An interlude before we go on.
Part Two of my Interdependence Day trilogy — The Road Not Taken — is nearly complete and will land in your inbox soon. But before it does, I want to hand the mic to my friend Rev. Dr. Ben Boswell, because what he’s weaving belongs in this conversation too. My trilogy argues that real freedom in USAmerica has never trickled down from our founding document — it has been seized, again and again, by the people this declaration was written to exclude. Ben takes this claim and builds a twenty-week spiritual-formation curriculum on it, tracing the true American founding not to 1776 but to a revolt of enslaved people in the Georgia woods in 1526. It’s called the 1526 Project, it’s already underway (you can still join mid-stream — each week stands alone), and the whole thing costs $15.26.
If you skim nothing else: get the curriculum here, or read three sessions free first. Now — here’s Ben.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice — and the bending is being done by hands you have not yet learned to honor.
— after Theodore Parker, with maroon corrections
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
— Frederick Douglass, Rochester, July 5, 1852
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
— Ella Baker, by way of Sweet Honey in the Rock
I hate, I despise your religious festivals. Your assemblies are a stench to me.
— the prophet Amos (5:21)
Fifty years ago, on the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, my mother was not in the mood to celebrate. A graduate student at the University of Virginia, steeped in the Black intellectual tradition, she told my father — then her boyfriend — that she would not join the jingoistic pageantry of parades and fireworks. Instead of celebrating two hundred years of freedom for white male landowners, they agreed to see Aerosmith, Bob Seger, and Jeff Beck, and get high.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Like my parents, I’m in no mood to celebrate the semiquincentennial of American independence, and I have no interest in the white nationalist propaganda festival masquerading as “Freedom 250.” There was no semblance of true freedom in this country until Juneteenth 1865 — and even that was partial and temporary. What “freedom” are we celebrating?
Whose Freedom?
There is a massive contradiction at the heart of the American experiment: what America calls freedom was built on, and continues to be dependent upon, the unfreedom of others. Freedom for white people was built on the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Indigenous nations, Jim Crow apartheid, mass incarceration, mass deportation — and the beat goes on.
The Founding Fathers were capitalist landholding colonizers who declared independence chiefly from any constraint on their accumulation of wealth and power. They had no intention of extending freedom to women, to Indigenous nations, or to enslaved Africans. Their pseudo-enlightenment understanding of freedom was severely limited by a white colonial imagination.
Why would we celebrate the genocidal settler-colonialist enslavers who founded this nation?
Scholar Saidiya Hartman claims the end of slavery should be considered “the nonevent of emancipation” because the freedom received arrived burdened and hollowed out. In Scenes of Subjection, she shows how emancipation transferred the formerly enslaved into a new architecture of subjection: the debt of the sharecropper, the binding labor contract, the “burdened individuality” of a liberty that conferred blame without land, power, or protection. Liberty became one more instrument of domination.
According to Eddie Glaude Jr., American freedom is white freedom — an imposter freedom, treated as the white man’s possession and a revocable gift he can grant or withdraw at will. Every advancement toward freedom for non-white Americans meets a season of white backlash, like the one we are living through now, which serves as a horrific reminder that American freedom has always been for whites only.
Whose Democracy?
I am also in no mood to indulge attempts by “moderate” or “progressive” Christians to redeem the semiquincentennial as proof of a sacred bond between Christianity and American democracy. What Christianity are we talking about? What democracy?
In an age of extreme White Christian Nationalism, it is disingenuous to speak of that bond without specifying which Christianity we mean. There are many different versions of Christianity and democracy in America. Most of them are fraudulent.
Over the last 250 years, Christianity has most often been an enemy of democracy and a partner in oligarchy, patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy, blaspheming their support for these evils in the name of Jesus. The only reason we have anything resembling a democracy in this country today is because of the resistance by the people to whom white freedom was never intended to extend.
What would Indigenous Americans, the descendants of enslaved Africans, women, LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, and AAPI communities make of our 250 festivities and think pieces? These are not rhetorical questions. They force us to ask whether the word freedom means anything when Americans say it.
Honesty requires us to confess that true freedom has never been handed down by this nation. It has always had to be seized, repeatedly, by the very people the nation was built to own and oppress.
Freedom is not a gift an oppressor can give, because oppressors can only offer the freedom they possess — one built on the slavery of others, which is not freedom at all but domination in disguise. As Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” reminds us, real freedom cannot be based on oppression, and we must walk away from false white freedom to pursue a liberty that is not dependent on anyone’s bondage.
Frederick Douglass tore off that mask on July 5, 1852 — not July the Fourth, but the day after. He faced a hall of white abolitionists expecting an Independence Day oration and delivered an indictment: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?… To him, your celebration is a sham.” And: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
He was not refusing to love freedom; he refused to let a complicit Christianity counterfeit the word.
Personally, I am not satisfied, as my mother had to be, in refusing the counterfeit alone. Sacred memory is among the holiest practices of any spiritual tradition.
A More Worthy Celebration
Watch Night New Year’s Celebration, 19th-century
I reject the Fourth of July as a day of independence, but that does not leave me without a celebration — only free to keep a truer and more liberative one, which took place five hundred years ago.
Two hundred and fifty years before the founding enslavers and colonizers signed their declaration, in the summer of 1526, a Spanish nobleman named Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón set out with roughly six hundred would-be settlers, three Dominican friars, and about one hundred enslaved Africans, and planted the first European colonial settlement in what would become the United States — the original sin of the American project, eighty-one years before Jamestown. He called it San Miguel de Gualdape, on the coast of what is now Georgia.
The colony lasted three months. Disease swept through it. The settlers fought each other. Ayllón died on October 18. And within weeks the whole thing lay in ruins — because the enslaved Africans rose up, killed their enslavers, burned what could be burned, and walked into the woods to live free with the Guale people. They were the first enslaved Africans to revolt against slavery on this soil, and when they joined with the Guale they formed, in all likelihood, the first maroon community on the North American mainland. Scholars now believe the descendants of that 1526 revolt also played a critical role in the massive Guale Revolt of 1597, a coordinated uprising that nearly dismantled the Spanish colonial system across Georgia’s Sea Islands.
These brave revolutionaries signed no parchment. Their names have been lost to history. Yet they engaged in the first of a long line of slave revolts on this continent; they formed the first maroon community on this soil; they gave birth to Afro-Indigenous solidarity; and they established a true multiracial community of freedom two hundred and fifty years older than America itself. They began the real American revolution — the only one that has ever mattered — and it has been going on, in maroon swamps and slave quarters and Indigenous councils and Black churches and Pentecostal storefronts and on the Standing Rock prairie, for five hundred years without stopping.
This is what I intend to celebrate this year: the anniversary of the first enslaved rebellion, the first resistance to settler-colonialism, the first maroon community, the first true birth of freedom. Freedom did not begin in 1776. It began in 1526, in the woods of coastal Georgia, in the hearts of the enslaved, in the hospitality of the Guale people, and in the courage of those who resisted.
So this year, while the United States throws itself the most expensive birthday party in the history of empires, I am keeping a different feast — and I have built a way for you to keep it with me. It’s called the 1526 Project.
A Debt to The 1619 Project
The 1526 Project takes its name, and much of its method, in homage to The 1619 Project — the landmark work created by Nikole Hannah-Jones with The New York Times Magazine in 2019, which reframed the American story around the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colony of Virginia in 1619 and insisted that slavery and Black resistance belong at the center of the national narrative rather than its margins. The 1526 Project would not exist without it.
Where The 1619 Project reckons with the year slavery’s enduring American institution took root, The 1526 Project reaches back another ninety-three years — to the first European colonial settlement on the mainland, the first enslaved Africans, and, decisively, the first rebellion — and asks the church in particular to keep a different anniversary. We do not offer this as a correction to Hannah-Jones’s work; we offer it as a continuation of it, into the territory of liturgy, theology, and spiritual formation, and with profound gratitude. The argument that the true American founding belongs to the resisted and the resisting is hers before it is ours.
What the Project Is
The 1526 Project: Resistance at 500 is a twenty-week spiritual-formation curriculum that began on Independence Day 2026 and runs through the First Sunday of Advent (November 29) — a calendar arc that opens on the day America tells itself freedom was born, peaks on Sunday, October 18 (the day a different America was actually born, in the woods of coastal Georgia), and carries the work forward to the opening of the Christian liturgical year at Advent.
The curriculum is intended for use by:
- Individuals seeking a personal devotional — a guided rule of life to read, pray, and practice alone, one session a week from Independence Day to Advent.
- Local church small groups and adult Sunday school classes seeking a serious, biblically grounded engagement with the histories their pews were not built to remember.
- Seminary classrooms and theological reading groups who want a primary-source-rich syllabus on the long tradition of liberatory resistance.
- Faith-rooted organizers, abolitionist communities, and movement chaplains forming the spiritual lives of people doing the work.
- Ecumenical public-facing networks running a parallel article and podcast series across the same months.
Each weekly session is built around the same six-fold pattern, derived from the spiritual practices of the maroon communities themselves — gather, remember, examine, lament, celebrate, and act — and is paired with a Sunday in 2026, a passage of Scripture, and a moment in the Christian liturgical year. Where the church’s calendar offers an opening — St. Mary Magdalene, the Transfiguration, Michaelmas, St. Francis, St. Luke — we have walked through it.
Five monthly deep-dives — one each for July, August, September, October, and November — provide longer, essay-length studies for those who want to go further. Use them as optional fifth-week gatherings, weekend retreats, podcast deep-cuts, or solo reading.
The arc has two peaks. The first is Sunday, October 18 — the Feast of St. Luke, the gospel of the poor, the day Ayllón died and the day the first rebels walked free — in a gathering we call simply The Feast of Maroon Freedom. The second is Sunday, November 29 — the First Sunday of Advent, also the anniversary of the start of Jamaica’s Baptist War of 1831–32 — in a closing liturgy that hands the fugitive tradition forward into the Christian year. The five weekly sessions between those peaks — Part V: The Long Continuance — carry the story across the rest of the great Atlantic-world rebellions of the nineteenth century: the German Coast Uprising, Amistad, the Creole mutiny, the St. John insurrection, and the Baptist War itself.
A Theological Framework: Maroon and Fugitive Christianity
The theology that animates this project is what we are calling — with the help of theologians and ancestors named in the appendices — maroon Christianity, and, in close conversation with it, fugitive theology. The two terms name the same gospel from slightly different angles:
The maroon escapes and builds a place. The fugitive escapes and keeps the escape itself sacred.
The maroon is the community in the swamp. The fugitive is the disposition in the heart.
We need both.
The framework rests on six convictions:
- The God of the Bible is the liberating God of the people who leave, walk, run, hide, and escape. From the Hebrew midwives who lied to Pharaoh, to the Israelites who walked out of Egypt, to Mary who fled to the hill country and then to Egypt with her child, to the early church scattering from Jerusalem under persecution — the Scriptures are saturated with the holiness of escape. Maroonage and fugitivity are not deviations from biblical faith. They are among its native forms.
- Freedom is the running, not only the arrival. The political theorist Neil Roberts has argued that freedom is best understood as marronage itself — the movement of fleeing, not the eventual settlement in a free place. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in The Undercommons, have shown how the fugitive constitutes another way of being in the meanwhile, beneath and alongside the institutions that cannot capture it. Kelly Brown Douglas has named what this looks like in the church: a fugitive faith, never fully settled, always on the way toward the kingdom. To be a maroon Christian is to recover the fugitivity of running.
- The cross is not a license for empire; it is empire’s defeat. When the Doctrine of Discovery turned the cross into a property deed, it inverted the gospel. The cross is the place where Rome’s project failed, where the lynching tree was made into a tree of life, where the executioners learned that they had killed someone who would not stay killed. A theology that uses the cross to justify conquest has stopped being Christian; it has become Caesarist — empire religion.
- Resistance is a spiritual discipline. The enslaved Africans who set fire to San Miguel de Gualdape were not engaged in a political act distinct from their religious lives. They were practicing the discipline of refusal. Like prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and worship, refusal is something Christians do — and it is something we have to learn.
- Land is liturgy. The first communities of resistance on this continent — Indigenous and maroon — knew themselves to be in covenant with particular places. The swamps that hid them, the rivers that fed them, the soil they planted: these were not backdrops to their faith but participants in it. Any spirituality of resistance has to relearn how to be in relationship with land, which means relearning how to follow the lead of those who have always known how.
- The eschaton has already broken in among the fugitive people. Where two or three gathered in the Great Dismal Swamp, the kingdom was there. Where Palmares stood for a hundred years, the kingdom was there. Where a Black church sang under the trees in hush harbors and a Lakota grandmother prayed at a pipeline gate, the kingdom is there. We are not waiting for the new heaven and the new earth. We are joining people who have been living in it the whole time — and who, in the tradition that runs from the maroons of San Miguel de Gualdape through Harriet Tubman through the scholars of fugitivity in our own day, have always known that the gospel is on the move.
Interested? Here’s how to join us.
The 1526 Project is not a document to admire; it is a practice, and it is already underway. It began on Independence Day and runs every Sunday through the First Sunday of Advent — which means the two great peaks are still ahead of us: the Feast of Maroon Freedom on October 18 (the day Ayllón died and the first rebels walked free), and the Advent liturgy on November 29 that hands the fugitive tradition forward into the Christian year. Every week stands on its own, so it is not too late to begin. Start today and walk the rest of the way with us.
Get the full curriculum — $15.26. Priced at fifteen dollars and twenty-six cents in honor of the anniversary, a single congregational license gives you all twenty weekly sessions, the five monthly deep-dive essays, the Feast of Maroon Freedom and July 4 liturgies, the reading and guest-list guides, and permission to reproduce the whole thing for your community. (Not ready to buy? Read three sessions free — San Miguel de Gualdape, the anatomy of a failed empire, and the maroons’ fugitive theology — before you decide.)
And however you come, come to do something. There are three ways in:
- Run the series. Gather a circle, a class, or a whole congregation and walk the twenty weeks together — then tell the project you’re running it, so you can be woven into a network of communities keeping this anniversary across the country.
- Pay reparations. Every session ends in action. Build durable, recurring support for Indigenous-led and Black-led organizations in your own region. Reparation begins with relationship.
- Amplify the voices. If you run the companion podcast or article series, center Indigenous, Black, Caribbean, and Latin American scholars and elders as your primary voices — and pay them for their time.
The empire is throwing itself the most expensive birthday party in history. You are invited to keep a truer feast — one that is five hundred years old and still running. Come find your place in it.
Learn more and begin at resistance500.com.
Rev. Dr. Benjamin Boswell is the co-creator of the Resistance 500 curriculum and the author of For the Facing of This Hour: Preaching That Resists White Christian Nationalism and Confronting Whiteness: A Spiritual Journey of Reflection, Conversation, and Transformation. He is the former pastor of Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., and is currently the lead pastor of a new church in Charlotte called Collective Liberation Church.
Related posts:
Our Resistance, My Resistance: Enough for the Whole World | Making America Great Again | David N Moore
Christ and Antichrist: Matthew Fox on Democracy, Joy, and Spiritual Resistance
Why Not Become All Flame? | Jennifer Helminski
Resistance, Resiliency & Revival | Ashon Crawley & Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II
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