Too Many Fireworks?

There were celebrations in the streets, fireworks included.  Joining the celebration were a dozen fighter jets, leaving trails of colored smoke representing the colors of the flag. The people were jubilant, shouting, singing, hugging.  Yes, it was quite an independence day.  Wait a minute, didn’t this all happen just last year?  I wonder if this is going to happen every year, or if at some point the people might decide that there is such a thing as too many fireworks.

That’s what I would be thinking if I lived in Egypt.  President Morsi, the man who was the symbol of the return of democracy to Egypt in 2012 is now a political prisoner. The military responded to the protests of the people  against the president they had elected.  Of note, for our purposes, is the fact that Mr. Morsi was a religious man.  He was a former leader of a group called the Muslim Brotherhood.  It is too early to know, but was the mix of religion and civil power too much for the people, or for the military?  Would the “people” really rather be ruled by the military?  What were the Egyptian revolutionaries protesting against, what freedom did they seek?

Which is what I was thinking on a spectacular July 4^th in the United States, a day when the nation where I live was engaged in days of fireworks to celebrate not that the president was in jail, but that the nation was still, 237 years (!) later, free from the tyranny of an unelected government.  What exactly is it that holds the United States of America together for 237 years while Egypt’s revolution didn’t last but a year?  I began my 4^th of July reading the Declaration of Independence.  It is a mostly timeless piece of political brilliance.  The power of the government rests in the “consent of the governed.”  It sounds a note of caution: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light or transient causes”, and that a people should “suffer…while evils are sufferable… .”  I think the U.S. persists because the vast majority get that idea.  But, for me, the most brilliant move of the revolutionaries is that they did not impose a state religion.  They knew that politics and religion are a dangerous brew which can boil over at any time.  They knew that their “unalienable rights” came from “their Creator”; they acted “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence”; but they understood that human freedom means religious faith is a personal relationship with God and not a matter of governmental dictate.  So, as I watched the fireworks this year, I celebrated this truth: no president, no congress, no army, can choose my God for me.  And that is a truth worthy of fireworks forever.