To Be American

It hardly seems like all of eight years ago that Samuel P. Huntington gave us The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. September 11, 2001, gave that prescient book a sense of immediacy that is not likely to wane for a long time to come. The book introduced most readers to worlds of culture, religion, and politics to which they had not previously given much thought. Huntington’s new book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $27), may be just as prescient—it is certainly just as bold—but it will be an easier target for critics.

That is because most of its likely readers think they have thought about the challenges he addresses, and they hold positions on these questions that fit into familiar partisan disputes. It seems the lines are pretty well drawn on, for instance, immigration policy, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and economic and cultural globalization. Many who have made up their minds and do not want to think again will blithely or angrily deride the book as an exercise in anti-immigrant, nativist, and chauvinist reaction. Those inclined to ad hominem attacks will not be able to resist the cheap pleasure of depicting Huntington, whose ancestors came over in the early seventeenth century, as a nostalgic advocate of restoring an American WASP hegemony that is irretrievably, and happily, a thing of the past.

The thoughtful reader should not be taken in by such utterly predictable attacks. Who Are We? explores old questions in fresh ways and is a treasury of arguments and data that cannot help but make us think anew about what it means to be American. Huntington says he writes as “a patriot and a scholar” and leaves no doubt that a patriot is one who identifies with a national tradition that was present at the American creation, was consolidated after the Civil War, and was unchallenged until the 1960s. “All societies,” he writes, “face recurring threats to their existence, to which they eventually succumb.” But the American ending can be postponed by a determined effort to restore national vitality and identity. In the large picture of history, “the American nation is a fragile and recent human construction.” Of course history is unpredictable, but “the greatest surprise might be if the United States in 2025 were still much the same country it was in 2000 rather than a very different country (or countries) with very different conceptions of itself and its identity than it had a quarter century earlier.” We have less than twenty-five years? It sounds alarming, and some will dismiss it as alarmist, but the more one ponders the argument the more one is inclined to the conclusion that it is, at the very least, not entirely implausible.

A Culture, Not a People

Our national identity is defined by the American Creed (e.g., the Declaration of Independence) and, much more importantly, by American culture, which is indisputably Anglo-Protestant. “The Creed was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Key elements of that culture include: the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.’” The important thing, Huntington emphasizes, is Anglo-Protestant culture, not Anglo-Protestant people. It is precisely the achievement of Anglo-Protestant culture that it has largely eliminated ethnicity and race as factors in belonging and achieving. If anyone doubts that for four centuries Anglo-Protestant culture has defined American identity, simply ask what America would be if it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics. The answer? “It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.”

Throughout the argument, Huntington surprises with claims, impressively backed by documentation, that cut against what everybody knows about America. For instance, he says it is at best a half-truth that this is “a nation of immigrants.” Almost half (49 percent) of the present population of the U.S. is descended from the people who were here in 1790. That is hard to believe in New York or Boston or Chicago, where most of the people who write books about America live. We also forget, says Huntington, that periods of massive immigration are the exception and not the rule in American history. Since the “reform” of immigration law in 1965, we have had the longest sustained period of massive immigration in our history.

Noteworthy, too, is the book’s treatment of the origins of the Creed. Other nations were formed, and are still formed, by conflicts between distinct peoples and cultures. Former colonies, for example, justify their claim to independence on the principle that it is wrong for one people to be ruled by another people. With America it was very different. In terms of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and language, Americans and the British were one people. A different justification for independence was required; hence the Creed. Louis Hartz and a host of other scholars are wrong, Huntington contends, in claiming that America’s origins are in the “liberal,” “Lockean,” or “Enlightenment” thought of Europe. America was America before Locke was born or the Creed devised. “Scholars who attempt to identify the American ‘liberal consensus’ or Creed solely with Lockean ideas and the Enlightenment are giving a secular interpretation to the religious sources of American values.”

The Triumph of “Pluralism”

Immigrants in the past were, for the most part, eager to be assimilated into America’s Anglo-Protestant culture. That was the famous “melting pot.” The de rigueur metaphor today is that of a cultural mosaic or tossed salad. Back in 1915, Horace Kallen first challenged the idea of a coherent American identity, promoting the idea of “cultural pluralism.” Kallen’s day has come around at last, according to Huntington. The bulk of the book is a detailed examination of the ways in which American identity is being rapidly deconstructed: by neoconservatives of an imperial bent who proclaim America to be “the universal nation”; by transnational business leaders for whom the global market trumps American interests; by intellectual cosmopolitans and other moralists who teach that patriotism is a vice that must yield to allegiance to “humanity.” On all these issues there is a wide and widening gap between elites and the overwhelming majority of Americans who remain strongly committed to the American identity and its attendant patriotic virtues.

Working, however inadvertently, in tandem with these elites is uncontrolled immigration, mainly from Mexico. Even people who think of themselves as pro-immigration say that the U.S. must be in charge of the immigrant flow. One of the great merits of the book is in demonstrating the myriad ways in which immigration, legal and illegal, is wildly out of control, and has been for decades. Organizational leaders claiming to represent Mexican immigrants make no secret of their goal to achieve a demographic, cultural, and even political reconquista of large regions of the U.S. taken from Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s. The Latino, mainly Cuban, takeover of Miami, turning it into a Latin American city, is not all that different, says Huntington, from what is happening in many other cities. Next to oil, remittances sent back to Mexico by citizens living and working in the U.S. is that country’s largest source of wealth. The U.S. government has largely acquiesced in letting the Mexican government certify immigrants for government benefits in this country. Our schools promote bilingualism and multiculturalism at the expense of American identity. The top fifty colleges in this country do not require even one course in American history. In a survey of the top fifty-five colleges, 40 percent of seniors could not say within a half-century when the Civil War was fought.

Dual Loyalties

More than seven million Americans are “ampersands,” and the number is growing fast. An ampersand is someone who is at the same time a citizen of the U.S. and of another country, usually with a primary attachment and political allegiance to the other country. Rather provocatively, Huntington suggests that many American Jews belong in this category. The question of “dual loyalty” to Israel and the U.S. is, to say the least, controversial. It is a question with a very particular and, for the most part, disreputable history. If it is addressed, it should be addressed with the seriousness and nuance it deserves, and not simply mentioned in passing as a circumstance comparable to, say, a U.S. citizen who values more highly his citizenship in the Dominican Republic.

The decisions before us, says Huntington, are stark: Will America be cosmopolitan, imperial, or national? He sums up his case this way:

Cosmopolitanism and imperialism attempt to reduce or to eliminate the social, political, and cultural differences between America and other societies. A national approach would recognize and accept what distinguishes America from those societies. America cannot become the world and still be America. Other people cannot become American and still be themselves. America is different, and that difference is defined in large part by its Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity. The alternative to cosmopolitanism and imperialism is nationalism devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding.

Huntington has clearly made his decision and is confident that almost all Americans outside the abovementioned elites agree with him, as will become increasingly evident politically when more people realize what is happening to their country. Who Are We? will, I expect, be widely read and debated, and deservedly so. A University Professor at Harvard and one of the country’s more influential intellectuals over more than thirty years, Samuel P. Huntington cannot be easily ignored. Many will lament that he is making respectable anxieties and arguments that have, in recent history, been at the margins of our public life. Others will be mightily encouraged that, at last, someone of indubitable standing has had the courage to say the obvious. My own response to the book is conflicted. I am pleased to be an American patriot, and have given a large part of my life to explaining the singularity of the American experiment. I believe that Huntington’s depiction of the “Hispanization” of the country is excessively dour, while I agree on the need to bring immigration under American control. So I find myself in substantial agreement with most of his argument. Among the seriously problematic parts of Huntington’s case, however, is his understanding of “Anglo-Protestant” culture.

They Know They Are Americans

It is beyond dispute that America’s constituting culture and institutions are Anglo (meaning English, Scottish, and Welsh) and that, with very few exceptions, those present at the creation were Protestant. More than that, they were dissenting Protestants of various stripes, which has everything to do with the strong streak of individualism and skepticism toward authority in the American ethos. There is, however, an unnecessary in-your-face problem with equating “American” with “Anglo-Protestant.” If one wants to revitalize “American” identity, it is not smart and it is not true to tell Germans, Italians, Poles, Jews, Filipinos, and a host of others that, if they really want to be Americans, they must become Anglo-Protestants. And, incidentally, there is no point in reinforcing the Hispanic view that all non-Hispanics are “Anglos.”

It does not detract from the decisive Anglo-Protestant contribution to acknowledge that American identity is also the cumulative and continuing experience of all who understand themselves to be American. While the idea of our being a nation of immigrants may be exaggerated—Huntington notes that, from 1820 to 2000, the foreign-born averaged “only” slightly over ten percent of the population—what most Americans understand by America is inseparable from immigration. It may be that half the population is descended from the people who were here in 1790, but the other half is not. An effort to revive American identity by equating America with “Anglo-Protestant” will meet with understandable resistance from many millions who are neither Anglo nor dissenting Protestant but who know that they are Americans and are confident that they have brought to the American experience more than exotic cuisines and ethnic color.

The question of whether American identity must be explicitly described as Christian is considerably more complicated. Against the eager celebrants of a multicultural and multireligious mosaic, Huntington notes that non-Christians—people of other religions or no professed religion—”are tiny minorities.” He quotes Irving Kristol, who says, “Americans have always thought of themselves as a Christian nation, equally tolerant of all religions so long as they were congruent with traditional Judeo-Christian morality. But equal toleration never meant perfect equality of status in fact.” Christianity is not legally established, “but it is established informally, nevertheless.” This, says Kristol, is a reality Jews must learn to accept.

Huntington writes, “Americans are still a Christian people, as they have been throughout their long history.” After an extensive discussion of history and survey research, he concludes, as have many others, that the last half of the twentieth century was the beginning of a fourth “great awakening,” making America more emphatically Christian than it has been since the late nineteenth century. “The proportion of Christians in America rivals or exceeds the proportion of Jews in Israel, of Muslims in Egypt, of Hindus in India, and of Orthodox believers in Russia.” As for what I described twenty years ago as “the naked public square,” Huntington believes that it is fast changing as religion becomes more publicly assertive, and both the political culture and the courts become more accommodating toward that assertiveness. Such facts of life are fiercely resisted by the aforementioned elites who, Huntington suggests, are engaged in a futile defense of the naked public square. Without calling for it in so many words, he anticipates an intensified populist rebellion against those who, as Marxists used to say, control the commanding heights of culture.

The Catholic Question

The Christian particularity of American identity is somewhat disguised by the Creed and by what some scholars call the American civil religion, and many have permitted themselves to be taken in by the disguise. Huntington writes, “While the American Creed is Protestantism without God, the American civil religion is Christianity without Christ.” He means that the Creed is Protestantism and the civil religion is Christianity, but, whether for reasons of politeness or of ideological secularism, many Americans maintain the disguise by not mentioning God or Christ in public. Huntington is well aware of what would appear to be the great exception to his definition of American identity, namely, the Catholic Church. It is communal rather than individualistic, hierarchical rather than democratic, and it values adherence rather than dissent. But all that was yesterday, according to Huntington, and it explains the long history of anti-Catholicism that, quite understandably, claimed that Catholicism was fundamentally un-American. But at long last, and with a great assist from the Second Vatican Council, Catholicism has surrendered and we now see “the transformation of a Roman Catholic Church into an American Catholic Church.”

The Catholic Church, writes Huntington, has accepted the fact that it has become “another denomination.” “Catholics are proud of their American identity, the Americanization of their church, and its emergence as a central and influential institution of American society. For understandable reasons, however, they do not like people referring to the ‘Protestantization’ of their religion.” But becoming Protestant, suggests Huntington, is the necessary price of assimilation. “Progressive” Catholics who welcome the displacement of the Catholic Church with what conservatives deride as “AmChurch” will be encouraged by Huntington’s description of what has happened. More orthodox Catholics, such as Francis Cardinal George and David Schindler, will ruefully agree with it, deploring as they do the degree to which the Church has been taken captive by an essentially Protestant culture. I am convinced that the struggle between Catholic identity and Huntington’s version of the American identity is far from over. Within the Church, younger priests, theologians, and lay leaders are vigorously challenging the idea that the “success story” of Catholicism in America is that Catholics are now just like everybody else. The current, if belated, efforts of bishops to discipline public figures who defy church teaching is among the evidences that the Church has not entirely resigned itself to being only “another denomination” or a religious organization with a Roman franchise for serving a niche market among American spiritualities. The tensions between what the Catholic Church claims to be and the sociological dynamics of American individualism and voluntarism are real and ongoing, and they have not been resolved in favor of the spiritual marketplace of Huntington’s dissenting Protestantism. Not yet. Please God, not ever.

The Strong Foundation

Huntington’s patriotism is a jealous God. He is gratified by a survey showing that 91 percent of Americans are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. As he is gratified by another survey that asked, “How important is being an American to you, where zero is not at all important and ten is the most important thing in your life?” Forty-five percent of respondents chose ten; another 38 percent chose a number between six and nine; 2 percent chose 0. The most important thing in your life? More important than your family? More important than your allegiance to Christ and his Church? If those questions had been asked, the responses would likely be very different. But it is troubling that Huntington is encouraged by the suggestion that a near-majority of Americans say being American is the most important thing in their lives. That is not patriotism. That is idolatry.

Nonetheless, Who Are We? is a book to be read and debated. Assuming the desirability of America’s survival, it sets forth with admirable lucidity why the survival of this or any nation requires a robust national identity, and why identity necessarily involves a widely understood distinction between “we” and “they.” Huntington makes a convincing case that our out-of-control immigration practices (they hardly deserve to be called policies) are seriously threatening the national identity. He persuasively argues that the American Creed is dependent upon American culture and that at the heart of that culture is religion. He exposes with appropriate relish the dangerous fatuities of business, political, and intellectual elites who preach a gospel of globalization that presumably makes national identity obsolete. For all this we owe him. But it is a mistake, both rhetorical and substantive, to so elevate the constituting and continuing importance of Anglo-Protestantism. Rhetorically, it invites resistance to his argument from those who are not and do not want to be Anglo-Protestants. Substantively, it obscures the reality of a national identity sustained and significantly reshaped by a diverse people living out their commitment to an American experiment that was, to be sure, begun by Anglo-Protestants, but by Anglo-Protestants who laid a foundation strong enough to bear the weight of unanticipated multitudes whose lived experience, in unending romance and quarrel with the normative beginning, is the American identity.