Recent events in Minneapolis have prompted me to reflect on American identity. If the Democrats and mainstream media have their way, many millions of illegals whom Joe Biden gifted to this country will become citizens of this republic and vote for future American leaders. Greasing the skids for this expanding multicultural society is the popularization of a reinvention of how Americans became a people. For this immigration-expansionist purpose, Americanness is now increasingly defined through some verbal formula, a “creed” intended to remove any discriminatory specificity about an American “nation.”

In line with this task, efforts have long been underway to remove America’s historic identity from white Christians, and particularly Protestants from the British Isles. This project works by exaggerating the presence of “others” in early America, or by trying to substitute for America’s Anglo-Protestant cultural and political foundations some secular, global creed to which everyone on the planet can readily assent. Under this idea, merely repeating a verbal formula can make a model American of every Somali, as Mark Brennan pointed out in his sardonic commentary in our January print issue.

It was while mocking the idea of the “creedal nation” that Mark and I ran afoul of Larry Arnhart, a political theorist claiming some link to the conservative movement. Arnhart is big on America as a creedal nation and has expressed annoyance that neither Mark nor I is buying what he’s selling. In my case, the problem seems to be that I’m a negligent historian and failed to recognize that only a small part of the U.S. population consisted of British or Northern European Protestants at the time of the founding. Apparently, John Jay was wrong when he wrote this in Federalist 2 in 1787:

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.  

In response to a citation from the Cambridge History of Religions in America, which I thought indicated Protestant dominance in early America, Arnhart insists that Protestants accounted for only 17 percent of the total American population at the end of the 18^th century. He quotes the author of the history book that I cite to this effect:

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.”

The 17 percent “Protestant dominance” in the U.S. in 1776 obviously refers to church-affiliated Protestants. If Arnhart checks the first volume of Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s A Religious History of the American People, he would learn that just about everybody in early America was Protestant, at least by descent if not by virtue of active church attendance. In 1800, the Catholic population in this country was slightly below 1.5 percent and mostly confined to Maryland. The Jewish population was about 2,000 and almost entirely limited to a few port cities. Multicultural religions like Islam and Hinduism had no representation here. 

Contrary to Arnhart, scholars such as George Marsden, Mark Hall, David Driesbach, and Barry Shain have investigated early church membership in the U.S. and dispute the 17 percent church attendance figure that historians have recently begun to cite. They argue that these lowballed figures stem from looking at some churches, such as the Baptists, whose membership was flagging at the time of the American Revolution, while ignoring other denominations, such as the Congregationalists, whose membership was then notably increasing. We might also suspect, as Hall, Shain, and other church historians maintain, that this eagerness to “de-Christianize” early America is an attempt to give credibility to the present multicultural narrative. Instead of simply promoting the now-widespread vision of America as an inherently secular nation, some historians prefer to read it back into the country’s beginnings.

Much of the relevant research is necessarily speculative, since it depends on examining early, sometimes fragmentary, church records or on isolated statements about attendance from ministers or parishioners. It is, however, clear that the Second Great Awakening (1800-1835) revived and energized American Protestantism. But this doesn’t mean that non-awakened Protestants living here before 1800 were somehow not Protestants or that they prefigured Mamdani’s New York City.

In any case, there is no evidence that the U.S. began as a multicultural society was held together by “a creed.” It was, at the very least, united by English political and legal institutions and the general use of English (with notable exceptions such as the widespread use of German in Pennsylvania, Dutch in the Hudson Valley, French in regions settled by Huguenots, and various Native American tongues).

I also have no idea why Arnhart cites the Scots and other non-English immigrants from the British Isles as non-Anglo Protestant. These people fit quite easily into the general Protestant culture , which the distinguished sociologist Samuel Huntington views as distinctively American. Eventually, other Northern European Protestants mostly blended into this Anglo-Protestant milieu. (The Scotch-Irish mountain population, as David Hackett Fischer observes, is a more problematic fit.)

Arnhart, in one of his commentaries, says he can’t imagine how JD Vance could wish to restrict immigration to those who were culturally homogeneous when his wife is a Hindu.  Allow me to suggest some answers. Our once-dominant Anglo-Protestant culture grew weaker over time, and what Vance wants to preserve are some of its residual characteristics: respect for constitutional law, a sense of individual responsibility, and the Protestant work ethic, but not necessarily the original religious doctrines.

Allow me, however, to express my own reservations about Samuel Huntington’s contention (perhaps put forth to protect himself from leftist, multicultural critics) that being Anglo-Protestant has nothing to do with fostering the culture and morality that became distinctively American. Although it is possible to adopt the traits in question even without the original models, having the real thing on hand can certainly help instill those qualities. It is hard to maintain a form of civilization when those who have created it are no longer around or are morally unable to guide it.

Since Vance is himself a convert to Catholicism and his wife is a Hindu, I don’t think that either would argue that only those who are strictly Protestant should be allowed to reside here. Our vice president may also think that we have more than enough diversity, and so, unlike Arnhart, he has no interest in importing more. Let’s try to digest what our two national parties have already inflicted on us, namely, a diversity on which we’re presently choking! Clearly, Vance doesn’t believe (any more than Mark Brennan or I do) that celebrating the “creed” suffices for creating new Americans.

Arnhart rightly guesses that I don’t view today’s Northern European Protestants as necessarily suitable for carrying on their ancestral culture. Unfortunately, this is the case, although I’m not happy about it. It pains me to observe all those Scandinavian Protestants in Minnesota shouting expletives at immigration agents, and I listen with disgust to the woke descendants of New England’s early settlers cheering on LGBTQ lifestyles. I still recall Kingman Brewster Jr., Yale’s 17^th president and the descendant of Puritan leaders who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17^th century, welcoming the Black Panthers to Yale in May 1970. Brewster publicly announced in April of that year that a black revolutionary then being tried for murder in New Haven “could not achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” The Black Panther, Bobby Seale, was subsequently acquitted for lack of evidence. Ruling classes decline, as Brewster’s kowtowing to the revolutionary left showed. But I doubt he stumbled into this error because he failed to embrace Arnhart’s “creed.”