I know people who don’t celebrate Christmas because they think Christmas trees and other Christmas traditions are pagan–same thing with Easter. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t celebrate Independence Day/Fourth of July. Of course, that is the date the Declaration of Independence was signed. That is, political leaders in the 13 colonies told the existing government that they were no longer going to submit to them. They were forming their own new government. They were no longer going to obey the King and his laws or pay their taxes to Britain. In fact, they ended up killing British government agents and soldiers.

The patriots wrote eloquently about resisting tyranny and the God-given rights of men. The king was abusive, but only a fraction as abusive as today’s U.S. government. He charged a very small, yet still unjust tax, a fraction of what we pay today, and the colonists revolted. The way the vast majority of Americans twist Romans 13 into teaching nearly blind obedience to government would indicate that the founding fathers were in grave sin. Yet I know of zero conservative Christian Americans who aren’t proud Americans who celebrate Independence Day with vim and vigor.

When I point out that inland immigration checkpoints are wicked, and police are an unamerican, socialist institution, public schools are funded by the most evil form of taxation–property taxes, and so forth, conservatives get mad at me and say I’m the unamerican one and I should leave the country. But who is really unamerican? What is the definition of what America is and what it ought to be? Is it defined by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible? Or is it defined by proudly pledging allegiance to whatever it is now? If what defines a good American is how proud you are of what America currently is and saying the pledge of allegiance, then I guess they’re right. I’m unamerican. I’m not pledging my allegiance to a country that has betrayed its founding values. I’m not pledging allegiance to a country that has allowed the murder of 60 million babies and takes 50% or more of our income through all forms of taxation or that stops people as they travel through the southern U.S. to ask them what their citizenship is. By that definition I’m definitely unamerican and so are the founding fathers. However, I think the Bible, the Declaration and to a lesser extent, the Constitution define what a true American is and I’m, unfortunately one of the few true Americans left.