Why I Cannot Celebrate Memorial Day

Every Memorial Day, I’m struck again by how many professing Christians parrot the nationalistic myth that we are free because of wars fought on foreign soil. We have been taught to believe that liberty is secured by bombs and bayonets, rather than by truth and righteousness.

Take the Civil War. It was not a glorious war for liberty—it was a war of national blood guilt, the outpouring of judgment upon a land that refused to repent of manstealing and chattel slavery. Let’s not whitewash history: Abraham Lincoln had no intention of abolishing slavery. His priority was preserving the Union, even if it meant slavery remained intact. It wasn’t until abolitionists—fiery Christian voices like William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and (yes) Frederick Douglass—so agitated the conscience of the nation that Lincoln could no longer ignore the moral reckoning.

They exposed the sin of slavery for what it was: a national abomination. As Garrison thundered, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”

Today, many Christians uncritically repeat the propaganda of American exceptionalism. “We’re free because of WWII,” they say. “We don’t speak German because of brave American soldiers.” But history tells another story. The war was already turning. FDR, eager for political clout and economic leverage, dragged America into a conflict that we had opposed for years. It is well documented that Pearl Harbor was provoked. As Richard Maybury put it, “Even a cornered rabbit will fight if need be.”

We forget that America was allied with Joseph Stalin—a butcher whose death toll eclipsed Hitler’s. We forget that our own government turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees. We forget that Hitler’s army, for all its terror, relied on horses and bolt-action rifles. We are not free today because of that war. In many ways, we have been more enslaved—enslaved to the myth that freedom is won by the shedding of American blood on foreign soil.

But Scripture says otherwise:

“Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” (2 Corinthians 3:17)
“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” (John 8:36)

Any liberty we have ever tasted—in this nation or any other—has come through the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It has come through brave preachers, evangelists, and reformers who risked everything to speak the truth. We are not free because of fallen soldiers. We are free because of the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile, while we laud those who wielded rifles, we ignore the greatest holocaust in human history happening in our own backyard. I speak of the legalized slaughter of innocent human beings—our unborn neighbors. Over 100 million babies have been executed in the United States alone. Add to that the unreported killings, the chemical abortions done in private homes, the embryos frozen and discarded through IVF, the fertilized eggs flushed away by abortifacient birth control—and the number becomes incalculable.

God once promised that Abraham’s seed would be as the stars of the sky. And now, as a nation, we have turned those stars into black holes—cold, lifeless pits in our collective soul.

No, we are not free. We are imprisoned in a culture of death—a culture so blind, we don’t even see the bars. As someone once said, “The most effective prison is the one you don’t know you’re in.” And this prison makes Stalin’s gulags or Hitler’s camps look like holiday resorts in comparison.

Let me be clear: this is not to downplay the suffering of those who have endured the atrocities of war. They suffered, and many died with honor. But if we truly learned anything from the blood-soaked 20th century, we would not be murdering our own children by the thousands every single day.

Today’s human rights activists ignore the silent screams of children as they are ripped limb from limb, poisoned to death, or vacuumed from the safety of the womb. Their remains are thrown into medical waste bins—modern-day sacrificial altars in America’s sanitized death cult.

We don’t need national celebration. We need national repentance.

The real warriors today are not the ones who storm foreign beaches. They are the Christians standing outside Planned Parenthood, holding signs that make lukewarm churchgoers gag. They are the men and women who push for abolition bills—only to be betrayed not just by pro-choicers, but by the pro-life lobby.

America is not free. It is steeped in sin. There is blood on our hands. And these are the very hands we lift to heaven in worship every Sunday. But God says:

“When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.” (Isaiah 1:15)

So no, I cannot celebrate Memorial Day—not while my brothers and sisters are being legally slaughtered. Not while the Church remains largely silent. As Garrison said:

“I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation.”

And neither should you.