If Dec. 7, 1941 is remembered, thanks to Franklin Roosevelt, as a Day of Infamy, then surely Jan. 6, 2021 will be remembered as a day of equal ignominy, when we were invaded not by a foreign enemy but by ourselves. This attack has been long in the making.

To be sure, the toxin injected into the body politic by the rise of Donald Trump has been far more deadly even than the virus that, by coincidence, killed more Americans yesterday — 4,000 — than ever before. But a virus must find something to latch onto in order to thrive, and that one found ready welcome among the unmasked children of America’s original sin.

“All men are created equal” rolls easily off our tongues, but is this America’s lived experience? We thrill to the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” without acknowledging that, as long as equality remains elusive, so, too, will its rewards. America rests on the dual supports of freedom and equality, each requiring the other. Freedom flows naturally from equality, but freedom without equality yields a corrupt and undemocratic society in which, finally, none are truly free.

Despite their symbiotic relationship, we have persisted in pitting freedom and equality against each other. Either you favor freedom, which means behaving as you please, being left alone by government, being the lord of your own castle, or you favor equality, which means being responsible for one another, owing a debt to society, and adhering to boundaries set by that society. Donald Trump has pushed this dichotomy to its extremes: “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it,” he famously boasted, and it takes little imagination to conjure up the color of the person he’d likely be shooting.

The problem of freedom without equality is its ultimate narcissism. You can begin by saying, “We must be free,” but if freedom is all you care about, in the final analysis, you will cease to care about anyone’s freedom but your own, a stance the current resident of the White House openly exemplifies.

It was under the banner of freedom that Trump’s minions stormed the Capitol with the righteousness of citizens supposedly wronged by their government. And how have they been wronged? As they see it, the life to which they are entitled is being usurped by others not entitled to it. Not just an election but what they see as their America has been “stolen” from them. That grievance lies at the heart of the Trump rebellion and keeps it well fueled. And that’s what happens when you’re willing to buy freedom without equality, personal autonomy without social responsibility.

We’re currently where we are because of a Faustian bargain, led by manifestly craven representatives, senators, and, of course, the bargainer-in-chief. We Americans just watched in horror as our own citizens violated the sanctity of what most of the world considers the temple of democracy. Yes, the Capitol is the seat of American politics, the place where, as has often been said, sausage is made, but anyone who has stood in the rotunda beneath its stately dome in the hush its geometry enforces even when loud voices intrude knows this is sacred ground. America has no state church; our “religion” is in those founding documents, flawed though our founding may be.

Make no mistake: what the January 6th insurrectionists were lashing out at as they brandished arms, waved Trump flags, and smashed windows, was American society itself—the compact by which our forefathers made us a nation and which still binds us one to another. America has

today no greater adversary than those of her own citizens who would break that compact—who insist on freedom without equality. And the sad irony is that, should they win the battle, theirs will be a pyrrhic victory, for anarchy steals everyone’s freedom.

So how do we move forward? We begin with the commitment to freedom and equality for all, along with the recognition that the healing of wounds that have festered since the very birth of our nation will be a painful process. Just as we have failed to reckon as a nation with the true cost of our unequal past, so, too, even the best-intentioned of us have yet to face up to the price we must pay to redeem the equality of all of our fellow citizens. That work must, at last, begin in earnest.

We can look toward it with trepidation as the arduous path it will surely be, or we can look toward it as the journey of our lives—the journey that will make this generation of Americans the worthy inheritors of the true American dream in which all of us participate equally in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Frank Strasburger, a resident of Brunswick, is a retired Episcopal priest and the former Episcopal chaplain at Princeton University.

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