This essay appears in the Winter–Fall 2012 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.
The state of Arizona has recently been in the forefront of social and political upheaval in America. Responding to its abysmal financial difficulties, the state has sold many of its properties, including its capitol buildings, and is leasing them back. Its financial crisis is perceived by many to have been caused by illegal immigration. State legislators have enacted laws, and proposed others, for combating the problem. Arizona law now requires an alien who is present in the state to carry immigration documents; bars state and local officials as well as agencies from restricting enforcement of federal immigration laws; and punishes anyone sheltering, hiring, or transporting illegal aliens. As part of Arizona’s overall approach to illegal immigration, the state has even banned public school courses in ethnic studies, which, it believes, promote racial resentment and exacerbate immigration problems.1
On the table for legislative consideration are also bills that nullify birthright citizenship and require Arizona teachers and administrators to identify the immigration status of students, and call for hospitals to do the same. Some pundits have remarked that the state has already “seceded” from the Union without officially doing so. This observation calls to mind Peter Brimelow’s foreboding comment that the immigration crisis may lead “ultimately to a threat thought extinct in American politics for more than a hundred years: secession.”2
Immigration is not the only subject of controversy occasioning threats against the Union. In a number of states, including Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia, a majority of citizens have voted to nullify, repeal, or otherwise reject the new health care law.3
Other federal initiatives are targeted for voidance as well. They include, but are not limited to, particular EPA regulations, Cap and Trade mandates (if enacted), measures overriding state law regarding the use of marijuana, and prohibitions on the manufacture and possession of firearms within the boundaries of a state.4
Adding fuel to this already volatile mix is the hard reality of financial instability looming large throughout the nation. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank in Washington, D.C., at least forty-six states face huge budget shortfalls for 2011, which are in addition to the deficits remaining from 2010. If these financially troubled states receive bailouts from the federal government, the national debt, which is already in excess of $14 trillion, will increase exponentially. Without bailouts, the states could default on their obligations. Either way, the anticipated result is a weakened, perhaps worthless, dollar. Pundits caution that the logic of states remaining in the Union could lose its traction. Texas governor Rick Perry, alluding to the “federal budget mess,” admitted that the time may come when his state wishes to secede.5
How is one to interpret these unsettling facts? For sure they are evidence of an eroding sense of national community in American life. But do sharp policy disagreements and arduous financial stresses provide a comprehensive explanation of this erosion, or are these in turn symptoms of a prior cause? The nation has endured a number of challenging moments since the Civil War. From time to time, various groups of citizens have expressed alienation from the federal government. But discontent and animosity have never before been so commonplace that the rhetoric of nullification and secession has abounded as it does today. This fact suggests an additional dynamic or underlying etiology. The sheer magnitude of the protest, in other words, implies far more than an extreme right-wing response to social and political concerns.
The attempt to account for America’s lost sense of community requires first that we examine several misconceptions regarding the origin and development of the nation’s communal ties.
The Constitution
Cokie Roberts, a celebrated radio and television commentator, once participated in a discussion concerning congressional term limits and commented on American solidarity (or the lack thereof). She stated, “We have nothing binding us together as a nation—no common ethnicity, history, religion or even language—except the Constitution and the institutions it created.”6 This is a curious comment, which continues to engender many questions. The primary question is whether the Constitution, in and of itself, can really do that for which she gives it credit. Better yet, can any written document, regardless how formative, bind a nation and its people together?
Antifederalists formed the initial wall of opposition in 1787 to the newly proposed Constitution. Sounding a note from the French political philosopher Montesquieu,7 they objected to the idea that a territory so vast as America, and a people so accustomed to their own regions of the country, could ever be bound together by one representative government authorized by a single Constitution. Mercy Otis Warren of Massachusetts, the sister of James Otis, regarded the objection as an “insuperable” one. George Mason of Virginia was quick to echo that genuine representation “breaks down when the territory is so large.” Melancton Smith of New York insisted that “a free people cannot be governed over such an extensive territory and plan” and predicted that, under the proposed Constitution, state liberties would “not be violently wrested from the people . . . [but would] be undermined and gradually consumed.”8
How the Federalists, who were the chief architects and supporters of the Constitution, responded to this objection is notable. They did not defend the document by arguing, as Ms. Roberts does, that the Constitution in and of itself provides the mortar necessary to bind the states together. No, they advanced a communitarian argument. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania emphasized that the proposed constitutional regime was feasible by virtue of the homogeneity of the American people, “drawn together by religion, blood, language, manners and customs, undisturbed by former feuds or prejudices.” John Jay of New York made the same point:
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.
David Ramsey of South Carolina exhorted Americans, when considering whether a single Constitution could hold sway over all citizens, to keep in mind their similarities as opposed to their differences.
Examine the new constitution with candor and liberality. And indulge no narrow prejudices to the disadvantage of your brethren of the other states; consider the people of all the thirteen states, as a band of brethren, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, inhabiting one undivided country, and designed by heaven to be one people. 9
James Bryce, who discoursed liberally upon America and its Constitution a century after the Founding, would have thought all the foregoing comments more than vindicated. He himself underscored the homogeneous profile of the Framers:
All spoke the same language. All, except a few descendents of Dutchmen and Swedes in New York and Delaware, some Germans in Pennsylvania, some children of French Huguenots in New England and the middle States, belonged to the same race. All, except some Roman Catholics in Maryland, professed the Protestant religion. All were governed by the same English Common Law, and prized it not only as the bulwark which had sheltered their forefathers from the oppression of the Stuart kings, but as the basis of their more recent claims of right against the encroachments of George III and his colonial officers. In ideas and habits of life there was less similarity, but all were republicans, managing their affairs by elective legislatures, attached to local self-government, and animated by a common pride in their successful resistance to England.
In a tribute that would certainly be vociferously condemned by many today as “racist,” Bryce applauded the success of the Constitution by praising “the political genius, ripened by long experience, of the Anglo-American race, by whom it [the Constitution] has been worked, and who might have managed to work even a worse drawn instrument.” Racially and religiously, the Framers were, in general, Anglo-Protestant and represented in microcosm the American people.10
If the Federalists or anyone else had dared to make a sustained argument favoring ratification of the Constitution on the ground that, by force of its four corners alone, Americans across the thirteen states would be bound together into a cohesive Union, the argument would have conjured up images of tyranny. The images would have been reminiscent of the ruthless and arbitrary power advocated by those, such as Robert Filmer, Thomas Hobbes, and Thomas Hutchinson, whose names were infamous to freedom-loving Americans.11
The truth of the matter is that America’s sense of community is not now, nor has it ever been, predicated upon the Constitution. Robert A. Dahl, Yale University political science professor, notes that a constitutional system is a reflection of a people’s identity and needs “to be tailored to fit the culture, traditions, needs, and possibilities of a particular country.” For this reason he maintains that the American constitutional system “is probably not suitable for export to other countries.” He points out that, although our Constitution and the institutions it created were in place for over a half century, the Civil War still occurred, thanks to “the extreme polarization in interests, values, and ways of life between the citizens of the slave states and those of the free states.” The professor observes that he “cannot imagine any democratic constitution under which the two sections [North and South] could have continued to coexist peacefully in one country.”12
If the American people are the chicken and their Constitution the egg, then for Professor Dahl the chicken came first. It will not do to ascribe the sense of community to the power of a single solitary document, even one that is foundational. A scheme of government, including a declaration of rights, is a reflection of a people’s traditions, habits, mores, and customs, and arises from deep within their very soul.
Perhaps, then, the next step is to look to the people themselves and to the ideal of “democracy” as the means by which to account for the nation’s sense of community.
Democracy
Democracy is a term notoriously difficult to define. It is, in general, a form of government in which supreme power is invested in the people. For the people as a whole to exercise power in an organized manner necessitates their working together cooperatively. For this reason it is asserted that democracy encourages a sense of community. As Sarah Song puts it, “Genuine democracy demands solidarity. If democratic activity involves not just voting, but also deliberation, then people must make an effort to listen to and understand one another. Moreover, they must be able to moderate their claims in the hope of finding common ground on which to base political decisions.”13 If the goal is to strengthen the ties binding Americans together, a hefty dose of democracy seems a most salutary elixir.
Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz points out that the mere mention of “democracy” in present-day America conjures up only positive images.14 Americans tend to believe that a democratic government is the ideal one. “Democracy” is glibly bandied about by American leaders as a virtual panacea for whatever ails a nation. President Barack Obama’s glowing response to popular protests in Egypt is a case in point. “Egyptians have made it clear,” he stressed, “that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”15
Although democracy may currently be regarded as the pathway to social and political community, the same was not the case when the Constitution was drafted. The architects of the nation seemed largely immune to democratic sensibilities. While they established the framework for a classless republic, their ideological roots were firmly implanted in antidemocratic soil. During the preceding generations in England, writers there had described the populace with venomous contempt as “the beast,” the rabble,” and “th’ idiot multitude.” This disdain was not lost on the Framers. The sad fate of the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic, as well as the accounts of numerous peasant uprisings from the fourteenth century on, not to mention the thought of Plato himself, helped convince the Framers that the great mass of people comprised little more than an irrational horde. This conviction was expressed in the words of prominent Massachusetts Federalist George Cabot when in 1804 he described democracy as “the government of the worst.” Federalist hostility toward democracy subsequently reached full boil when the great commoner, General Andrew Jackson, ascended to the presidency in 1828. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, commenting on Jackson’s inauguration, sneeringly labeled him “King Mob.”16
America’s Constitution mirrors, without question, a Federalist mind-set and exhibits glaringly undemocratic characteristics. Consider the approval of the “Connecticut Compromise,” devised by Constitution Convention delegate Roger Sherman.17 The plan provided for proportional representation in the lower house of Congress but allowed for equal representation in the upper one. The result is that, when citizens in Nevada now vote in a senatorial election, their votes are worth seventeen times more than those of California residents.18
The Electoral College is equally undemocratic and no more governed by the principle of proportionality than is membership in the Senate. Although a presidential candidate may receive a majority of the popular vote, he or she can still lose the election. John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and George W. Bush ascended to the highest office in the land after losing the popular vote.
Even so, the undemocratic features of the legislative and executive branches of government pale beside those of the judicial. Federal judges appointed for life are thoroughly insulated from the will of the people. Chief Justice John Marshall, a rock-ribbed Federalist, defined and established the federal judiciary’s power of judicial review.19 Although the people, the Congress, and the president may work together to enact a law, the Supreme Court, comprising nine justices, has the power to declare it unconstitutional. The popular will is, in this way, systemically obstructed.
Ruminating upon the undemocratic character of the Constitution raises several pertinent questions. If the nation, from its inception, was never intended to be fully democratic, then by what constitutional authority do ardent proponents of democracy tout it as a solution to the problem of America’s lost sense of community? Is the enthusiasm for democracy not simply an excuse to reinvent American political culture?
Lafayette College professor Joshua Miller has long pondered democracy and the missing sense of community in American politics. Democracy, he believes, enhances the spirit of community. In his analysis, Professor Miller distinguishes between “democracy” and “liberalism,” which he argues does not recognize “community . . . as a necessary component of the good political order.” The Federalists, he contends, favored a “liberal” regime invoking the private ownership of property and individual rights. The Antifederalists, on the other hand, favored a “democratic” ethos expressive of values associated with social and political cohesion. The professor maintains that liberalism can flourish over a large territory, precisely because it stands for a strong centralized state, which discounts the value of community.20
A question immediately arises for Professor Miller. Given the fact that the United States stretches over an enormous portion of the North American continent and includes two states not contiguous with each other or with the first forty-eight, is a sense of social and political community even possible for Americans on a national basis? The professor, I take it, would answer no. He would agree, in a spirit reminiscent of the Antifederalists, the Berkshire Constitutionalists, and Shays’s rebels, that no real sense of community is likely in a nation as large as America, especially one as fixated on “individual rights” as it is. Aside from local and perhaps statewide associations, a loose confederation among the various states is as close as the professor believes we can come to a sense of national community.21
Professor Miller’s analysis is significant, because it redefines the primary issue for contemporary advocates of democracy. No longer is the pertinent question whether democracy is conducive to a sense of national community. The problem, rather, in America’s case is whether democracy is intrinsically and fundamentally at odds with it. If Miller is correct, the hope that America as politically constituted can rediscover its lost sense of national community through democratic empowerment is vanity. Democracy is a local fix, not a national one.
Initial Objection and Response
The first objection to this analysis may be a reminder that a binding sense of community was a staple in American life through the Great Depression and the two World Wars. Americans pulled together during these momentous events and demonstrated once and for all that Antifederalist misgivings about the possibility of a federal Union were unfounded. The philosophy of liberalism is therefore consistent with a strong, viable sense of community.
This objection is misguided. Compared to the social and political landscape in America today, the nation’s population and its values prior to 1965 were largely homogeneous. There existed, in fact, a single prevailing culture, which defined American identity. Immigrants were compelled to assimilate to it. Although there were differing social, political, and religious points of view within the culture, “diversity” was narrowly circumscribed. Will Herberg’s book Protestant-Catholic-Jew22 bears witness to the overwhelming unity reflected within this narrow diversity.
Consensus on subjects of national concern generally posed no insurmountable challenges. Tocqueville, commenting on American homogeneity in the nineteenth century, wrote that “the different states have not only more or less the same interests but also the same level of civilization, so it is almost always an easy matter for them to agree.”23 Political and civic institutions functioned well in most cases. For four centuries, Americans were in the same book, if not on the same page. Although the differences between North and South over the issue of slavery erupted in war, President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address touched upon the deep, underlying communal solidarity between the two sections when he noted that “both read the same Bible and pray to the same God.”24 In general, the American people coalesced as a single unified community not because of but in spite of the fracturing, atomistic tendencies of liberalism.
This is not to suggest that liberalism is the sole reason America is divided. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which has welcomed to American shores millions of immigrants of non-European stock, has drastically changed American demographics.25 What is more, new immigrants have come, and continue to come, not to a culture to which they are expected to assimilate but rather to institutionalized multiculturalism. They are encouraged to hold on to their old-world languages, traditions, habits, customs, and mores.26 In an attempt to be tolerant, peaceful, and hospitable, long-term citizens are expected to assume a relativistic cast of mind toward newcomers actively practicing and professing other cultural ways.
It almost goes without saying that America’s cultural ties, dating from when the first settlers set foot on these shores, have been seriously compromised and, in some instances, destroyed. This observation, as true and as factual as it is, offers only a point of transition. It is still incumbent upon us to understand the specific character of the ties that once held American culture together and created a vibrant sense of national community.
Religion, Society, and Culture
Emile Durkheim explained nearly a century ago that society, which is the basis of any civilization, grows out of the religious impulse. All great social institutions, he emphasized, are born in religion. The fundamental categories of thought, including those of science, are of religious origin. It is religion that structures a people’s universe and defines their culture.27
Clifford Geertz attempted further to flesh out the relationship between religion and culture. He described culture as a “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols . . . by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” Religion, in his view, provides the system of symbols through which a culture sustains itself. For both Durkheim and Geertz, religion is the formative factor in culture. 28
These are not the only notable thinkers to have highlighted the pervasive influence of religion upon culture. “Religion,” Paul Tillich asserted, “is the substance of culture, [while] culture is the form of religion.” Allan Bloom likewise opined, “Culture is a synthesis of reason and religion, attempting to hide the sharp distinction between the two poles.”29
Given the religious tone and texture of culture, we must now advance our analysis a step further by asking what religion definitively shaped America’s public culture. As historian Thomas E. Woods Jr. maintains, “The Church . . . built Western civilization.”30 America, for many, is the capstone of this edifice. The nation’s most distinctive cultural attributes are unquestionably of Anglo-Christian origin.
The Meaning of “Anglo-Christian”
The term Anglo-Christian is sure to raise eyebrows and to meet at best with limited approval. At a time when an unquestioned rubric of thought is that all races and religions are equal, words and phrases that appear judgmental and discriminative are almost sure to result in consternation. Using the term Anglo-Christian seems to imply, in other words, that some peoples and religions are, or should be, arbitrarily excluded from American life. No such meaning is intended here. The idea is to describe traditional American culture in a factual manner, not to contend that there are other peoples and cultures inferior, or subservient, to it and thus have no right to exist. Although the term Anglo-Christian generally refers to a culture that originated and flourished first among the peoples of Western Europe, the meaning of the term is not constricted by geography or race. It describes a way of life, in which many religions, ethnicities, and races of people can and do participate.
In spite of the term’s enormous breadth, it is still far from amorphous. It possesses a specific structure and content, embracing particular values and principles, which allow it to accept some ideas and to reject others. One may therefore wonder why the more delimited term Anglo-Protestant is not preferred. Most of the initial settlers in America were, after all, Protestant. While technically correct, the term tends to obscure the many lines of convergence between Protestantism and Catholicism in American experience as well as the many centuries of shared history in which there was but one church in the West. Tocqueville, in his discussion of the Catholic Church in America, capitalized upon this convergence when he wrote “one can say that there is not a single religious doctrine in the United States hostile to democratic and republican institutions. All the clergy there [Protestant and Catholic] speak the same language; opinions are in harmony with the laws, and there is, so to say, only one mental current.”31 That a Roman Catholic from Maryland, Charles Carroll, signed the Declaration of Independence is hardly surprising.
Anglo-Christian Treasures
The expansive sense of freedom and creativity in Anglo-Christian culture involves, as previously noted, a definite intellectual orientation and way of response to the world and has resulted in the production of many inestimably rich treasures.
Science. In 1925 Alfred North Whitehead presented the Lowell Lectures at Harvard University. He explained that the possibility of science is predicated upon “the faith” that the world is a rationally ordered place. He undoubtedly startled the “cultured despisers of religion”32 in his audience by pointing out that this faith is “an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”33 That the church, through voices like those of Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, paved the way for modern science is an idea now shared by a number of prominent historians of science.34
Western Systems of Justice. Legal scholar Harold Berman informs us that Western systems of justice are “a secular residue of religious attitudes and assumptions which historically found expression first in the liturgy and rituals and doctrine of the church and thereafter in the institutions and concepts and values of the law.”35 Concepts such as free will, mistake, duress, fraud, and sanctions, with which every practicing attorney in America is intimately familiar, were born in the church’s canon law.
Industrial Progress. Historian Rodney Stark points out that Western Christianity blazed a path for technological innovation and the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Christian monks, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, began building monasteries. They harnessed the power of water for sawing lumber, turning lathes, grinding knives, fulling cloth, hammering metal, drawing wire, and pulping rags. They also utilized the power of the wind and of horses, inventing the wind mill, horseshoes, and the plow. They pioneered fish farming, rotational farming, and cloth making. They invented chimneys and clocks. They turned disease-ridden marshes and swamps into rich, luscious farmland. Suddenly, these monasteries were no longer simple religious communities but also huge complexes of buildings, churches, workshops, storehouses, offices, schools, and almshouses. Commerce became abundant, and full-blooded capitalism dawned. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations did not mark the beginning of capitalism; instead it was little more than a footnote to its development.36
Indeed, this culture, the development of which has spanned 1,500 years and came to define much of the Western world, and not least America, was inspired by Western Christianity. In addition to modern science, western systems of justice, technological innovation, and capitalism, the Western church gave rise to the university system, international law, and reached heights never before achieved in music, architecture, art, philanthropy, and morality. Nothing could escape the Western church’s formative influence with its accent upon reason.37
The Religious Bazaar and the Disuniting of America
As devotees of other religions have invaded American life in staggering numbers, it has become increasingly difficult to pay homage to both the public culture to which Anglo-Christianity gave birth and the liberal ideal of protecting “individual rights” of minority citizens. The two goals have grown increasingly discordant with each other. What, for example, are public medical personnel to say when parents of a Hmong child, who is afflicted with epilepsy, insist that she falls down because of being captured by a fugitive spirit?38 What do public school officials do when a Confucian, Buddhist, or Taoist student not only refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance but also threatens to institute suit against the school district if the Pledge, with its “offensive” reference to a deity, is “imposed” upon the class? What steps should military commanders take when a Sikh insists upon wearing a turban in violation of the military dress code? How are public officials to respond when American Muslims, in order to pray, obstruct traffic on a busy public thoroughfare, insist upon installation of public shower facilities at taxpayer expense, and demand to live under Sharia law?
Second Objection and Response
Some critics may assume that Oregon Department of Human Resources v. Smith39 offers a dispositive objection to this argument. In this case the Supreme Court curbed the free exercise of religion by asserting that a citizen has no legal right to ignore generally applicable, religion-neutral laws. Any social or cultural threat posed by non-Christian religions, the critics urge, is grossly exaggerated.
In response to this objection, I note that, pursuant to Smith, restraint upon the free exercise of religion requires a religion-neutral law. This requirement raises a vital question: Just how important should religion-neutrality be in American constitutional law when the fabric of American culture, which tacitly undergirds the Constitution, is decidedly Anglo-Christian?
The question tends to defuse the power of the objection. The truth is that the Supreme Court in Smith did not protect the integrity of America’s traditional public culture at all. The Court simply took another incremental step toward transforming American culture into a secular one. Religion-neutrality tends most often to mean “secular.” American culture cannot continue to embody one transfusion after another of secular values and at the same time be true to its origins. It cannot survive when divided against itself. Invoking the shibboleth of “religion-neutrality” as the golden key by which to interpret both Religion Clauses of the First Amendment may create the appearance of even-handedness between opposing faiths and control religious enthusiasms but does so at the expense of discounting the distinctive wellsprings of traditional American culture.
Untutored adherence to the idea of religion-neutrality forms no part of the foundation or heritage of American culture. This mischievous notion emanated from the pen of Justice Hugo Black in Everson v. Board of Education.40 The idea has no consistent meaning and is little more than judicial legerdemain, as I have elsewhere demonstrated.41 The wisdom of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. speaks directly to the matter. He shares the following story and comment:
When Irving Howe, hardly a notorious conservative, dared write, “The Bible, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Shakespeare are central to our culture,” an outraged reader . . . wrote, “Where on Howe’s list is the Quran, the Gita, Confucius, and other central cultural artifacts of the peoples of our nation?” No one can doubt the importance of these works nor the influence they have had on other societies. But on American society? It may be too bad that dead white European males have played so large a role in shaping our culture. But that’s the way it is. One cannot erase history.42
Final Objection and Response
Finally, some critics will note that most American immigrants after 1965 have come from Mexico, as well as from Central and South America, and are Christian.43 The hope is that this fact will boldly demonstrate that fear of the destructive effects of immigration on traditional American culture will be revealed as a thin veneer for a virulent form of racism and xenophobia.
True, a number of new immigrants have come from Christian countries, but the reality is more nuanced than this fact allows. As Ebaugh and Chafetz note, new immigrants “are expressing their Christianity in languages, customs, and independent churches that are barely recognizable, and often controversial, for European-ancestry Catholics and Protestants.”44 The new immigrants’ brand of Christianity is not consonant with that of American culture and, what is more, serves primarily to perpetuate their own distinctive cultural attitudes and dispositions.45 My argument is not that Christianity in abstracto accounts for America’s erstwhile sense of community. The thrust is rather that a particular instantiation of Christianity, derivative from Western Europe, does so.
As American citizens are invited in the name of toleration, justice, and equality to embrace other religions and brands of Christianity distant from their own, dominant cultural ties unravel and, along with them, the prevailing sense of community.
Safeguarding the Culture’s Spiritual Character
The nation’s lost sense of community is a symptom of its embattled culture and, specifically, the demise of its Anglo-Christian moorings. No country can be everything to everyone. Physical boundaries define it territorially; cultural boundaries define it spiritually. Like it or not, the values and principles that have definitively shaped traditional American culture are what they are—Anglo-Christian. Disclaiming this hallmark of American identity will lead at best to chaos, at worst to nothingness.
Safeguarding the spiritual character of the culture need not imply the formation of a political theocracy, the curtailment of religious freedom, or disrespect for other religious perspectives. What I am instead advocating is that governmental authorities recognize as a historical fact that Anglo-Christianity has decisively shaped the nation’s institutions as well as its idea of the good. One who desires to practice another religion, or to take active issue with the religious orientation of American public life, should be free to do so without threat or fear of government retaliation. There should also be no reason why dialogue between devotees of various religions cannot be both vigorous and civil. But these freedoms notwithstanding, there should be no right to a malcontent’s (or heckler’s) veto over American public culture. It is what it is and deserves a foundational place of honor and respect throughout the nation. To this end, the jurisprudence of religion should be revisited by the Supreme Court and recast in a way I have elsewhere outlined.46
The fictive “neutrality” of an overpowering liberalism, exacerbated by uncritical and unrestrained immigration, further intensified by institutionalized multiculturalism, is hopelessly dividing America. What is needed is the restoration of a binding sense of national community. Steps should be immediately taken toward this end. If America’s sense of community is not soon recovered, the Union may eventually dissolve or, alternatively, authoritarianism may rear its ugly head to impose order at any cost. Neither is an inviting prospect. ♦
L. Scott Smith is a licensed attorney and ordained clergyman, with a PhD from Columbia University. His works appears in America Unraveling and in numerous law reviews and other periodicals.
1 Arizona Revised Statutes, §13.1509 (2010), §11.1051 (2010), §13.2929 (2010), §§15-111, 15-112, and amending §15-843 (2010). Please note that the United States Supreme Court, in Arizona v. U.S., 567 U.S. ___ (2012), struck down sections 3, 5(C), and 6 of Arizona S.B. 1070, which the Court stated are preempted by federal law. The preempted sections, respectively, prohibited the “willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document . . . in violation of 8 United States Code section 1304(e) or 1306(a)”; made it a state misdemeanor for “an authorized alien to knowingly apply for work, solicit work in a public place or perform work as an employee or independent contractor” in Arizona; and provided that a state officer “without a warrant, may arrest a person if the officer has probable cause to believe . . . [the person] has committed any public offense that makes [him] removable from the United States.” The Court did, however, uphold section 2(B) of S.B. 1070, requiring state officers to make a “reasonable attempt . . . to determine the immigration status” of any person they stop, detain, or arrest on some other legitimate basis if “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States.”
2 “Arizona Acting on Bills that Go After Illegal Immigration,” Fox News Latino, February 22, 2011, http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2011/02/22/arizona-acting-bills-illegal-immigration/ (accessed February 23, 2011); “Hearing Set on Bill Requiring Hospitals to Check Patients’ Immigration Status,” Arizona Republic, February 14, 2011, http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2011/02/13/20110213hearing-on-bill-requiring-hospitals-patients-immigration-status.html (accessed February 23, 2011); Patrick Alcatraz, “How Arizona Seceded from the Union, Chapter Two, Verse 11 . . . ,” The Tribune, May 1, 2010, http://brownsvilleherald-tribune.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-arizona-seceded-from-union-chapter.html (accessed February 23, 2011); Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 268.
3 “US States, Obamacare, and Nullification of Law,” OmniSpeak, http://omnispeak.com/?p=2150 (accessed February 23, 2011); Michael Boldin, “Oklahoma Voters Reject Healthcare Mandates,” The Tenther Grapevine: The Tenth Amendment Center Blog, http://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2010/11/oklahoma-voters-reject-health-care-mandates/ (accessed February 23, 2011).
4 “The 10th Amendment Nullification Movement,” Tenth Amendment Center, http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/the-10th-amendment-movement/#resolutions (accessed February 23, 2011).
5 “Podcast: States Continue to Feel Recession’s Effects,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 25, 2010, http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3311 (accessed February 23, 2011); Nicholas Johnson and others, “An Update on State Budget Cuts,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, February 9, 2011, http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1214 (accessed February 23, 2011); United States National Debt Clock, http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock (accessed February 23, 2011); “Gov. Rick Perry: Texas Could Secede, Leave Union,” Huffington Post, April 15, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/15/gov-rick-perry-texas-coul_n_187490.html (accessed February 23, 2011).
6 Cokie Roberts, “Good Old-Fashioned Public Servants,” Washington Post, October 28, 1992.
7 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, bk. 8, chap. 16 (1752; repr., London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1914).
8 Brutus I, The Debate on the Constitution, ed. Bernard Bailyn, pt. 1 (1787; repr., New York: Library of America, 1993), 1, 174; A Columbian Patriot (Mercy Otis Warren), “Observations on the Constitution,” The Debate on the Constitution, ed. Bernard Bailyn, pt. 2 (1788; repr., New York: Library of America), 294; “George Mason Fears for the Rights of the People,” ibid., 607; “Melancton Smith Fears the Federal Taxing Power and the Capacity of Any Free Government to Rule So Vast a Nation,” ibid., 818.
9 Fabius (John Dickinson), “Observations on the Constitution Proposed by the Federal Convention,” ibid., 425; Federalist No. 2, (John Jay), at 38 (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961); “Civis (David Ramsay) to the Citizens of South Carolina,” The Debate on the Constitution, pt. 2, 153.
10 Viscount James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1 (1897; New York: CosimoClassics, 2007), 24; ibid., 28; Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004), xv–xvii.
11 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), 121–23, 198–201, 220–22.
12 Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 96–97; ibid., 96; ibid., 95.
13 Sarah Song, “What Does It Mean to Be An American?,” Daedalus, Spring 2009, http://www.amacad.org/publications/daedalus/09_spring_song.pdf (accessed February 25, 2011).
14 Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), xviii.
15 “People Have Spoken in Egypt: Obama,” Dawn.com, February 12, 2011, http://www.dawn.com/2011/02/12/people-have-spoken-in-egypt-obama.html (accessed February 24, 2011).
16 Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 39, 5 , 312.
17 Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier, Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787 (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 127.
18 Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, 49.
19 Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).
20 Joshua Miller, The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America, 1630–1789 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 11, 12, 13.
21 Ibid., 66.
22 Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1960).
23 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Meyer, trans. G. Lawrence, 12th ed. (1848; New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), 167.
24 Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html (accessed February 25, 2011).
25 Roy Beck, The Case Against Immigration (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 19, 69–74.
26 Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Religion and the New Immigrants (New York: Alta Mira Press, 2000), 4, 8, 30; Victor Davis Hanson, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 6, 71.
27 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (1915; repr., New York: Free Press, 1965), 465–66.
28 Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System, http://140.78.61.8/lxe/sektktf/GG/GeertzTexts/Religion_System.htm (accessed March 10, 2010), 1–2.
29 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. R. C. Kimball (1959; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 42; Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 1987.
30 Thomas E. Woods Jr., How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Washington, DC: Regnery Press, 2005), 1.
31 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 289.
32 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (1799; repr., New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958).
33 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; repr., New York, Free Press, 1967), 13.
34 Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, 4.
35 Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 195.
36 Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason (New York: Random House, 2006), xiii, 35–43, 120.
37 Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, x, 1–7.
38 Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 20–31.
39 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
40 330 U.S. 1, 15–16 (1947).
41 L. Scott Smith, “ ‘Religion-Neutral’ Jurisprudence: An Examination of Its Meanings and End,” William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 13 (2005): 815, 869–70.
42 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 128.
43 R. Stephen Warner, “Immigrants and the Faith They Bring,” Christian Century, February 10, 2004, 20–23, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2946 (accessed February 24, 2011).
44 Ebaugh and Chafetz, Religion and the New Immigrants, 4.
45 Ibid., 8.
46 L. Scott Smith, “From Typology to Synthesis: Recasting the Jurisprudence of Religion,” Capital University Law Review 34 (2005): 51, 121–23.
