On Jan. 15, Larry Arnhart, a distinguished professor of political theory at Northern Illinois University, posted a long critical commentary on Mark Brennan’s column, “The Creedal Nation Myth,” in the January issue of Chronicles.

According to Brennan, our book editor, whose inimitable caustic style I won’t even try to duplicate, Gordon Wood and other historians who deny the cultural impact of America’s birth as an Anglo-Protestant country are overlooking something significant. Like other countries, the U.S. has identifiable ethnic and cultural roots, and those who try to reduce it to a “creedal nation” are ignoring its historic identity. Brennan has cited, among others, political scientist Samuel Huntington and historian David Hackett Fischer in support of his view. For the record, I have long regarded Brennan’s assertion as self-evident.

But according to Arnhart, we are wrong. If I assent to Brennan’s proposition, I am guilty of a horrendous oversight. “Protestant culture? So Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians cannot be real Americans?” Arnhart writes. “And certainly Jews, Muslims, and other religious traditions would have to be excluded. Think about what that means!”

Indeed, Arnhart argues, if I concur with Brennan, then I deny Usha, Vice-President Vance’s Telegu immigrant wife, the right to become an American citizen, even though her hubby, in a rash moment, called for “severe immigration restrictions on immigration because immigration causes too much cultural diversity.” Arnhart asks:

Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telegu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America? Of course not!

Let me stop Arnhart at this point, before his discourse starts meandering through his concept of “Darwinian conservatism” and from there to the “Passage” in the Declaration and finally to Lincoln’s achievement in clobbering the slave-holding South and bringing us back to “the creed.” Did the Southern side in the Civil War cease to be American, even if many of their soldiers had families that were living here for generations, because they didn’t believe in “the creed”? Am I to assume that recently arrived immigrants from, say, Somalia are more “American” than Robert E. Lee, because they earnestly recite the key words from the Declaration? Unlike them, Lee, who came from America’s most illustrious family, may have repudiated the creed, if I read Arnhart properly, because he led the Confederate side against Lincoln. These are both obvious questions, as were those Brennan raised in the commentary that so enraged Arnhart.     

Let me cite this key passage from 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.

 Clearly, there was a long-time Protestant dominance over American religious and moral life. Moreover, save for black Protestants and Hispanic Pentecostals, almost all the Protestants referred to in the Cambridge history can trace their ancestry back to Northern Europe and, in most cases, the British Isles.

 What Brennan states seems factually undeniable, and the use of the English language, the invocation of British Common Law, and the widespread adherence to forms of Protestantism originating in Great Britain among German Pietists, Huguenots, and Scandinavians would provide further confirmation of his argument. So would various moral and cultural habits that have defined American life and been adopted even by non-Protestants, but I won’t belabor the obvious.  

According to my fellow historian Barry Shain, who wrote a definitive work on the Protestant origins of America, The Myth of American Individualism, some of the country’s non-Protestants and some Protestants eager to reach out decided to change the onetime establishment narrative to make America seem more congenial to other groups. They therefore came up with the idea of America as a “propositional” or “creedal” nation, one that was de-sectarianized and identified with a universal creed of democratic equality.

I’ve no problem with those who like this notion of America as a propositional nation, provided they keep it for themselves and don’t require me, as an historian or someone on the political right, to swallow it whole. I readily concede this country has changed fundamentally during my lifetime, and talking about it as a propositional nation may be a foundational myth that can appeal to this otherwise fragmented society. Alas, even this myth may no longer work in dealing with the overwhelming diversity we’re now drowning in.

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. Like Mark Brennan, I couldn’t care less about propositional anything, but I can admire particular cultures and communities.  If forced to choose which group is closer to the truth about early American identity, I would pick Catholic integralists over American creedalists. At least the integralists are right about the profoundly Protestant character of early America and its formative culture, even if they thoroughly reject those origins and would prefer to live in an explicitly Catholic society.  

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.