When pro-Hamas rioters on Wednesday ripped down and burned the American flag outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., and defaced nearby monuments with antisemitic, Islamic terrorist graffiti, they unintentionally made a case for what Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said at the RNC last week: that America isn’t just an idea, but a place and a people with a shared history and a common future.
Vance ruffled some feathers when he said that, provoking instant outrage and, predictably, vague accusations of racism. Even Vance’s simple desire to be buried in his family cemetery in Kentucky — a commonplace of human existence across millennia — was greeted with sneers from the corporate press about how it was an “Easter egg of white nationalism,” as one MSNBC pundit said.
But what he said wasn’t racist, it was simply common sense — or at least it once was. We’ve become accustomed to thinking and speaking about America as if it’s merely an idea, nothing more than an abstract proposition divorced from a particular people’s history and culture. One might charitably call this the Ellis Islander view of America, that anyone from anywhere in the world can come here and become an American because we aren’t defined by ethnicity or tribe or ancestry, but by creed. If you accept the creed, you can become an American.
In a narrow sense, this is at least partly true. We are a propositional nation, but as I noted at the NatCon conference earlier this month, most people who invoke that idea are confused about what the proposition is. It’s not just “all men are created equal,” but the source of that proposition, which is Christianity and all that comes with it.
That is to say, the proposition at the heart of America is that the American people, wherever they come from originally, must affirm and embrace the core tenets of the Christian faith, without which the proposition “all men are created equal” is not necessarily a self-evident truth but one of many competing claims.
What happens when we misapprehend the nature of America’s creed is that we slip into the Ellis Islander view of America and begin to suppose that anyone from any culture or religion can come here and become American without changing anything about their customs, beliefs, or behaviors. We justify this erroneous view of America with worn-out slogans like “diversity is our strength,” a statement devoid of meaning deployed as a substitute for an actual argument.
We also end up misunderstanding what the “melting pot” metaphor we were taught as schoolchildren actually means. America as a melting pot doesn’t mean we all become people from nowhere, with no past and no culture or customs. It means that newcomers must melt into the mainstream of American life and assimilate, shedding whatever habits and ideas from their homeland are incompatible with our way of life.
For a long time in this country, we knew that America actually has a way of life, that it is something more than just an economic arrangement, a live-and-let-live zone of wealth accumulation. It’s a people, as Vance said, with a shared past and a common future. Immigrants can of course become part of that people, but they have to change their ways to do it. Cultural (and yes, religious) homogeneity, not diversity, is actually our strength, and in the first two centuries of our history, it’s what enabled us to absorb and assimilate peoples from all over the word. But the crucial thing was that we insisted on absorption and assimilation.
If we don’t insist on this, we end up with the situation we now have: terrorist sympathizers burning our flag on the streets of the nation’s capital, chanting violent antisemitic slogans, and clashing with the police. Without a proper understanding of what the proposition is at the heart of the American republic, we end up importing all the tribal conflicts of foreign lands and hashing them out on the streets of our cities.
We also end up with our own domestic Balkanization: pride flags on every crosswalk, endlessly multiplying identities, and the return of racial segregation in our institutions — this time under the dubious auspices of “equity” and “inclusion.”
You simply can’t have a republic under those conditions. You need a certain critical amount of homogeneity and agreement on fundamental questions before you can establish and maintain something like the American republic, which is now unraveling before our eyes. Our leaders, especially on the left, have for decades rejected the idea that America is anything more than an abstraction. They have insisted instead that the cultural and civic homogeneity necessary for our experiment in self-government to work is actually a liability, and they have worked very hard to destroy it.
Vice President Kamala Harris released a statement condemning the burning of the American flag this week by “unpatriotic protesters,” adding that “Antisemitism, hate, and violence of any kind have no place in our nation.” But her condemnation is insincere and devoid of meaning. The multicultural, Ellis Islander view of America she espouses is largely responsible for the violence and hate she claims to deplore, and appeals to diversity and inclusion will not solve the problem.
What Harris and nearly our entire leadership class fail to recognize is that our political divisions today stem from division that precedes the political. They are really religious divisions because they concern pre-political questions about the nature of God and man. We say and believe that “all men are created equal” because our founders embraced the Christian doctrine of imago Dei, that all men are created in the image and likeness of God. Hence, in a just political regime they must all be equal before the law. That is fundamentally a theological, not a political, statement. The American creed, so far as America has one, is thoroughly Christian. Pretending it isn’t undermines the only thing that can give the American experiment coherence.
The same is of course true of free speech and freedom of religion, and indeed all the freedoms we’ve enshrined in our polity. They all have as their source the Christian gospel, and without a Christian people living out and passing on that culture down the generations, they cannot be maintained. We’re seeing that now, and we’re going to see a lot more of it in the years to come.
