On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stepped to a podium in Rochester, New York, and said something that stopped his audience cold. He had been invited to give a Fourth of July address. Instead, he turned the celebration itself into the subject of his remarks.
Douglass understood that rituals have meaning — and that when a ritual loses its integrity, something deeper than a ceremony is lost. He quoted the Israelites in Babylonian exile, who refused to sing their holiday songs in a strange land. He quoted Isaiah, who told a fasting people that God was not impressed by their observance: “Because on your fast day, you see to your business, and oppress all your laborers … No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke.” Then Douglass landed his blow. To celebrate liberty while tolerating slavery, he said, was “brass fronted impudence,” “hollow mockery” that did not just fail to honor American values, but actively corroded them.
His warning has never stopped being relevant. And as America approaches its 250th anniversary, it feels more urgent than ever.
What is a Ritual?
Before we continue, I need to explain how I am using the word ritual. It is not simply something repeated ritualistically, or done rote. It is also not just worship, although worship is a kind of ritual. Rather, ritual is when a group of leaders and participants enter into a defined period of imagination and suspended disbelief and open themselves to the possibility of being changed. Unlike a drama, when a group of spectators watch a group of actors play a role and then everyone departs and snaps back to their old ways of being, ritual is meant to be lived authentically, with a posture open to transformation.
Ritual uses all the various forms of human expression—poetry, prose, song—individual, collective, choral—instrumental music, archetecture, costuming (both for leaders and participants), lighting, social gathering, food, storytelling, and calendar—to communicate a message beyond mere words. By doing so it brings into existence possibility and imagination. Through symbolism, ritual asks us to consider how the world might be different, how we might be better, or how we might be part of something bigger than we can comprehend.
Democracy Needs Ritual. Here’s Why.
Because ritual has the power to bridge from experience to ideal, it serves a critical function in democracy, because democracy is hard to sustain emotionally. Somebody always loses an election. Policies you care about get reversed. Leaders you distrust take power. The question for any healthy democracy is whether the people on the losing side — this time, or this cycle — can hold on to their sense of belonging, their investment in the shared project, their willingness to stay at the table.
Laws and institutions help. But they are not enough on their own. What holds people together at the level of the heart is ritual.
The political theorist Danielle Allen puts it plainly. Democratic citizens, she writes, are “by definition empowered only to be disempowered.” Winning and losing are baked into the system. What makes that bearable — what keeps the losing side from walking away or tearing things down — is ritual. Shared ceremony creates shared meaning. It reminds people that they belong to something larger than any single election or leader.
This is why people fill sanctuaries after tragedies. After the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, our congregation was packed the following Shabbat. The room held turbans and hijabs alongside kippot, elected officials alongside neighbors who had never been inside a synagogue before. No speech could have done what that gathering did. Only a ritual — with its layers of music, prayer, symbol, and presence — could hold the weight of that moment.
It’s also why even people who never set foot in a house of worship will seek out ritual at the hinge moments of their lives. Birth. Marriage. Death. Something in us knows that these moments require more than words. They require ceremony.
Nations are no different.
What We’ve Lost — and What’s at Stake This Year
The problem is that our national rituals have been hollowing out for a long time. Federal holidays have become long weekends. The national anthem gets performed at sporting events but rarely sung together. Jon Rauch, in his recent book Cross Purposes, talks about the “load-bearing walls” of democracy — the structures of shared life that hold the whole thing up. Civic ritual is one of those walls. When it crumbles, we do not always notice right away. But the foundation is weakening.
America’s 250th anniversary is one of the most significant civic moments in a generation. How we mark it will say something loud about who we are and what we value — whether we plan it to or not.
Why faith250 Is Asking Congregations to Lead
This is exactly why faith250 encourages its clusters of congregations to create public civic rituals in their communities. Not private worship services. Not internal programs. Public rituals — ones that open the doors, invite the neighbors, and say to the broader community: we are here, we belong to this place, and we believe this country’s story is worth telling together.
Congregations are uniquely positioned to do this. We have the space, the relationships, the trained leadership, and the tradition. Clergy are among the last professionals in American life who are specifically trained in how to create and conduct ritual. And faith communities are woven into the fabric of local life in ways that national organizations simply are not.
Which brings us to something faith250 is intentional about: we provide resources, but we do not create the rituals for our clusters. That’s not an accident or an oversight. It’s the whole point.
A ritual that lands — one that actually moves people, holds meaning, and builds community — has to be rooted in local soil. The needs of a congregation in rural Mississippi are not the same as those of one in suburban Virginia or urban Chicago. The history is different. The wounds are different. The hopes are different. A ritual designed somewhere else and handed down will always feel like it was designed somewhere else.
So faith250 offers frameworks, ideas, and support. But the people who know the community — who have sat with its grief, celebrated its milestones, and argued about its future — are the ones who need to shape the ceremony. That’s not a limitation. That’s what makes it real.
Taking on Douglass’s Challenge
Douglass did not just denounce the hypocrisy he saw around him. He called people to something better. He believed that American ideals were worth fighting for — worth insisting on, worth embodying in public, communal life.
faith250 makes that same claim. This anniversary year is not something to hand off to big, splashy, national events planned by politicians. It belongs to communities. It belongs to congregations. It belongs to the people who will still be here, doing the slow work of democracy, long after the speeches are over.
The ritual is ours to create. Let’s get to work.