Today is a complex holiday indeed. One wants to celebrate America’s independence and courage and imagination at launching a great experiment in democracy 258 years ago.
But the reality is that many are grieving today rather than celebrating. A new poll found that “national pride is declining in America” and only about 4 out of 10 US adults of Generation Z (born from 1997 to 2012) expressed a high level of pride in being American today.*
Much of the American government has been hijacked by forces utterly contrary to democracy—such as the senators who voted for an immoral budget bill this week. What forces? What is going on is not the work of one person who, in spite of 44 felony convictions got himself elected president. A mountain of enablers, including senators and congresspeople who lie supine for a president with 44 felonies on his record, are either selling their souls or have completely lost faith with the American experiment in democracy. Politicians who represent cynicism and sourness and uncaring rather than democracy.
Former president Obama called the cutting of our USAID program a “travesty and a tragedy.” Former president George Bush asks, “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is and so do you.” A study in one medical journal determined that gutting USAID will lead to 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030. It also reminded us that USAID has already prevented the deaths of more than 91 million people, many of them children.**
To sour on democracy and preach it as MAGA does, and to erase caring as integral to the American experiment home and abroad, bespeaks the death of a country with any values to emulate.
Thom Hartmann recently reported on how the “Alligator Alcatraz” that Trump and Florida governor Ron de Santis visited this week is “a political prison engineered not merely to detain but to humiliate and broadcast terror.” An “open-air symbol that our democracy is dying.” Cruelty personified. “It’s performance” — a “bizarre effort to show who can be more cruel.”
It has a precedent because Dachau in Nazi Germany also started as a detention center, which was also advertised by the government: “Step out of line, and this is where you go.” It too was dedicated to denaturalizing citizens, that is, stripping them of their citizenship. Stripping people of their citizenship is a civil, not criminal procedure, so one is not entitled to have a lawyer.***
The new GOP budget bill provides over $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement and detention, including $45 billion toward new detention jails. The vice-president called throwing 16 million Americans off health insurance and shutting down hundreds of rural hospitals “miniscule” — and I guess it is, compared to locking up immigrants.
Perhaps this drop of pride in America and the gross goings-on in domestic and foreign actions might serve a larger purpose. Might it fire-up resistance to what is going on in America today? Can it ignite fires of moral outrage that will birth a new solidarity and new leadership of politicians who can inspire people at the grassroots to work for a better democracy?
The election of Zohran Mamdani in NYC seems like a harbinger of a possible future that we can celebrate on a future July 4th.
* Linley Sanders and Amelia Thomson-Deveaux, “National Pride is Declining In America. And It’s Splitting by Party Lines,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2025.
** Leith Kimmins, “Obama and Bush Unite in Rare Move Against Trump,” The Daily Beast, July 1, 2025.
*** Thom Hartmann, “Alligator Alcatraz Isn’t Just a Prison. It’s a Mirror. And It’s Asking Us: Who Are We, Really?” The Hartmann Report, July 2, 2025.
See Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.
And Fox, Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.
And Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
And Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
And Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
Banner Image: A tattered American flag hanging on a fence. Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash.
Queries for Contemplation
What are your thoughts and feelings on this 4th of July, 2025? How do they compare to your thoughts and feelings 10 or 20 or 30 years ago? Do you see Alligator Alcatraz as a mirror asking us who we are and what we want to be? And as a template for the $45 billion just appropriated by the senate toward erecting new detention jails? How alarming is that?
Recommended Reading
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them.
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science. A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election
Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.
From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.
For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE.
To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE.
To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.
“I am reading Liberating Gifts for the People of the Earth by Matt Fox. He is one that fills my heart and mind for new life in spite of so much that is violent in our world.” ~ Sister Dorothy Stang.
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story
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