What Is An American?

My VIP for this week is an American. With the help of an article authored by Josh Hammer, this essay will discuss the question, “What is an American?” 

The narrow, legal answer is straightforward: An American is a citizen of the United States, born or naturalized. That definition undergirds equal protection, sets the parameters of the franchise, and helps define the various obligations citizens owe and the rights we enjoy.

But that technical legal definition is unedifying and wildly insufficient. A passport can inform which government recognizes us on paper. But it doesn’t tell us what holds the nation together, what binds disparate strangers into a people, and what shared implicit assumptions make the American experiment workable rather than a “Groundhog Day”-style recurring melee of clashing worldviews.

Since the origins of the republic, the United States has always had a legal identity and a cultural one. The legal identity is broader, permitting more inclusiveness. New arrivals on our shores can relinquish foreign allegiances, acquire American citizenship, and become part of “We the People,” much as the biblical figure Ruth left the nation of Moab thousands of years ago to join the children of Israel. As Ruth said: “Your people shall be my people and your God my God.”

But the cultural identity of the United States – the religiously imbued habits, values and expectations that enable our national creed, “E Pluribus Unum” – has never been infinitely malleable. America has always had a dominant public ethos shaped by a historical Protestant-majority culture. This culture emphasizes individual responsibility, industriousness, respect for the rule of law, the dignity of conscience, and the limits of liberty rightly understood.

The two identities are connected. As President John Adams famously said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Conscience and freedom of religion must be wholly protected and secured in one’s private life, but the very nature of American citizenship and American community are shaped and guided by the inherited tradition of the Protestant majority….

So once again, then: What is an American? It is someone who holds citizenship under our law, yes – but also someone who adopts, respects and participates in the civic, religiously imbued dominant culture that founded and still sustains the republic. That culture is neither rigid nor intrinsically hostile to reasonable diversity, but it is certainly not infinitely elastic either. And it requires conscientious assimilation into a framework that alone makes ordered liberty possible.

Citizenship is a status. But being an American in its fullest sense is something much greater and more rewarding: It is partaking in a common civilization, accepting its responsibilities, and upholding the dominant inherited way of life. That doesn’t seem to be happening in Dearborn – or in far too many other places throughout the country. A free people – and a free nation – lets that trend fester at its own grave peril.

Are you an American? Are you a legal resident of America? Do you accept the responsibilities of being an American as well as the rights and blessings? Do you hold an allegiance to another nation? (Having allegiance to another nation is different than honoring ones ancestry: I come from a Scottish/English background, and my husband is proud of his Norwegian ancestors. However, we are Americans through and through.)