The creedal nation

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, former US President Joe Biden posted on social media that ‘We’re the only nation in history built not on ethnicity, or blood, or geography but on an idea. That’s always been what makes us exceptional.’ The statement naturally led to a renewed debate on what it means to be a true American and what defines Americanism, a debate given new charge by the contentious birthright citizenship ruling from the US Supreme Court. Two questions set its terms. First: if America is not a creedal entity, what is it? Second: if it is, what defines the creed?

America is not a borderless economic zone for anyone from across the globe to come to. That part is settled. But it is also not just a random nation-state. It has never been, in its entire history, despite occasional attempts to make it so.

GK Chesterton wrote, ‘America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.’ Often forgotten is that the Declaration of Independence raged against the monarch of Great Britain for opposing migration and naturalisation: ‘He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.’

The American creed is also clearly defined. ‘Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories,’ Alexis de Tocqueville wrote. James Madison argued that the US should never fall under the tyranny of majoritarianism: ‘Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’

The first major attempt at charting the story of the republic, by George Bancroft in his History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, had this sentence: ‘The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.’ Abraham Lincoln said that America is a nation defined by a proposition, that all men are created equal: in other words, a creed.

Perhaps the strongest effort to define the American creed was Theodore Roosevelt’s. He defined it as loyalty to the English language, the land under one’s feet and the flag, above all other identities, including blood and soil ties: ‘There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad’, adding further that ‘Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.’

Ronald Reagan once said, ‘You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’ The most prominent living historian of US history, Jill Lepore, echoed the sentiment. ‘The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, after having waged a war against Great Britain, just about the last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Britishness.’ The historian of the United States Gordon Wood, author of The Idea of America, wrote in his final essay before his death: ‘To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something. That is why we are at heart a creedal nation, and that is why the 250th anniversary of the Declaration next year is so important.’

If America is not a creedal entity, then what is America? It is clearly not a religious entity. Thomas Jefferson wrote that religious freedom was ‘meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination’.

The first US treaty with Tripoli, ratified by the Senate, accepted that premise. ‘As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.’

Here’s Teddy Roosevelt again: ‘Political movements directed against men because of their religious belief, and intended to prevent men of that creed from holding office, have never accomplished anything but harm. This was true in the days of the “Know-Nothing” and Native-American [nativist] parties in the middle of the last century; and it is just as true to-day. Such a movement directly contravenes the spirit of the Constitution itself.’

America is also not an ethno-nationalist entity by design. Classical nationalism as understood in its post-French-Revolutionary form rests on a relatively stable triad: a people born within a land, a shared culture and a bounded territory. Within this alignment, political cohesion is easier to sustain. And yet, the American ethno-nationalist right tends to privilege supra-national ideological, religious, or ethno-racial unities over the sovereignty of individual nations and the primacy of co-nationals.

The core debate always involves a fundamental question: what defines citizenship and who belongs in it? Through the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the United States has largely answered that question through a civic rather than an ethnic understanding of nationhood: it declares that all persons either born or naturalised in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens, under a universal legal foundation based upon birth and allegiance to the Constitution rather than race, ancestry or inherited status. This was further reaffirmed by United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the Supreme Court held that a person born on American soil is a citizen regardless of the nationality of his or her parents.

Any attempt to recast the character of America as a fixed ethnos therefore faces two problems, other than the obvious logistical nightmare of implementation, or the risk of an all-out civil war and foreign interference: how to measure who is a ‘real American’, without creating what would in reality be an American version of a form of casteism based on the year and generation of birth; and how to measure the racial and ethnic purity to determine that. Once citizenship is rooted primarily in ancestry rather than territorial birth and legal allegiance, distinctions among citizens tend to become hierarchical and caste-based and, ultimately, it would render the republic ineffective, as membership within the republic would cease to be a shared civic status and instead become differentiated according to origin, lineage, and inherited characteristics. By contrast, the republican tradition embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment rests upon a creedal conception of nationhood, one that ensures citizenship in birth under the law and equal membership in the political community rather than in race, ethnicity or descent.

The failure of conservative forces is in attempting to re-litigate the founding and character of the US, when it has already been decided by history. The failure of the liberals is to not implement a more muscular defence of the creedal nature of the US and, in effect, cede the ground to various factions, whether it’s the ethno-nationalist right, or the post-national or Islamist left.

The obvious answer to America’s crisis of identity is for any unifying political movement to return to a form of muscular creedal character measured on jus soli, based on defined geography and place of birth, rather than lineage, to constitute the primary basis of identity and nationalism, while also accepting that the majority of the problems come from illegal migration and some specific religious elements among native-born minorities. The multicultural models pursued by Canada and the United Kingdom should be rejected in favour of a strongly ethno-neutral but assimilationist and creedal approach of a multiethnic but monocultural entity, similar to Singapore, the United States in the 1990s, and a potential version of the future European Union, provided it could form a coherent civic culture.

Because, after all, no pope, politburo, populist, or patrician, or even the people can trample upon one’s guaranteed rights within a creedal nation. The opposite of creedalism is a form of hierarchical casteism, and Americans in every century have rejected that. A person born in the 1790s and a person naturalised yesterday stand equal before the law as Americans, not by accident. It is a deliberate feature of the American character and order. It is also one of the most powerful, attractive and unifying political forces in history. In return, America asks for only one thing: an enduring loyalty to the creed, to the Constitution and to the land under your feet.