I love America—the place where I was born, the people who have loved me, the songs that have shaped my soundscape, and the story in which I’ve had to negotiate my own existence. I also know America well enough to know her deepest flaws, and I know she will never be all that she aspires to be until she repents of the marginalization of some people from her beginning.

Langston Hughes wrote, “America never was America to me, / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!” At this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we have a nation we love, founded on a great dream and the words of men who, even when they signed their names, knew that they were empty phrases for poor men, women, Indigenous people, and Black people.

It is as though our great Declaration and Constitution represent a great political house with empty rooms. There have been empty promises and empty dreams for so many. The quill wrote “freedom” and “justice,” but the same quill enshrined counting an enslaved human as three-fifths of a person; it also lessened women and never ensured that the right to vote and the right to public education were guaranteed by the Constitution. Still, some people have always kept believing they could fill the house according to the instructions of the grand design.

For 250 years, every moral movement that has pushed this nation toward greater justice has tried to fill the house according to the promise on its deed. This was supposed to be a turnkey job, but so much was left undone and unfulfilled. So the abolitionists tried to fill the house with the justice and freedom promised to enslaved people through the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and the work of the Reconstruction. The Social Gospel and labor movements tried to fill the house with equity for poor people, and the suffrage movement tried to fill the house for women. The civil-rights, women’s-rights, immigrants’-rights, and LGBTQ-rights movements all tried to fill the rooms of the house that remained empty for so many people. Today, movements for a living wage and healthcare and action to address the climate crisis are still pushing to fill the empty rooms.

All of these movements have been trying to fill the house with what was promised would define the house from the beginning—the rights that the founders said were endowed by God and thus inalienable. At times over these 250 years, we have been successful in partially filling this house, but we have also seen effort after effort to remove any progress and to reject what we thought was finally, permanently in this house called America.

As a theologian and student of Scripture, I want America to hear a message from Jesus right now. In the New Testament, Luke records that Jesus said:

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, “I will return to the house I left.” When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.

Current Issue

July-August, 2026 Issue

Our Constitution and founding documents and creeds are clean and in order. They promise so much of what we all know to be right and good. This is why Dr. King was able to say he believed in a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. But unrealized and spoiled, this dream leaves some rooms of our body politic vacant and subject to other spirits that are wrong, unjust, mean, deceitful, fascist, authoritarian, and immoral. These spirits come in and take over the house with even greater malice than some of the former occupants.

Could this be the root of our crisis today? Because we didn’t fill the American house with fully secured voting rights and equal protection for all, immoral and mean spirits have swept in to reverse fundamental voting rights, birthright citizenship, and the basic civil rights of people on the streets, who are now subject to search and seizure by masked men. Because we didn’t fill the house with healthcare as a human right, now we have forces that want to take away Medicaid and SNAP and other basic protections that we thought were secured. Because we didn’t fill the house with living wages, a new political majority brought forces who give the greedy more tax cuts, who are overturning labor rights and have granted corporations the status of people, and who allow those corporations to pay unchecked amounts of money into our political system, treating people like things and corporations like people.

Could this be where we are? We once said we would be a nation that went to war only when we were attacked, but slowly this partial concept was removed and restraint on presidential powers was weakened, leaving the house open to someone abusing power and starting a war because of a feeling he has in his gut.

We must be honest and say we let in much of what we see now. And we must take responsibility for doing what we have the power to do to set our house in order. Religious leaders, progressive media, and movement activists must form a moral fusion movement strong enough to deep-clean our house. We need a Third Reconstruction to fill the house with policies that will guarantee a living wage, healthcare, fully funded public education, affordable housing, green jobs, justice for immigrants, and a peace economy. We must go to work now, in this 250th year, to build a coalition that will vote for a deep clean: a massive sweeping of corrupt political leaders, from the statehouse to the White House, who have either abused their power or refused to challenge those who did. And this deep cleaning must go on for a while, not just one sweep in an election.

My grandmother used to clean her house with a handmade straw broom, but then she was able to buy a real broom. It was one of her most prized possessions, but not because she loved being a domestic. She had filled her house with used furniture while making do, and when she got to a place where she could buy a new piece of furniture, she always wanted to do a deep cleaning before she brought it in.

This must become the new rule in our national house: Before we bring in the new, we’ve got to have a deep cleaning. This is no time for partial cleaning. We must build the power to sweep out so much of the extremism we are seeing—both because of Donald Trump and his MAGA entourage and because of far too many moderates who just want to go along to get along.

And the sweepers don’t need to carry the title “liberal” or “conservative.” Like the great movements of our past that have attempted to fill the American house with justice, today’s sweepers must be justice sweepers, moral sweepers, love sweepers.

This year is also a voting year. We must deep-clean the American house if we hope to fill this house with the establishment of justice, the provision for the common defense, the promotion of the general welfare, domestic tranquility, and equal protection for all. We have to sweep out the powerful political forces that are the antithesis of this nation’s highest ideals, and each of us must become a broom. Almost 90 million Americans did not vote in the last federal election. It’s time for every young person, every poor person, every marginalized person who feels like no one represents them to link up with a movement that says, “There are more of us than there are of them” and declares together, “It’s sweeping time!”

In the 1920s, a writer influenced by the great Social Gospel movement of his day composed a hymn about the need to sweep the land. The sweeping he wrote about wasn’t just for one moment; sweeping, cleaning, and furnishing our shared house must be the constant work of hope. As I travel this country and hear all the sounds coming from the people in the streets, I find myself singing this old hymn. When I read courageous journalists who are asking the questions that must be asked and doing the investigations that need to be done, I find myself singing it again. When I hear prophetic voices rising in the public square and see my students full of fire, I join the hymn writer in saying again:

Over the hilltops, down from the skies,
Coming from glory—lift up your eyes!
While we are watching, and while we pray,
A mighty revival is sweeping this way.

Sweeping this way, yes, sweeping this way,
A mighty revival is sweeping this way.
Keep on believing, trust and obey;
A mighty revival is sweeping this way.