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The Fourth of July is our national holiday to celebrate the most American of virtues — independence. The day is obviously about commemorating the historical anniversary of our country’s separation from Great Britain. But more deeply, I’d argue it’s about reaffirming the paramount importance of our own individual independence, the basis for our country’s founding and the existential blood that still flows through our culture and institutions, even while other values like patriotism and civic responsibility have seemingly run thin.
However, this year’s Independence Day celebration coincided with two separate trends that should prompt us to soberly reflect upon the limitations of independence — or at least how it is understood and practiced today — and its proper place in a just society.
The first was the horrific shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, which ultimately left seven people dead. This shooting fit an all-too-familiar pattern in American life, one we’ve seen recently in places like Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida: A young man, estranged from the wider community and bereft of a deeper sense of meaning in his life (he had previously produced songs that contained lyrics like “Living the dream/ Nothing’s real/ I just want to scream/ ‘— this world’” and had threatened to kill his family), legally acquired a semi-automatic, high-capacity killing machine and inflicted mass casualties and suffering upon those around him.
Two factors were present in the Highland Park shooting and others like it that few people seem willing or able to connect: both deep-seated existential emptiness produced by a broken, “live and let live” culture and lax gun laws that prioritize individual autonomy over the common good. In two directions, unrestrained independence has flown to create the conditions in which young men succumb to nihilism, effectively rejecting the gift of life, and yet have the means to take others with them via mass shootings that happen in America at a rate exponentially higher than any other wealthy nation. “The darkness first takes our children who then kill our children, using the guns that are easier to obtain than aspirin,” Bishop Daniel Flores, the U.S. bishops conference doctrinal head, noted hyperbolically after the Uvalde shooting.
The partisan reactions to these kinds of shootings, with one political faction saying the problem isn’t guns, and the other saying it’s not the culture, neither willing to address both, are manifestations of this same “independence-above-all” mentality that generates the crisis in the first place. Neither side is willing to sacrifice their version of the same sacred cow.
The second instance of this kind of “independence unhinged” is the ongoing reaction to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. For some, such as the Antifa protesters who passed by me on the streets of Portland where I was there for the Fourth, chanting “Riot with us!” and carrying anti-pro-life signs, any limitation on abortion access is fundamentally an affront to that most sacred of American values, individual independence. In fact, a significant strand of pro-abortion argumentation doesn’t even deny the life or personhood of the unborn child — it simply asserts that even this fact cannot constrain the bodily and existential independence of the mother. As the Catholic scholar Erika Bachiochi recently noted in the pages of the New York Times, these kinds of arguments have more in common with Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s views on private property than they do with any ethic consistent with the common good and mutual dependence.
But, as Bachiochi also notes, this same kind of individualistic logic can sneak into the approach of pro-lifers, when they root their arguments and activism solely on the grounds of the unborn child’s autonomous independence. The danger of this approach is that it fails to escape the narrow framework of individual rights. It fails to advance a social vision in which not only does the mother have a positive responsibility toward her unborn child, but the wider community has a responsibility to said mother. We can see this unhealthy attachment to independence playing out before our eyes, as some who oppose abortion are unwilling to even have a conversation in the post-Roe context about how public policies — which, yes, might involve taxation — should be a part of making abortion unthinkable.
The juxtaposition of our national celebration of independence with such wide and varied instances of autonomous freedom run amok hammers the point home: the kind of individual independence celebrated in all sectors of our society today is inadequate, if not downright corrupting, without a more fundamental “declaration of interdependence.”
Perhaps the Founders were aware of this, perhaps they were not. But the Catholic Church has always highlighted this fundamental danger in the American experiment, and has emphasized the need to understand individual rights as existing for the sake of fulfilling our wider communal responsibilities. But centuries downstream from 1776, independence-over-all has dissolved the bonds of religion, community, and even family. The moderating constraints that come with understanding oneself not merely as an independent individual, but as a person essentially defined by interdependent relationships, are effectively nonexistent.
If I’ve written this column correctly, I’ll get angry responses from both the political left and the political right. I’d invite readers to consider why that might be. Perhaps, it’s the case that the American left and the right are simply different sides of the same coin of “libertarian independence.” And, perhaps, it’s the case that the Catholic Church’s vision of interdependence as the organizing principle of society, grounded, as Pope Francis points out in “Fratelli Tutti,” in Christ’s teaching in the parable of the Good Samaritan that we are each other’s neighbors, offers something fundamentally different. We’d do well to read the Declaration of Independence in light of the Gospel, not the other way around.
Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is the senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary and School of Divinity.
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