Happy Pentecost everyone!

By an unexpected coincidence, on the Church’s birthday I ended up with a post going up regarding America’s birthday…though not the one you’re probably thinking of:

There is not space to explore all of these possibilities, so let us go straight to the official choice. The use of July 4^th is really quite brilliant, as it follows on from the logic of the Declaration. The central claim is that “governments … derive their just power from the consent of the governed.” The Declaration was a formal rescinding of that consent, and thus, by hypothesis, the new nation was born the moment it was signed.

By this reading, America, or the United States, is defined by a particular political philosophy– that of Government by Consent–and its national identity is bound up in that premise. This is, indeed, what most people who consider the question seem to conclude; that America is a creedal nation defined by a certain idea of government and its relation to the people.

For my own part, though, and at the risk of offending the readership, I much prefer another date: May 14^th, 1607 and the founding of Jamestown in Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

My first reason for doing so is purely historical. Just as a matter of fact, this was the beginning of what became the United States. Our national institutions, structures, and actions, the threads of our national history lead back there, to the arrival of the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery in Chesapeake Bay. Beyond that, the only place to follow those threads (apart from the earlier, failed attempt at Roanoke) is back across the Atlantic. English speaking civilization in the New World began there.

Of course, there were others in the New World already; the Spanish had founded St. Augustine in Florida, for instance. But the American nation derives from the English thread. When the time came, the heirs of Jamestown took Florida and imposed their form of government, law, and language upon it; not the other way around. The same with New Amsterdam, New Orleans, and so on. These different threads had their influence upon the national character, of course, and remained strong in their local pockets, but it was the English-speaking, English-derived thread that set the tone.

Check out the rest there.

(Obviously, this ought to have gone up on or around May 14th, but I didn’t get it finished in time).