In this episode of the “ Collage ” podcast, Rev. F. Willis Johnson and Rev. Gregory Kendrick explore the profound intersections of faith, history and preservation. They delve into the power of sacred spaces and how maintaining and honoring these place can be a form of advocacy.
As the United States nears its 250th anniversary, Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson explores the nation’s founding contradictions, enduring racial inequalities, and the ongoing struggle to align democratic ideals with reality.
As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, the nation confronts a moment that should stir both celebration and sober reflection. A quarter millennium is no small achievement in the long arc of human governance. Republics have faltered far sooner. Yet anniversaries, especially ones of this magnitude, are not merely commemorations of survival. These observances are invitations to take inventory. Thus, demanding that we ask not only what we have built, but what we have become.
The American story is told in two intertwined registers. One is triumphant: a daring rebellion reshaping political thought, expanding liberty. The other is quieter and often suppressed: a republic professing universal rights while sanctioning human bondage, preaching equality but benefiting only a select few. In our 250th year, we are invited to see these two narratives as inseparable, each shaping and challenging the other.
For those of us who inherit both America's ideals and its failures, the upcoming anniversary brings a complex sense of hope and heaviness. As a fifty-one-year-old Black American, trained to interrogate history rather than accept it at face value, I cannot ignore the contradictions at the nation’s origins. The same parchment that boldly declared “all men are created equal” was signed in a country where my ancestors were denied their humanity. This is not an aside to the American story; it is at its center. A century later, James Baldwin expressed the same tension, writing that he loved America more than any other country in the world and, for that reason, insisted on the right to criticize her perpetually. Their patriotism, like mine, was not sentimental but demanding. It was the patriotism of those who believe the American creed is worth holding accountable and worth redeeming.
That tension remains unresolved today. Two hundred and fifty years have not erased the color line that W.E.B. Du Bois described as the defining problem of the twentieth century; the divide between Black and white Americans and the system of racial separation that governed so much of the nation's life. If anything, this color line has proven remarkably adaptable, reappearing in the persistent segregation of schools and neighborhoods, the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, and enduring racial wealth gaps. The right to vote, once secured through the sacrifices of abolitionists and civil rights activists, has again become a contested terrain. Disinformation circulates with unprecedented speed, turning the public square into an arena where facts themselves are up for negotiation.
Such conditions tempt a nation toward two extremes: nostalgia for a mythic, unified past and fatalism that democracy is nearing its end. Both positions misread the American project. The United States has never been stable or morally settled. It is, and has always been, an argument about who belongs and what freedom requires.
To understand the significance of the 250th anniversary, we must resist the urge to see the founding as a finished achievement. The Constitution was not meant to be a monument, but a framework open to revision and debate. American progress has never come from complacency. It has advanced through the efforts of abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, civil rights activists, and countless citizens who refused to accept imposed boundaries. Our democracy survives because of persistent dissent and the willingness to challenge what has come before. As we approach this milestone, the real test is not only whether the nation has endured, but whether it has learned from its past.
Learning, in this context, means telling the truth about the past without falling into cynicism or myth. It means acknowledging that the American experiment began in contradiction and required generations of struggle to align ideals with reality. Expanding democracy did not diminish the founding vision, but furthered it.
For America to thrive for another 250 years, the republic must protect the mechanisms through which citizens hold leaders accountable. The right to vote should serve as the bedrock of legitimacy, not as a tool for partisan gain. It is just as vital to confront economic inequalities that threaten the middle class and erode faith in social mobility. These responsibilities also extend beyond our borders, as the nation navigates a world where democratic norms face growing pressure. Crucially, we must recognize that America is not a completed story, but an ongoing negotiation between aspiration and reality. The changing place of those previously excluded. Those who were denied, later contested, and are now indispensable. Revealing something central about the country itself—America's promise grows stronger only when those at its margins make their voices heard.
This is why the most honest form of patriotism may be the kind that refuses to flatter the nation into complacency. The prophets of American democracy, like Frederick Douglass, the journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, the author and essayist James Baldwin, and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., did not love the country despite its contradictions. They loved it by confronting them. Their critique was based on the conviction that the ideals set forth in 1776 make a just society possible. The 250th anniversary is not merely a birthday. It is a test.
The test is whether Americans can summon the civic imagination required to extend democracy into the next century. Can the nation move beyond the reflexive tribalism that has come to dominate political life? Can it build institutions resilient enough to withstand the pressures of misinformation and the temptation of authoritarianism? Can it cultivate a public ethic that recognizes diversity not as a threat but as a source of democratic vitality? The answers to those questions will not be determined by commemorative speeches. They will be determined by the everyday choices of citizens, who decide whether democracy is something they practice or merely inherit.
As one of America’s darker sons, I write not to indict but to lament. The American experiment is incomplete, its history marked by both failure and renewal. Each generation inherits unfinished work. The story of our nation will not be written by those who turn away from its challenges, but by those who confront its complexities with honesty and resolve. As we approach 250 years, let our patriotism be measured by our willingness to strive for a more just and inclusive future. This milestone is not just a time to remember, but a charge to build the America that its highest ideals promise. The next chapter depends on all of us.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, scholar-practioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
Stephanie Toliver examines book bans, transgender rights in Kansas, the impacts of ICE detentions, and the history of conditional equality in America’s schools, libraries, and churches.
Late February brought two stories that most Americans filed under separate categories. In Kansas, the state government invalidated the driver's licenses and birth certificates of transgender residents, erasing legal identities with the stroke of a pen. In New York, a Columbia University neuroscience student named Ellie Aghayeva was taken from her campus apartment by federal agents who misrepresented themselves to get through the door and held by ICE until the city's mayor personally petitioned for her release. Different people, different states, different mechanisms. The same message: for some of us, the promises of this nation were always conditional.
And yet, many Americans hold onto the lie of equality because acknowledging the truth would mean that the foundational promise we have repeated since childhood — liberty and justice for all — was never meant for all of us. It is far easier to accept comfortable fictions than to reckon with a truth that destabilizes everything you thought you knew. That meritocracy is real. That all are equal. That the documents we carry and the institutions we enter will protect us the same way they protect everyone else. But for many of us, there was never a fiction to hold onto. We were born into the conditions the lie was designed to obscure.
But the lies are coming apart in real time.
In 1848, Horace Mann declared education "the great equalizer of the conditions of men." It was a promise that school would be the institution that leveled the playing field, that made the American ideal available to everyone. But the promise was never universal. It was made to some and withheld from others by design. Can a school deliver on that promise when certain children are told their histories are not important enough to know? Can it equalize when the truth about this nation is buried beneath calls for anti-divisiveness? Can it protect when federal agents abduct children from their communities and take them to detention centers, as they make pleas to disembodied voices on the other side of a prison wall, hoping someone will explain why they are imprisoned for the act of existing?
The library carried a similar promise — a public space, open to all, where knowledge belonged to everyone. But public meant something narrower than we admitted. Patrons who didn't fit the image of the intended public entered through back doors, or not at all. Today, according to PEN America, more than 22,000 books were banned from public schools between 2021-2025, resulting in book banning and censorship “now becoming a routine and expected part of school operations.” Between 2023 and 2024, 44% of the most commonly banned titles featured characters or people of color. Twenty-nine percent included LGBTQ+ characters or people. In my hometown of New Castle, Pennsylvania, the public library was forced to close entirely due to harassment of staff for the sin of housing books that acknowledged the existence of queer people.
The church promised sanctuary — a space beyond the reach of the state, where people could gather, worship, and be held. But the Black church has never been beyond the reach of the state. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI's COINTELPRO program put Black communities under surveillance in their churches, classrooms, and libraries. They infiltrated the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and sent anonymous letters by federal agents attempting to coerce him into suicide. COINTELPRO officially ended. The surveillance did not. Today, congregations of color hold services under security alert, praying for protection from the next Dylan Roof — or from the government that was supposed to protect them from him.
These are not separate crises. They are the same lie, repeating. Policy creates the conditions, fearmongering sustains them, and the comfortable fiction that these promises were ever universal keeps us from seeing the pattern clearly.
The pattern is not new. Policies legalized school segregation. Fearmongering drove white flight, hollowing out the schools that remained and producing the fiction of failing schools and failing children, as though the schools failed themselves. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America — not because people chose separation, but because the promise of shared worship was never seriously made. Libraries required back entrances. Documents were denied. Citizenship itself was withheld, litigated, and conditionally extended to those the state deemed worthy.
What Kansas did to transgender residents in February was not an aberration. What ICE did to Ellie Aghayeva was not a deviation from who we are as a nation. They are the visible edge of a much longer history of conditional promises the nation has always been willing to revoke when the cost of keeping them became politically inconvenient.
America was lying. America's pledge has always been a lie.
But at some point, it has to stop. The promises of this nation — equality, safety, belonging — cannot remain conditional for some and absolute for others. We cannot build a future on a foundation we refuse to name. And only when we tell the truth about what was never given can we begin the work of building something that is.
Stephanie Toliver is a Public Voices Fellow and a member of the OpEd Alumni Project sponsored by the University of Illinois.
Oksana Masters of Team United States celebrates after winning gold in the Para Cross Country Skiing Sprint Sitting Final on day four of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympic Games at Tesero Cross-Country Skiing Stadium on March 10, 2026 in Val di Fiemme, Italy.
If you’re a sports fan, you likely watched coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina. But will you watch the Paralympics when approximately 665 athletes are expected in Italy to compete in the Para sports of alpine skiing, biathlon, cross-country skiing, ice hockey, snowboarding, and wheelchair curling?
The Paralympics, so-called because they are “parallel” to the Olympics, stand alone as the globe’s premier sporting event for elite athletes with disabilities. According to the International Paralympic Committee, 4,400 disabled athletes competed in the 2024 Paris Summer Games in track and field, swimming, and twenty other sports.
Worldwide, viewers consumed 763.3 million hours of dedicated live coverage during the 2024 Paralympics, an increase of 83 percent from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. Yet audience viewership still far underperforms when compared to the Olympics.
As a scholar who teaches about and studies Paralympic sport, and who makes films highlighting Paralympic athleticism, I know why: I’ve seen how often Para-sport can be mistakenly viewed as an inspirational spectacle of athletes “overcoming” disabilities, displaying courage and resilience, but ultimately performing at a lower level than able-bodied athletes.
The reality is that the Paralympics are inspirational, but for different reasons. It’s elite sport at its most essential: focused athleticism, hard-core competitiveness, and record-breaking performances. And to watch it closely is to encounter some of the most complex questions sport has to offer—about fairness, performance, technology, and the body itself. For these reasons, the Paralympics offer a spectator experience that’s less about overcoming and more about mastery with diverse bodies.
For one, the Paralympics make us re-think who counts as an athlete. At the Paralympic Games, athletes with disabilities are missing limbs, they sometimes lack eyesight, and may use assistive devices such as wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs. Yet the athletes in our films view their disabilities as the fact that made possible their world-class Paralympic performances, rather than as impaired bodies defined by the able-bodied world.
Showcasing these athletes’ elite performances also raises important questions about how we define “excellence” in sports. In the Winter Paralympics, you can see double amputee skiers race at speeds up to 80 miles per hour on the same courses used by Olympic skiers. Meanwhile, sitting biathlon athletes will pole their way through courses ranging from 4.5 to 7.5 miles. Lower extremity amputees incorporate a variety of strategies to maintain and manage balance, all while attending to the intensive muscular demands of the solely upper body activity.
These unique bodies demonstrate unique athletic risks and skill demands—reason alone to watch the Paralympics. Excellence in Para-sport is not about overcoming impairment but about maximizing skill execution within the constraints and possibilities of a specific embodied configuration.
At the Paralympics, the question of fair competition pushes the boundaries of how we think about the fundaments of competition. Each Paralympic athlete is assessed by a team of experts who determine the level of function, ensuring that athletes compete against those with similar physical capacity but potentially different disabilities. Decisions about who competes against whom determine medals, funding, and careers. The result is a sporting environment in which fairness is not a questionable assumption but an ongoing negotiation, providing Paralympic audiences with a transparent view of the risks, challenges, and thrills of elite sport.
Yet, the assistive devices that some Paralympians require are sometimes scrutinized as “cheating” or unfair, as 2024 Paralympic high jump gold medalist Ezra Frech has experienced. But carbon-fiber blades, customized racing chairs, and auditory balls are not considered cheating in the Paralympics; they are part of the sport, just as specialized swimsuits, speed skates, and ski jumping suits are elsewhere.
And that’s part of what makes the Paralympics so valuable. It makes bodily differences visible by forcing us to ask difficult questions: What counts as an advantage? Where do we draw the line between technology and talent?
What goes without question is that the Paralympics offer viewers a powerful and expanded view of bodily possibilities and bodies of many configurations as athletes aim for the beautiful and superhuman performances that attract us to watch sport in the first place. Watching the Paralympics won’t just change how you see disability. It will change how you see sport itself.
Susan G. Zieff is Professor of Kinesiology at San Francisco State University and an independent filmmaker.
People carrying flags, marching in the nation's capital.
I believe democracy is a powerful form of government that can serve the common good. We are a better country for having multiple pathways to make our voices heard—for the right to vote, the right to petition our government, the right to free speech, and the promise of equal protection under the law. These are the core pillars of American democracy. But anyone who has been paying attention knows that those pillars are cracked. And too often, those fractures run straight through the lives of LGBTQ+ people.
According to the Kettering-Gallup Democracy for All Project, a survey released by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation in partnership with Gallup, Americans’ satisfaction with US democracy is in freefall—roughly half of what it was four decades ago. Despite broad agreement with democratic ideals, most Americans believe democracy is performing poorly in the United States. Among those least likely to say democracy is working are LGBTQ+ people, with just 10% reporting that it is functioning well compared to 24% of Americans in general. As a transgender journalist who has covered the increasingly brutal and undemocratic assault on LGBTQ+ rights in this country, that finding comes as little surprise.
The Pillars of Democracy Are Failing LGBTQ+ People
So when one asks why only 10% of LGBTQ+ people say democracy is functioning well, one need only look at those pillars and ask how well they are actually holding for the people who most depend on them. Take the right to equal protection under the law. For LGBTQ+ people, equal protection has been steadily cast aside by the government meant to uphold it. When transgender youth are denied equal protection through health-care bans—handwaved away by the Supreme Court to justify laws designed explicitly to target and restrict us—what is equal about that? When passports are restricted by the federal government, and the Supreme Court ignores the unequal treatment inherent in that, the cracks widen. And when courts allow LGBTQ+ foster children to be placed with families that oppose their identities—exposing them to the risk of conversion therapy—how can anyone seriously argue that this pillar of democracy is still standing strong?
Or take the right to freedom of speech—something the far right now claims to champion and is foundational to any functioning democracy. We cannot change minds if we are not allowed to say what is on our hearts. Yet every day, we see new assaults on the speech of LGBTQ+ Americans, paired with the privileging of speech that denies our identities. College professors are fired for teaching LGBTQ+ topics. Universities that once supported transgender people are told they must accept draconian restrictions on what can be promoted or supported on campus. States move to ban drag—including family-friendly drag—and to pull books from library shelves across the country. In Alabama, policymakers have demanded that positive depictions of transgender people be prohibited, while negative portrayals remain fully permissible. And in Montana, I watched my own wife, Zooey Zephyr, who represents Montana’s 100th House District in the Montana House of Representative, have her microphone shut off on the House floor for daring to speak plainly about the harm anti-transgender laws inflict on young people’s lives. It would seem this pillar, too, has weaknesses.
And what of the right to petition our government? Surely this pillar still stands—at least in theory. Yet for LGBTQ+ people, its weaknesses are impossible to ignore. As a transgender journalist, I have covered countless hearings where virtually no one testified in favor of bills restricting transgender rights, while scores showed up to oppose them—only for lawmakers to disregard every speaker and pass those bills anyway. We have watched handpicked members of the Florida Board of Medicine take testimony from anti-trans witnesses then cut off supporters of transgender people with a dismissive “you have our email,” denying them a chance to speak. Public comments opposing draconian anti-trans policies are now routinely ignored altogether. Even the act of petitioning our government—one of democracy’s most basic promises—has become another cracked pillar that LGBTQ+ people recognize all too well.
The Impact of Voter ID Laws
Which brings us to one of the most foundational rights of all: the right to vote. It is among the core guarantees of American democracy. So what does it have to do with LGBTQ+ people, and how do we see cracks in this pillar as well? Strict voter ID laws have already thrown the legal status of driver’s licenses into question for voters in states like Florida and Kansas. The Williams Institute has estimated that hundreds of thousands of transgender voters live in states with strict ID requirements and could face disenfranchisement due to mismatched documents. In 2020, the Human Rights Campaign reported that “an issue with meeting voter identification requirements prevented 24% of LGBTQ adults, 35% of LGBTQ people of color, [and] 42% of transgender people from voting in at least one election in their lives.” Nearly half, 46%, of transgender people of color said they did not vote in one or more elections specifically because their ID listed an incorrect gender, name, or photo. Even this most fundamental pillar of democracy is fractured for LGBTQ+ people.
Making Life Unlivable
Meanwhile, as democracy weakens, the lives of LGBTQ+ people continue to grow harder under the weight of policies that explicitly target us. Transgender people face new restrictions on their legal documents. LGBTQ+ students are denied the ability to learn about themselves in schools. State legislators and public officials openly consider reviving bans on same-sex marriage while continuing to vote against basic equality. Between bathroom bans, health-care bans, sports bans, and countless other intrusions into daily life, LGBTQ+ people, and transgender people in particular, experience a government shaped by the erosion of basic principles, increasingly directing its power toward making our lives more difficult.
So when the Kettering-Gallup Democracy For All Project reports that just 10% of LGBTQ+ people believe democracy in America is functioning well, the finding is not surprising. LGBTQ+ people are the canary in the coal mine of American democracy. When our faith collapses, it is because we are living first with the consequences of democratic failure. And that should alarm everyone else. The same anti-democratic tools used to silence, exclude, and erase the most marginalized are never confined to one group. They are rehearsed on us, normalized through us, and then expanded outward—until anyone who falls out of favor with those seeking to consolidate power finds themselves standing under the same cracked supports.
A Call for Solidarity
Recognizing that these pillars are cracked does not mean American democracy is dead. The structure has not collapsed—at least not yet. Transgender and queer people are among the many marginalized communities who noticed its failures first, and we have been among the first to do the work required to keep it standing. You will find trans people leading the protests to protect those terrorized by ICE. You will find queer people defending the rights and dignity of the unhoused. And you will find LGBTQ+ people organizing politically at every level, from local school boards to national movements. We are still fighting for democracy. Democracy will survive if our allies can recognize that attacks on the most vulnerable are attacks on democracy itself and join our fight.
Erin Reed (she/her) is a transgender journalist based in Washington, DC. She tracks LGBTQ+ legislation around the United States for her subscription newsletter, ErinInTheMorning.com.
This article was originally published as part of From Many, We, a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that highlights the insights of thought leaders dedicated to the idea of inclusive democracy.
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