“All the evidence shows that differentiation which is not fragmentation is a source of strength. But such differentiation is possible only if there is a center toward which the parts look for their meaning and validation.” —Richard M. Weaver One of the most interesting of many superb memoirs of the American Civil War is that...
"I esteem . . . Toleration to be the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church." —John Locke It is fitting that the most confused and confusing legal tradition in America today is First Amendment case law regarding religious liberty. It is confusing because . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full...
One week after the 1984 Presidential election, while Ronald Reagan was still basking in the afterglow of a victory he takes as evidence that "America is feeling good about itself again," the National Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington finally got a look at the 136-page draft . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now...
Any exploration of American nationalism must begin with the National Question: “Is there such a thing as the American people? And if so, what is it?” Most people do not ask such questions. A Frenchman does not wonder if he is French, nor the Pole if he is Polish, nor—notoriously—the Serb if he is Serbian....
The Yugoslav civil war will turn out to be, from the long perspective of the American experience, a mere dot on the horizon. But for a small part of the American landscape—the Americans of Serbian descent—the twisted portrayal of this war, by politicians and the media, will be painful and difficult to bear for a...
At the time of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing, the French Revolution still loomed over minds and, with it, memories of a bloodbath and of a new kind of tyranny. The American Revolution seemed to offer grounds for rosier hopes about democracy. Convinced that there was no turning back . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now...
The term “political religion” designates the infusion of political beliefs with religious significance. Political religions involve grand plans to transform society into a new sacral order unrelated to how humans have lived beforehand. Political religions also typically divide people into the righteous and the evil based on whether they . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe...
In the course of American history, nationalism and republicanism have usually been enemies, not allies. From the days of Alexander Hamilton, nationalism has meant unification of the country under a centralized government, the supremacy of the executive over the legislative branch, the reduction of states’ rights and local and sectional parochialism, governmental regulation of the...
Jacob Neusner, Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, University of South Florida Martin Buber Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Frankfurt Immigration nourishes America, affirming the power of its national ideal: a society capable of remaking the entire world in the image of humanity in democracy. No country in the world other than...
“To be an American,” George Santayana said, “is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” For Americans and non-Americans alike, the American people has seemed a recognizable and describable breed from the earliest years of the Republic down to the 21st century . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access...
On May 5, President Joe Biden left out the word “God” in his proclamation on the annual National Day of Prayer. Some critics on the right claimed Biden . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and gain access to other exclusive features. Already a subscriber? Sign in here
"I do not yet see the absolute necessity of extirpating the Christian religion from among us." —Jonathan Swift I am sure it is possible to praise too highly James Reichley's Religion in American Public Life, but it would . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and gain access to other...
In After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman explores three historical attempts at answering the question, “What does it mean to be an American?”
If there was any major difference between the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1995 and his first run at the Republican nomination in 1992, it was the relative calm with which his enemies greeted the announcement of his second candidacy and his rapid move last year to the forefront of the Republican field. Rabbi...
“Empires are not built in fits of absent-mindedness.” —Charles A. Beard Described by the author as a “venture in contemporary history,” American Empire is also an in-depth study of the post . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and gain access to other exclusive features. Already a subscriber? Sign in...
"Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce." —Walter Savage Landor When English Protestants fled their native land during Mary's reign, many of them ended up in John Calvin's . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and gain access to...
From the June 1988 issue of Chronicles. The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British...
The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British Foreign Minister, uttered his epitaph of the...
Few would challenge the observation that the level of anti-American sentiments has been rising in Europe in recent months and has reached an historic high during the war against Iraq. At the same time, the attitudes among Arabs toward the E.U. states—with the exception of Great . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access...
The presidential campaign that began the day after the previous one ended nearly four years ago seems increasingly like a dream. I suppose it is part of the American Dream—this belief that, of all the allures and temptations the world has to offer, the greatest is the presidency . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now...
Some years ago, I was in Washington, D.C., for the annual convention of the American Academy of Religion, a vast gathering of college professors teaching in the area of Religious Studies, when an astonished cabdriver asked me who all these hordes of people were. When I explained the conference to him, he whistled and said,...
"There is no salvation to he extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can he revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can he found in it. If there is hope after the Holocaust, it is because to those who believe, the voice . ....
“I am told thee has been dancing with the queen. I do hope, my son, thee will not marry out of meeting.” —American Quaker mother in a letter to her son following the Coronation Ball in 1838 . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and gain access to other exclusive features....
The American Tradition As Americans we owe much of what we are to the ancient, Medieval, and post-Renaissance Europeans who proceeded us. Nonetheless, we are not simply generic Europeans. We have our own peculiar traditions, some of which go back to Britain or even to the Anglo-Saxons, while others are more uniquely American. ...
"The United States of America—the greatest potential force, material, moral, and spiritual, in the world." —G. Lowes Dickinson For Paul Johnson, American history was a non-subject in his days at Oxford and its School of Modern History in the 1940's. "Nothing was . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access...
Forget the “culture wars” and the assault on Christianity. The real conflict in America is thoroughly secular—between environmental and ecological “religions”—or so says Robert Nelson. He makes the argument, long known to conservatives, that religion never really goes away. Modern secular religions, like these two, borrow heavily . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to...
No metaphor in American letters has had a greater influence on law and policy than Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church and State.” Many Americans accept it as a pithy description of the constitutionally prescribed Church-State arrangement, and it has become the locus classicus
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to...
Despite the ocean of ink that has been spilled in the last several months on the "religious right," perhaps the most sensible comment about it, or at least about its journalistic coverage and political analysis, was penned by John F. Persinos in an article published in the magazine
For Englishmen, the Roman Forum was nearly as much a part of their political heritage as the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Since Colonial America was a part of British culture, educated American colonists shared in the British reverence for antiquity. Eighteenth-century Englishmen (and those Americans who could manage it) traveled to Italy—Rome in...
In these troubled times of pandemics, racial conflict, and economic instability, disagreements over American conservatism may not sound particularly important. Yet, when “cancel culture” tactics are being applied to the right, the meaning of conservatism is no longer just an academic talking point. This hostile climate has rekindled robust . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe...
Certainly no confusion of the ethnic with the religious presents more anomalies than the mixture of ethnic Jewishness and religious Judaism that American Jews have concocted for themselves. But the brew is fresh, not vintaged. For nearly the entire history of the Jews, to be a Jew meant to practice the religion set forth in...
“The adulterous connection of church and state.” —Thomas Paine Is “separation of Church and State” a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution? Should it be? The answers of constitutional historians Daniel L. Dreisbach and . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and gain access to other exclusive features. Already a...
My hometown in central Pennsylvania has long had a naked public square. Today the most noteworthy buildings on the square are the Colonial Bar and Grill, a Seven Eleven, and a barbershop. Religion is nowhere to be seen. I am not, I must . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article...
“Then unbelieving Priests reform’d the nation, And taught more pleasant methods of salvation.” —Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism On April 22, 1950, I published in the London Tablet an article entitled “The American Catholics Revisited,” which provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor, wildly protesting against my observations. Nearly all of them came...
"A people still, whose common ties are gone; who, mixed with every race, are lost in none." —George Crabbe That Americans of different ethnic or religious origins intermarry surprises no one—half of Japanese-Americans, more than half of . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and gain...
A successful War of Independence established 13 free and independent states in North America in 1783. This was followed, unfortunately for us, by the French Revolution and then by the 19th century, preeminently a time of violent government centralization. Subsequent events, as well as nationalist emotion and propaganda, have . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe...
My hometown in central Pennsylvania has long had a naked public square. Today the most noteworthy buildings on the square are the Colonial Bar and Grill, a Seven Eleven, and a barbershop. Religion is nowhere to be seen. I am not, I must . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article...
“In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity.” A Thus begins the Treaty of Paris (1783) by which Great Britain formally conceded the existence of the independent United States of America. This matter-of-fact invocation of the Triune God of Christianity stands in sharp contrast to the stirring tributes to human authority in the...
In 1833 James Fenimore Cooper returned from a European tour to Coopers town—founded by his father, one of the first pioneers into the dangerous frontier of New York beyond the Hudson Valley. Cooper property included a pretty peninsula on Lake Otsego that the family had allowed the community . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now...
Every once in a great while, an article appears in a mainstream publication that lets the eat out of the bag, by spelling out ideas that have long been dominant in public life but are usually seen only in vague or implicit form. One such appeared in the July/August 1996 edition of Foreign Affairs. Entitled...
Right-wing critics of Christianity often quote from The Hour of Decision, the last work of a once widely read German historian of philosophy, Oswald Spengler. This short, graphically composed book was published in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Although it has never . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full...
"I chant the new empire . . . " —Walt Whitman Walt Whitman sang what he saw—in 1860, he gave a name to Madison's and Jefferson's vision of the new commonwealth. "[Our success]," Jefferson had said in 1801, "furnishes a new proof . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and...
Some years ago, when I was a consular officer in the once-notorious border city of Tijuana, I spent a few days in Mexico City on my way back from a temporary assignment in Matamoros, another border town just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. At a social function, I was cornered by a typically...
The United States is a great country, as everyone knows. This is why America has many friends, among whom one must also take account of its less amiable, jealous friends. One must not forget that America saved France in 1918 with the disembarkation for the second battle of the . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe...
Colin Kaepernick, the former star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, made the decision during the 2016 NFL preseason to kneel during the playing of the National Anthem. Other athletes quickly followed suit, some by kneeling, others by raising a fist to protest “racial injustice” in America.
Tocqueville was the first author to apply the adjective exceptional to America, but the compliment—if he meant it as a compliment—was a backhanded one, referring narrowly to circumstances that “concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical pursuits.” Certainly, he had nothing . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the...
According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now...
“We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way—divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed—and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the . . . Subscribers Only Subscribe now to access the full article and...
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. ...