Remembering is a biblical command.
Throughout Scripture, God's people are told to remember what He has done. Israel remembered the Exodus. The church remembers Christ's death and resurrection at the Lord's Table. We remember because remembering cultivates gratitude, humility, and faithfulness.
The United States is not Israel. But nations have stories too, and those stories are worth remembering. Knowing our history helps us understand what we have inherited and what we are responsible to pass on to the next generation.
I love my country. And the more I learn about America's history, the more I appreciate her. I also see more clearly where she has failed.
There is plenty to criticize. Slavery. Indian removal. Abortion. Unjust wars. Political corruption. The list could go on. These things should not be brushed aside. They are part of our history, and Christians should be willing to say so. We know that every nation is made up of sinners and that no country is untouched by the effects of the Fall.
But those things are not the whole story.
America is also a remarkable experiment in constitutional government, religious liberty, local self-government, and ordered freedom. For generations, ordinary Americans have built churches, schools, businesses, communities, and families. They have sacrificed for their neighbors, served their communities, and, in many cases, blessed people around the world.
That did not happen overnight. It took generations. It took conviction, sacrifice, conflict, failure, repentance, and God's providence.
That is why history matters.
As I thought about America's semiquincentennial, I picked up Thomas S. Kidd's American History (affiliate link). I have read quite a bit of American history over the years, but I wanted something that would help me step back and look at the whole story again.
Kidd does a good job of that.
He doesn't give us a collection of American heroes who somehow got everything right. At the same time, he doesn't treat American history as nothing more than a story of oppression and injustice. Real people are more complicated than that.
People can do good things and terrible things. Sometimes the same person can do both.
That comes through clearly in Kidd's treatment of Christianity. This was probably one of my favorite parts of the book.
When I was in high school, Christianity seemed to appear in my history textbooks mostly when it was controversial. But Christianity was not some side issue in American history. It shaped the way countless Americans understood the world, their neighbors, their responsibilities, and their government.
Kidd traces that influence from the colonial period through the Great Awakenings, abolition, westward expansion, the Civil War, immigration, and the Civil Rights Movement. Churches and Christians were involved in education, missions, charitable work, and social reform.
But Christians did not always get it right.
Kidd is willing to talk about the Christians who defended slavery, tolerated injustice, compromised their convictions, or simply failed to live according to what they professed. I'm glad he does. We don't honor Christianity by pretending Christians have always been faithful.
We tell the truth.
I also enjoyed that Kidd doesn't only tell the stories of famous people. There are Native Americans, immigrants, women, children, enslaved people, pastors, missionaries, and plenty of other people who rarely make it into the version of history most of us learned in school.
That makes the book feel more like history and less like a list of names and dates.
And that's probably what struck me most while reading it. History isn't just about dates and battles. It's about people. It's about what they believed, what they valued, what they built, what they destroyed, and what they left behind.
That matters for Christians because the Bible puts a great deal of emphasis on remembering.
Parents were supposed to teach their children what God had done. When the Israelites crossed the Jordan, they set up memorial stones so that future generations would ask what they meant. The answer was supposed to be a story about the faithfulness of God.
"Why are those stones there?"
"Let me tell you what God did."
I think there is something worth recovering in that.
One day, I hope to read this book with my children. I want them to know the good things they have inherited. I also want them to know about the sins and failures that are part of our history.
I want them to appreciate the sacrifices that secured many of the freedoms we enjoy. I want them to understand the injustices that required courage and reform. And I want them to realize that the country they inherit did not simply appear out of nowhere.
People came before them.
They built things. They fought wars. They raised families. They planted churches. They made terrible mistakes. They did courageous things. They sometimes acted out of selfishness and sometimes out of love for their neighbors.
And now we are living with the results.
Someday, my children will inherit the results of what we do too.
That's one reason I think Christians should care about history. We aren't just looking backward. We are thinking about what we will hand to the people who come after us.
Christians should also be able to speak honestly about their country.
We don't have to pretend America is perfect to be grateful for her. We don't have to ignore her sins in order to love her. And we don't have to despise our country in order to acknowledge where she has gone wrong.
We can be thankful and honest at the same time.
We can confess what is wrong, give thanks for what is good, recognize God's providence, and seek the good of the place where He has put us.
That's what I appreciated about Thomas Kidd's American History (affiliate link). He tells the American story without asking us to pretend it is simpler than it really is.
As America celebrates her 250th birthday, maybe remembering is a good place to start.
Remember what came before us. Tell the truth about it. And teach our children what they have inherited.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Early American Encounters
Chapter 2 England and Its Colonies
Chapter 3 A Maturing Colonial Society
Chapter 4 The Coming of Independence
Chapter 5 The American Revolution and the Constitution
Chapter 6 The Early National Period
Chapter 7 A Growing Republic
Chapter 8 The Age of Andrew Jackson
Chapter 9 The American West
Chapter 10 Learning and Belief in Antebellum America
Chapter 11 The Crisis of the 1850s
Chapter 12 Secession and the Coming of the Civil War
Chapter 13 The Civil War Begins
Chapter 14 To Appomattox Courthouse
Chapter 15 Reconstruction
Chapter 16 Reforging the Nation
Chapter 17 The Gilded Age
Chapter 18 Populism and Empire
Chapter 19 The Progressive Era
Chapter 20 World War I
Chapter 21 The Roaring Twenties
Chapter 22 The Great Depression and the New Deal
Chapter 23 World War II
Chapter 24 The Cold War
Chapter 25 The 1950s
Chapter 26 Civil Rights and the Great Society
Chapter 27 Nixon, Watergate, and Carter
Chapter 28 Reagan’s America
Chapter 29 George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and a Changing America
Chapter 30 The Age of Terrorism
