This Fourth of July is a time for choosing

Why do we celebrate birthdays? The practice is so ingrained, so ubiquitous that we might not stop to consider the purpose.

We celebrate birthdays because we love the person whose birth we remember. We celebrate because of the resulting goods — the joys, the comforts, the laughs — with which we’ve been blessed since that person entered the world and our lives. Finally, we celebrate them because life itself is a good, and remembering individual lives reminds us of its goodness.

Birthdays mostly concern human beings, but they also can and do pertain to nations. We Americans were born on the Fourth of July in 1776. We are a July Fourth people.

Before our founding, we had our ancestors — forefathers whose words and deeds still make up part of our DNA. The political philosophy of Ancient Greece instilled the importance of reason and the universality of justice for political life. Ancient Rome showed the importance of structure in government and the need for proper administration of law. The biblical witness of Ancient Israel and the early church also displayed the concept of human dignity and equality before God.

We Americans then gestated for centuries within the British empire. As colonies, we practiced the art of self-government, largely left alone by the mother country. We were nourished not only by our ancestral heritage but by new articulations of free government from men such as John Locke and the French thinker Montesquieu.

The battles with the king and parliament in the 1760s and 1770s were our labor. We pushed and fought to be born anew as our own nation with our own principles. That birth finally came on July 4, 1776. It was announced in the Declaration of Independence.

But that declaration did more than simply announce a new birthday. It stated why we should evermore celebrate this birth.

America claimed for itself goods it had inherited and learned from others. It dedicated us to the “self-evident” truth of human equality. It decreed that humans possess natural rights bestowed on them, in their own making, by a benevolent creator. And it dedicated all good governments to protecting those rights by consent of the governed.

America’s history has been far from perfect. But it has been a triumph for liberty and human equality. It has garnered our love because she is our own, but also because she is good. She has our affection, too, for the many goods she has given us across the generations.

This July Fourth, we have much to concern us. The American experiment is never completely safe. Each new generation must take up the mantle of our cause both to perpetuate and to enhance it. Our goal is not just to have our children better off economically than ourselves. It is to leave America a more just and good place, more aligned with its noble purposes, than how we found it.

America is in a struggle over our future. Do we return and maintain or break away from our past? Do we celebrate this birthday in perpetuity or increasingly become embarrassed by it?

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Let us celebrate heartily what our Founders did that first July Fourth. Let us strive to form ourselves more to their wisdom. And let us continue to work to leave our country better for our children than we have it now.

That is a worthy birthday gift to the country and to ourselves. Because, in the end, we all, as Americans, were born on the Fourth of July.

Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.