Ecumenical Commemoration
National Day
July 4
also known as Fourth of July, Independence Day
Independence Day is the American Church's thanksgiving for religious and civil liberty, kept on July 4. The General Convention of 1785 ordered the day observed "for ever," and a form of prayer was printed in the Proposed Book of 1786. It was not carried into the ratified Prayer Book of 1789, and for one hundred and thirty-nine years the day had no propers at all. It returned in 1928, with new texts, and is kept still.
On Wednesday, 5 October 1785, in Philadelphia, the first General Convention of an American church newly separated from the Church of England resolved that the fourth of July should be observed by that Church for ever, as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God for the inestimable blessings of religious and civil liberty vouchsafed to the United States of America. A committee of four was named the same day, reported the same day, and the form it brought in was read through paragraph by paragraph and ordered used on the fourth of July for ever.
What the day replaced tells you what it was for. The English Prayer Book of 1662 carried four state services: the fifth of November for the Gunpowder Treason, the thirtieth of January for the martyrdom of King Charles, the twenty-ninth of May for the Restoration, and the sovereign's accession. The American resolution is recorded in exactly those terms: that instead of the observations of the fifth of November, the thirtieth of January, the twenty-ninth of May and the twenty-fifth of October, this service be used on the fourth of July. The slots England kept for the monarchy were filled, in America, by a thanksgiving for its rejection.
It did not take. One man in the room, William White, spoke against the motion and lost; almost no one voted with him. He had seen what the service would cost. Many of the clergy had opposed the Revolution, and to use this form was to make, as he wrote afterward, an implied acknowledgment of their error, in an address to Almighty God. Praying for the prosperity of the commonwealth was one thing, and every remaining clergyman had done that throughout the war however disaffected; but this was retrospective approbation of the origin of the civil constitutions, and White judged that the majority of the clergy could not have used the service without subjecting themselves to ridicule and censure. He kept the day himself, out of respect for the requisition of the Convention. He could never hear of its being kept in above two or three places besides Philadelphia.
The book that carried the service failed, and Samuel Provoost of New York, who was a friend of that book, thought the Fourth of July thanksgiving was in all probability one principal cause of the opposition. Thirteen copies had sold. When the ratified American Prayer Book appeared in 1789 the service was simply not in it. No repeal of the "for ever" resolution has been found; the day was dropped rather than abolished, and it stayed dropped for a hundred and thirty-nine years.
When it came back, in the American Prayer Book of 1928, it came back as something else entirely. Not one word of the 1786 service returned: not the collect, not the Epistle, not the Gospel. The 1786 form had asked the defeated for a spirit of peaceable submission to the laws and government of our country. The 1928 book appointed two lessons and no more, and they are these: love ye therefore the stranger, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt; and love your enemies. Those two readings have stood on this day, untouched, through 1979 and through 2019. The collect asks only for grace to maintain, or in the 2019 wording to exercise, these liberties in righteousness and peace.
A church that legislated a victory anniversary, watched it fail, and lost it for well over a century did not, when it recovered the day, recover its triumph. It appointed the stranger and the enemy, and asked for grace.
You have almost certainly kept this day without thinking of it as a day the Church keeps at all. Notice, then, what the Church actually puts in your mouth on it. Not a recital of what was won, but a request: grace to hold these liberties in righteousness and peace. And not a reading about founders, but two about people outside the circle of your gratitude, the stranger who is owed love because you were once the stranger, and the enemy on whom the same sun rises. There is no way to pray this day as it is appointed and come away flattered. So ask the harder question the propers ask for you: the liberty you are giving thanks for, who does it not yet reach, and what does loving them cost you this year?
The documentary base for this feast is unusually good at its origin and unusually thin in the middle. The founding act is recorded in the official minutes of the General Convention, printed by Bioren in 1817, under the sitting of Wednesday, 5 October 1785; the resolution, the four-man drafting committee (Smith, Magaw, Wharton, Campbell), and the order that the form "be used in this Church, on the fourth of July for ever" all stand there verbatim. The service itself survives in print in the Proposed Book of 1786, a full apparatus of proper sentences, a substitute for the Venite, a proper psalm, proper lessons, a proper thanksgiving, a substitute collect, and Epistle and Gospel. Its first use is attested by the title page of a sermon Samuel Magaw preached at St Paul's, Philadelphia, on 4 July 1786, "when the Form of prayer and thanksgiving ... was first used"; Magaw was one of the four drafters.
The reasons for its failure come chiefly from William White, who presided over the 1785 Convention, opposed the motion, and published his account in his Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America in 1820. That is a participant writing some thirty-five years later about a vote he lost, and he has an interest in being vindicated; nothing contradicts him, and his estimate of the service's uptake is the only reception figure that exists. Samuel Provoost's letter, judging the July 4 thanksgiving one principal cause of the opposition to the whole book, survives only inside E. Clowes Chorley's 1929 transcription; the manuscript has not been located. Chorley, the Church's own Historiographer, records that the service "called forth ... sharp difference of opinion in the convention and was not retained in the Prayer Book of 1789," though he does not name White. A search of the Bioren Journals finds "fourth of July" only three times in the whole file, all in the 1785 sitting: no entry rescinds the 1785 resolution, so on the available evidence the day was dropped rather than repealed. The day's absence from the 1892 book is consistent with everything else, but the check made was of a contents page rather than of the book.
For the restoration of 1928 the texts are certain and the deliberation is not. The collect, the Epistle (Deuteronomy x. 17) and the Gospel (St Matthew v. 43) print at page 263, and the Kalendar carries "4 c Independence Day" in the July column, set level with the Transfiguration. Who proposed the restoration, and who wrote the collect, is unknown. An attribution to Bishop Edward Lambe Parsons of California circulates widely in later secondary literature; no primary source naming him has been found, and it should not be repeated as fact. Chorley, writing the year after the revision, places the day within a wider 1928 enrichment he heads "First comes a larger recognition of the life of the Nation," alongside new prayers for the country, for social justice, and for the Army and Navy.
The day's customs are civic, and the Church has mostly borrowed rather than made them. Bells, fireworks and "illuminations" were prescribed for the anniversary before any liturgy existed for it, by John Adams writing to his wife on 3 July 1776, who named solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty first and pomp and parade second. No fast, vigil, or church-specific food custom has ever attached to the day, and no proper chant, sequence or office hymn exists for it in any edition; the patriotic hymnody sung near the date, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" and "America the Beautiful," enters by no rubric at all.
During the long gap without propers the day was kept in churches anyway. Charleston congregations lent their buildings to civic orations through the early nineteenth century; a Philadelphia collection taken on 4 July 1828 was appropriated to an enslaved man raising his children's redemption; and preachers argued, in 1869 as the 1786 rubric had assumed in transferring the day, about what to do when the Fourth fell on a Sunday. The most famous keeping of the day is a refusal of it: Frederick Douglass at Rochester on 5 July 1852, describing the peal of a thousand church bells and the prayers, hymns and sermons made in the day's honour, and answering "This Fourth July is yours, not mine." The American flag in the sanctuary is not an old custom; it became common only during the First World War, in a climate of coercion, and remains disputed.
Journals of the General Conventions of the Protestant Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: Bioren, 1817), sitting of Wednesday, 5 October 1785: the founding resolution, the drafting committee, and the "for ever" clause; also the negative finding that no repeal appears. Digitised at archive.org, item journalsofgenera00epis.
The Proposed Book of Common Prayer (1786), "A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God, for the inestimable Blessings of Religious and Civil Liberty," pages 300 to 304: the complete original proper. Digitised at archive.org, item bookofcommonprayer00epis (a London re-print for J. Debrett of the Philadelphia printing). The transcription at justus.anglican.org is defective at three points and should not be used for quotation.
William White, Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1820), pages 105 to 107 and page 156 note: all five White quotations in the Story and History above ("the most injudicious step taken by the convention"; "an implied acknowledgment of their error, in an address to Almighty God"; "a retrospective approbation of the origin of the civil constitutions"; "could not have used the service, without subjecting themselves to ridicule and censure"; "could never hear of its being kept, in above two or three places besides Philadelphia"), and the appendix recording the substitution for the four English state services. Digitised at archive.org, item memoirsofprotest00whitrich.
E. Clowes Chorley, The New American Prayer Book: Its History and Contents (New York: Macmillan, 1929), chapters III and VIII: the non-retention of 1789 and its reason ("sharp difference of opinion in the convention"), the Provoost letter quoted above ("one principal cause of the opposition"; "only thirteen have been disposed of"), and the 1928 enrichment heading. Transcribed at anglicanhistory.org. Chorley misdates the Proposed Book to 1785 and transcribes the 1786 collect inexactly.
The Book of Common Prayer (1928), page 263 and the July Kalendar: the restored collect, Epistle and Gospel. Digitised at archive.org, item 1928bookofcommon0000prot, cross-checked at justus.anglican.org.
The Book of Common Prayer (1979), pages 17, 242, 258, 924 and 930: the Other Major Feasts rank, the rewritten collect, the Preface of Trinity Sunday, the lessons, and both "For the Nation" opt-out rubrics. Validated page-scan transcriptions at Wikisource.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019), Anglican Church in North America, Holy Day leaflet 137 and The Calendar of the Christian Year, page 689: the 2019 collect, the retained lectionary, and the five-member National Days category. Published on the province's own site, bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776 (autograph, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society): "solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty," and the pomp, parade, bells and bonfires. The Charles Francis Adams edition of 1876 modernises the spelling; the quotation above follows the manuscript.
Frederick Douglass, Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester (5 July 1852): "the ascending peal of a thousand church bells"; "This Fourth July is yours, not mine." Full text at Wikisource.
Samuel Magaw, A sermon delivered in St. Paul's Church, on the 4th of July, 1786, when the "Form of prayer and thanksgiving ... " was first used (Evans imprint N15514): title-page evidence for the first use. The sermon's text could not be read.
Christopher R. Greene, oration in St. Michael's Church, Charleston, 4 July 1815 (archive.org, orationdelivered01gree); John H. Kennedy, Sympathy, its Foundation and Legitimate Exercise Considered, in Special Relation to Africa (Philadelphia, 1828; archive.org, sympathyitsfound00kenn); Horace C. Hovey, The Sabbath a Necessity (Peoria, 1869), pages 18 to 20 (archive.org, sabbathnecessity00hove): the three documented shapes of the day's keeping during the years without propers.
The 1979 book ranks the day among the Other Major Feasts, rewrites the collect entirely, appoints Psalm 145, Deuteronomy 10:17-21, Hebrews 11:8-16 and Matthew 5:43-48, assigns the Preface of Trinity Sunday, and provides an exit at both ends: the collect and the lessons "For the Nation" may be used instead. A parish may therefore keep the day in full without praying the patriotic collect or reading the patriotic lessons, and that structural provision is itself evidence of what the day was felt to require managing. The 2019 book of the Anglican Church in North America keeps the 1979 lectionary verbatim and reverts only the collect toward 1928, changing "through whose mighty power" to "by your providence" and "maintain" to "exercise." Its own leaflet heads the day a Holy Day, while its Calendar excludes the day from the Holy Days list and files it among five National Days, a category the ACNA had to create because no single-nation prayer book before it needed one to hold two countries' national holidays in a single province.
Lord God, by your providence our founders won their liberties of old: Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to exercise these liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.