A few days ago, I wrote a response to Mark Brennan's essay in Chronicles Magazine arguing that the idea of America as a "Creedal Nation" is a "myth," because anyone who knows anything about American history knows that America has always been identified by its "Anglo-Protestant culture." Yesterday, Paul Gottfried, the editor-in-chief of Chronicles, responded to my post by defending Brennan's claim as a "self-evident" truth about American history.
So what historical evidence does Gottfried cite to support his belief that, of course, America has always been culturally homogeneous in its identity as an "Anglo-Protestant" nation that does not depend on any affirmation of the Lockean liberal ideas of the Declaration of Independence?
THE MYTH OF PROTESTANT AMERICA
To prove that "there was a long-time Protestant dominance over American religious and moral life," Gottfried cites this passage from Michael McClymond's chapter in The Cambridge History of Religions in America:
Statistics tell a story. The newly formed United States of America included roughly 300,000 Protestant Christians in the year 1800. Yet by the year 1950, this number had grown to 43 million. This is a 143-fold increase, or a growth of 14,300 percent. The figure becomes more striking when one considers that the population of the nation, according to the United States Census, increased during the same period by the order of 28.4 times, from 5.3 million to 150.7 million. The increase in Protestant Christian affiliation during this period was 5.0 times the rate of the general population increase. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark noted that “the most striking trend in the history of religion in America is growth.” The overall rate of religious adherence in the U.S. population steadily climbed from 17 percent in 1776, to 34 percent in 1850, 45 percent in 1890, 56 percent in 1926, 59 percent in 1952, and 62 percent in 1980.
There are three interesting points here that Gottfried doesn't notice. First, I fail to see how "17 percent in 1776" shows "Protestant dominance." Indeed, the conclusion that McClymond draws from this (in a passage not quoted by Gottfried) is that "it is a mistake to think that there was a Christian golden age in the United States during the colonial era," because "the period of lowest religious affiliation in American history occurred around 1800 when there were much lower levels of church membership than at the present."
Second, when we speak about the growing numbers of "Protestant Christians," what kind of Protestantism are we talking about? Is it the illiberal Protestantism of John Winthrop or the liberal Protestantism of Roger Williams? In my post, I argued the Protestant liberalism of Williams--based on the liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty--eventually prevailed over Winthrop's illiberal theocratic principles. I also pointed to the Constitution of 1789 as manifesting William's liberalism: the "no religious test" clause, the "no establishment of religion clause," and the absence of any reference to God or Jesus Christ made it clear that the Constitution did not establish America as a Protestant Christian Nation. Brennan and Gottfried are silent about all of this.
Third, notice the title of the book from which Gottfried quoted: The Cambridge History of Religions in America: "religions" is plural because this three-volume book is all about the religious pluralism of American history. There are chapters on over two dozen religious traditions: native American religion, Catholicism (actually a half dozen different traditions of Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, African religions, Islam, and many more. In the Introduction to the book, the editor states the conclusion that emerges from the book: "The net result of this historical development in North America is a rich religious culture that includes representatives of most of the world's religions. . . . One result of the religious freedom mandated by the Constitution was the dramatic expansion of the religious diversity in the new nation." Gottfried is silent about this.
THE MYTH OF BRITISH AMERICA
First of all, let's remember that the American Revolution was to a large degree a civil war fought over the question of whether America's national identity was fundamentally British. The American Patriots (or Whigs) said no. The American Loyalists (or Tories) said yes. That's why the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of the separation of the American People from the British People, and the statement of Lockean liberal principles in the Declaration was the justification for that separation. By claiming that American national identity is necessarily British, Brennan and Gottfried take the losing side in the American Revolutionary War. (They also take the losing side in America's second civil war--another war in which the Lockean Whigs defeated the Filmerian Tories.)
Like Brennan, Gottfried cites David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed as confirming America's British identity. But like Brennan, Gottfried is silent about my reference to Fischer's African Founders as showing how African folkways were mixed with British folkways to create a new American culture.
Brennan and Gottfried are also silent about this passage from Gordon Wood's essay:
Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society. In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country. In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry. Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch. The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.
And notice that this 60% English ancestry would be even lower if one counted the African Americans.
As I said in my post, this racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of America increased dramatically over the 19th century when the U.S. had a virtually open borders immigration policy. Brennan and Gottfried say nothing about this. Nor do they say anything about how this massive immigration favored the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War.
In my post, I pointed out the hypocrisy of people like J D Vance and Stephen Miller who argue that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture. I wrote: Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America? No, of course not. He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.
Gottfried quotes this passage but he doesn't answer my charge of hypocrisy against Vance. Gottfried does conclude his essay this way:
I agree with much of what I hear JD Vance say and would happily vote for him. I also think his wife is a much nicer person than the scowling Methodist Hillary Clinton or the goofball Lutheran Tim Walz. But we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody “our culture,” which means the one that has been obsessively vilified by our ruling class. Unfortunately, whatever has taken its place seems far, far worse.
So it's all right for the Hindu Usha to be an American citizen because she's "nicer" than the Methodist Clinton or the Lutheran Walz?
And notice what he says in that last sentence: "we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody 'our culture.'" So is he saying that we should not restrict immigration to those who embody our Anglo-Protestant culture, because it is "too late" to do that?
My other example of hypocrisy was Stephen Miller, whose grandparents were Russian Jews. Brennan and Gottfried make no attempt to defend Miller on this point. This is personal for Gottfried because he was born into a Hungarian Jewish family that immigrated to the U.S. in 1934. Can Gottfried also be charged with hypocrisy? He does say this:
As everyone who knows me knows, my family came as refugees to this country long after the country was founded, and I was not born into its onetime dominant culture. But I profoundly respect that culture and am glad to live in a country that once embraced it.
Now what is he saying here? That America should open its borders to immigrants who do not belong to America's Anglo-Protestant culture as long as they "respect" that culture?
And what does he mean by "onetime dominant culture"? When did that "onetime dominant culture" cease to be dominant? Sometime before 1934 when his parents came to America? Sometime before the Civil War during the long period of open borders? In 1789 with the ratification of the Constitution, which some of the Antifederalists denounced as "godless"?
Both Brennan and Gottfried are so obscure in their writing that I find it very hard to understand exactly what they are saying.
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