The History of America Makes It a Creedal Nation

Now that we are in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, there is debate over the significance of that document.  For Gordon Wood, the distinguished historian of the American Founding, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Declaration helps Americans understand who they are, because it states those truths that Americans must hold to be self-evident--the truths of equal liberty--that make America a "creedal nation" rather than a nation defined by race, ethnicity, and religion.  But for Mark Brennan, writing in the January 2026 issue of Chronicles Magazine, Wood's creedal nation is a myth that contradicts the history of "America's Anglo-Protestant culture" as the real identity of the American nation (quoting from Samuel Huntington's Who We Are: The Challenges to America's National Identity).

Notice the contradiction in what people like Huntington and Brennan say.  They claim to be defending America's unique identity.  But the idea that national identity depends on race, ethnicity, and religion is a foreign idea imported from Europe and elsewhere outside America.  By contrast, America as a creedal nation as declared in the Declaration of Independence makes America uniquely American, unlike all the other nations.  Before 1776, no nation had ever had anything like the Declaration of Independence.

If you read Brennan's essay, you should notice that he arrogantly asserts that Wood is somehow ignorant of American history as showing that America has been always an Anglo-Protestant culture.  But he never presents even a brief summary of this history--as if it should be obvious.

Brennan does invoke David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America as showing that "the legacy of the four British folkways remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today."  But Brennan is silent about Fischer's more recent book African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, in which he shows how slaves from different regions of Africa interacted with European colonists to create new regional cultures in the United States.  The mixing of African folkways and British folkways created a new American culture.

PROTESTANT AMERICA?

So what about Brennan's insistence on America's Protestant culture?  Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians cannot be real Americans?  And certainly Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religious traditions would have to be excluded.  Think about what that means.  

As I have indicated previously, it has become common for nationalist conservatives like J. D. Vance to say that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture: if America had open borders, it would cease to exist as nation because it would have no distinctive social identity.

But remember that JD's wife Usha was born in 1986 in California to Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri, who are both Telugu Indian immigrants, speaking the Telugu language, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from Andhra Pradesh, which is a state on the east coast of southern India.  Usha met JD at Yale Law School.  They married in 2014 in an interfaith marriage ceremony: Usha is a practicing Hindu, while JD was raised as an Evangelical Christian before converting to Catholicism in 2019.  They have three children.

Hmm.  Sounds like a heck of a lot of cultural diversity to me.  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.

Similarly, consider the strange case of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who wants to deport those immigrants who might threaten the cultural homogeneity of America.  As has been noted in a recent article in The New Republic, Miller's ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903 when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser landed at Ellis Island, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in czarist Russia.  Glosser then began sending money back to relatives in Russia and helped them immigrate to the U.S.  But that was stopped by the Immigration Act of 1924 that shut down immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, because so many Americans thought they had to protect the purity of white, Christian, and western European culture.  Miller says he wants to restore something like the 1924 Act.  Does that mean that he and his family should be deported?  After all, his ancestry is neither Protestant nor English.  Of course, like Vance, Miller doesn't really believe what he says.

But let's go back to the beginning--to the earliest European immigrant settlers in North America in the seventeenth century.  What do we see?  Brennan would say: they were almost all Protestants!  Well, but what kind of Protestantism?

From 1607, the Virginia Colony had established Anglican churches in each county with taxpayer support.  But the Anglican Church was weaker in the other colonies, particularly in Puritan New England. In 1779, the Anglican Church was disestablished in Virginia; and in 1786, the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty separated church and state.  By 1833, all the states had abolished the state funding of established churches.

This vindicated Roger Williams in his defense of religious liberty against the Puritan theocracy that John Winthrop had established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.  When Williams was banished from Massachusetts, he founded the city of Providence (later incorporated into Rhode Island) in 1637.  Williams thus became the first Founding Father of America by promoting the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state that became a critical part of the American Creed of cultural pluralism.

Moreover, we should realize that Williams extended the principle of freedom of conscience to support toleration of not just all Protestants, but also Catholics, Muslims, pagans, and even atheists.  That broad principle of toleration is evident in the Constitution of 1789--particularly, in the "no religious test" clause, the no "establishment of religion" clause, and the Constitution's silence about God, which provoked some critics into denouncing the Constitution as "godless."  Thus, America's national identity was tied not to any particular religious tradition but to the creedal commitment to religious liberty and freedom of conscience, which protects Catholics like Vance and Jews like Miller from being persecuted.  This American history of toleration and pluralism denies Brennan's claim that the American nation must be Protestant.

ANGLO AMERICA?

Similarly, the American history of immigration denies Brennan's claim that American national identity depends on English ancestry.  Wood writes:

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.

Brennan is silent about this.  He is also silent about the massive immigration into America during the long period of almost completely open borders from 1789 to 1921.  Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States.  If their American-born descendants are added to this number, this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.

This immigration altered the cultural and political history of the United States.  The most dramatic illustration of this is the American Civil War.  From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States.  This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860.  That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration helped to decide the outcome of the Civil War.  

In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery.  As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.

In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality.  Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).

Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield.  He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument.  The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."  Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).

It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504).  So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.

On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants.  When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers."  But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans.  We have

. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.  If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).

This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their patriotic love of America and their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal.  What makes Americans Americans is their moral character as "patriotic and liberty-loving men."

In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States.  And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy.  The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.  Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field.

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them.

As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.

But once Trump and the MAGA Republicans are out of power, we can work to restore the promise of America as a creedal nation dedicated to that "electric cord" in the Declaration of Independence "that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."