As our nation’s 250th anniversary has approached, I’ve heard the phrase “the American experiment” many times. It’s not a new phrase. One source traces it to George Washington’s first inaugural address, where he said the new government was an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
It’s a common-enough phrase, but I find it unsettling. I’m not sure I want to be living in the middle of an experiment. I don’t want to eat experimental food, take experimental medicine, drive experimental cars or fly in experimental airplanes, so why would I want to live under an experimental government. Unless like with food, medicine, cars and airplanes, there’s been enough tests and trials to get the glitches out and declare the country safe and ready for the masses.
But after 250 years, I don’t think we’re there yet. Some boast ours is the greatest nation that’s ever been, but are we really? Only through the long timeline of history can that be determined, and with just 250 years in the books, it’s way too early to tell. So yes, maybe we are still just an experiment.
As an experiment – to use the language of science – we keep adding variables to the test subject and then we watch to see what happens. If the base material remains stable and viable, then we apply other variables.
That’s certainly been the case in my lifetime, with the pipets of change dropping into the petri dish of our culture: the cold war, political assassinations, an upsurge of youth culture with its music and protests, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, the Vietnam War and the protests and division that came with that, Watergate, inflation and stagnation, the Iranian hostage crisis, Reaganomics, the AIDS pandemic, collapse of the Soviet Union, the Great Recession, 9/11 and the wars that followed it, the explosion of technology and social media, the COVID pandemic, political-social movements such as MAGA, ANTIFA and BLM, generational changes in policies for immigration, education and health care. I’m sure I’ve left something out.
The result after each of these tests seems to be chaos and confusion, a decline in confidence and unity, increase in blame and fear mongering, political upheaval and partisanship, new rules and regulations, and then a slow return to calm and positive energy aided in part by a general forgetfulness of what just happened as we embrace the next new thing or encounter the next threat to our stability.
The good news is after 250 years, we’re still here as a nation with most of our foundational values, beliefs, principles and practices intact. It’s true we have huge disagreements about what those are, but perhaps the one foundational practice holding us together is the right of every individual to raise questions and objections and seek change at the ballot box and through personal involvement.
We have processes that mostly work to maintain that, and yet there are those who turn to underhanded schemes, chaos and violence to affect change. And now with technology and social media, the centuries-old weapons of misinformation and disinformation have been developed to a level our ancestors could not have imagined and certainly didn’t plan for.
The fact we still sift everything through a constitutional sieve adopted 250 years ago — with some amendments and changes in interpretation, of course — indicates our founding philosophies and framing structures are still in play.
Among the things we argue about endlessly is the role of religion and the church in all of this, but I believe that perspective is too broad. We should be looking to what really makes the church the church: individual people of faith, who are the active ingredient in this experiment. The writers of the constitution got it right in the first three words: “We the people.” That gets down to the granular level, which is you and me. As Washington said, the experiment is “entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
I know there are people who believe humankind is God’s big experiment. And there’s a wing of philosophy and statistics that believes we are just part of a big simulation put on by some higher intelligence. Either way, one has to wonder why the creator hasn’t swept us with a mighty hand off the lab table into the dust bin of history already.
I’ve certainly done that with many failed projects, but that’s the reaction of a limited mind with a limited view of what is possible. Apparently, God still has more time to give us to try and get it right, so we should keep working beyond this 250th anniversary to do that.
I once heard a man say, “I’ve run out of wrong ways to do it, so all that’s left is the right way.” That’s one way to get there, but it’d be better if we would work harder at being fair, honest, trusting, merciful, kind, caring, forgiving, generous, gracious, friendly, hospitable. That would be the best way to finally end this experiment and declare our United States of America is the best it can be.