives also put holy days into context. Every religion, in its story, includes events of great significance, and those great events are remembered and celebrated. So every religion has its holy days. So does the religion of the state.

Our national meta-narrative, of course, is not grounded in any sort of inerrant document, and as such, it tends to drift over time. Our parents were regaled with stories of the heroics of the founding fathers. They recited in school that poem about Paul Revere's ride. They put on school plays recreating the crossing of the Delaware. And they celebrated as holy days the anniversaries of the births of Washington and Lincoln. Such has fallen out of favor of late, principally because these were indeed men (excluding, of course, Mr. Lincoln) who loved freedom, and considered the British rule that was benign compared with what we suffer under, as utterly despotic. Now we in America have President's Day instead, when presumably we celebrate Clinton and Johnson (Andrew, who also was impeached) and every other scoundrel that made it to the White House. Independence Day is still celebrated, but with all the fireworks and cookouts, one would be hard pressed to remember why.

As the size of the state grew, so did the number of days which it laid claim to. At the acme of the labor movement in this country we were treated to another high holy day, Labor Day. Here we are told to celebrate labor, to toss one back in honor of the lunch bucket crowd. But as we have, with the advent of internationalism, exported our labor across the globe, we have again forgotten what all the hub-bub was about, and so celebrated a Monday off.

We have two separate holy days to celebrate our successes on assorted battlefields around the globe, Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Here we honor the dead and the living for dieing and fighting in defense of, of, well, that's where it gets a little complicated. And so again we forget.

Our narrative has now ceased to celebrate what we are supposed to be as Americans. We are united only in that we are committed together to be less than united. Multi-culturalism rules the day, and so we have begun to divvy up the remaining days among the faithful unfaithful. On Columbus Day we no longer celebrate the discovery of the New World, not wanting to encourage our young to become rapacious, disease carrying oppressors of noble savages, but we have turned it into Italian Saint Patrick's Day. The most heinous of all, however, is the newest of holy days in the state religion, Martin Luther King Day. I have a dream, that a day will come when we as a nation will judge our heroes by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. That day is not here yet. You know you're involved in a rather lame religion when one of your holy days celebrates the life of an unrepentant, plagiarizing womanizer. Come to think of it, why not just merge it with President's Day?

While such has not yet reached federal status, rest assured that Pink Triangle day is coming, a federal holy day to celebrate sodomy. Our politicos already honor the local celebrations with their presence. It is but a short step for all of us to have a day off to enjoy the spectacle of queers on parade. Be sure to tell your kids not to take the candy.

My point is not principally the nature of these holy days, the things we're called to celebrate, but rather to further make the case that we have indeed fallen deeply into statism. Statism is not merely the growth of the power of the state, but it is a religion in which the state is worshipped. The state becomes as god. They are the ones who determine what, and when, we will treat as sacred. We will get our fill of liturgical remembrance at the barbecue pit, and drink the sacred wine of cold Bud. Our days are now ordered by those who order us about day by day.

I'm not suggesting that we ought not to remember the sacrifices or the wisdom of the founding fathers. I am suggesting that that same wisdom would be arguing as I am, that we have too much of the state on our lives. I'm not suggesting that we ought not to remember the dead, and the living who have fought in wars under honorable flags. I am suggesting that to do so we have to do the messy work of determining which flags flew (and they were few) honorably. We can still honor the valor of soldiers, even if that valor was used in the service of empire, as all of our recent wars have been. But we cannot honor the state for building empire.

What we need to do is check what we're celebrating and who is throwing the bash before we join the party. We need to have our day-timers booked up with things worth celebrating. We are citizens of heaven, and so should work from heaven's calendar. We need to honor our martyrs before we honor American dead, those who died for an eternal reality, rather than a political abstraction. We need to remember our heroes, like Luther, Calvin and Knox, who brought us the truth before we get all misty-eyed in remembrance of Honest Abe, with his political lies. We need to rejoice in the true Liberator, who made us one in Him, before we rejoice over that liberation "theologian" who has made us divided.

We have a meta-narrative worth re-telling, and worth celebrating. What's better still, our story is grounded in history. Our legends are true. Our heroes are heroic. But we're too busy cheering on the state to notice. We are not worthy of our fathers in the faith, and so have the god we have earned.