America&#039;s Creed

Chapter 3 of "Immigration and the Next America" *(Our Sunday Visitor, 2013).

One of the country’s great scholars of immigration, Oscar Handlin, was the son of Jewish immigrants who fled religious persecution in Russia. They came to Brooklyn by way of Ellis Island in the early years of the last century. Handlin won the Pulitzer Prize for history for his 1951 book, The Uprooted, which began with this bold statement: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”

The history of America is still told as the story of immigration. And for good reason. From the beginning, the immigrant experience has been essential to America’s self-identity.

Hector St. John de Crévecoer, a French émigré and farmer in upstate New York was one of the first to try to define “what is an American.” In a letter that dates to the years just after the American Revolution, he describes how “in this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes.”

Crévecoer had an almost religious fervor about the saving power of the American dream:

Urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Everything has tended to regenerate them: new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants … they withered and were mowed down by want, hunger and war; but now, by the power of transplantation … they have taken root and flourished. … By what invisible power hath this surprising metamorphosis been performed? By that of the laws and that of their industry. The laws, the indulgent laws, protect them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption; they receive ample rewards for their labors; these accumulated rewards procure them lands; those lands confer on them the title of freemen, and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly require. This is the great operation daily performed by our laws.

This is one of the earliest and most heartfelt descriptions of the process of assimilation or “Americanization.” Crévecoer was also probably the first to speak of America as a melting pot. He imagined that upon coming to America immigrants’ distinctive religious, political and ethnic characteristics were being blended into a new national identity. “The American is a new man,” he said. “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

But the process of assimilation and “Americanization” has never been easy. The famous poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty promises that America will be the “Mother of Exiles” who offers “world-wide welcome” through her “golden door.” The reality of our history has been more complicated.

I think about that every time I travel to our nation’s capital and see that other symbol of America, the Washington Monument. Visitors often notice that the monument changes colors about one-quarter of the way up from the ground. The marble at the monument’s base is gray and white, but at a certain point the marble becomes brownish-white. Those differently colored stones tell another story about immigration and America.

Construction on the monument got underway in 1848. As a sign of national unity, the various states contributed stones for building the monument’s interior walls. Foreign nations expressed their solidarity by sending marble and granite. In that spirit of friendship, Pope Pius IX sent a stone from the 2,000 year-old Temple of Concord in Rome.

What happened next can only be understood in the context of the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic currents then stirring in the country. It is hard for us to remember that there was a time in America when Catholics were treated like second-class citizens. That was the case from the early days of the Republic. Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. once said anti-Catholicism was “the deepest bias in the history of the American people.”

Hatred of Catholicism was once so mainstream that books like Six Months in a Convent, and Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu in Montreal were best sellers. Traveling carnival shows featured actors claiming to be ex-priests and ex-nuns telling sordid tales in lurid detail. Bigots burned down Catholic churches and convents. A priest in Maine was tarred and feathered. He later became the first president of Boston College but the incident scarred him for life; he ended up dying in an asylum.

In this context, an influential secret society and political party, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, popularly called the “Know-Nothings,” started a rumor about the Pope’s gift to the Washington Monument. The Know-Nothings were pro-slavery, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and “nativist.” They wanted to keep America “pure” and for “natives” only — which for them meant people of white, Anglo-European and Protestant descent.

The Know-Nothings feared the waves of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who began arriving here in the 1820s and 1830s. They argued that these new immigrants came from inferior backgrounds; that they were lazy, uneducated and inclined to crime; that they wouldn’t learn English; that they didn’t share American values and weren’t interested in becoming loyal citizens.

The Know-Nothings considered Catholics to be foreign agents of the Pope. Nowadays their ideas might sound paranoid and imbalanced. But at the time the Washington Monument was being built, the Know-Nothings were a powerful political force. They held six governors’ seats and 75 seats in Congress. Their candidate for President, former President Millard Fillmore, would win almost one-quarter of the popular vote in 1856.

The Know-Nothings exploited anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic fears. They convinced people that once the Pope’s stone was fitted into the Washington Monument, it would be the signal for the Pope and his allies in lower Europe to invade and take over America. That was the context when, on March 6, 1854, just before dawn, a group of Know-Nothings came and stole the stone Pope Pius had sent.

Historians have never been able to determine what happened to it. Some believe it was smashed to pieces. Others think it was dumped into the nearby Potomac River. Whatever happened, the affair threw the monument project into chaos. It would be another thirty years before construction would resume. By that time the builders were forced to use marble from a different quarry. And that is why we see the change of colors today.

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It is fitting that this central symbol in our nation’s capitol bears a visible scar of America’s long and continuing national struggle with questions of race, religion and immigration.

The Washington Monument should remind us that while America has always been generous and welcoming of immigrants, we have also been a nation that at times throughout its history has been bitterly divided along racial, ethnic and even religious lines. The monument should remind us that America has also been a nation where blacks were lynched, Japanese-Americans were jailed in collective punishment, and where laws and policy have supported slavery, racial segregation, eugenic experimentation on the “unfit,” and the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of race and country of origin.

These are inconvenient, unflattering memories. But as we debate immigration today, we need to remember that our nation has always been troubled and conflicted on questions of race and immigration, and often religion.

In his last book, Where Do We Go From Here (1968), Reverend Martin Luther King said: “Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves — a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy.”

What Reverend King says is true as a matter of historical fact. The story of American immigration usually doesn’t include the millions who were violently “emigrated” to this country against their will — the men, women and children forced to come to this country in chains from Africa and elsewhere. But it should. Because the question of race in America runs deeper than black and white and deeper than our nation’s “original sin” of slavery.

Race has always been central to American immigration policy and our attitudes about immigrants. This is still true. Immigration is tied to the larger questions of “what is an American” — to our idea of what this country is meant to be and what it means to belong to this country. Sadly, the answers that many Americans give to those questions reflect a deep-seated racial bias.

I don’t believe America’s dark chapters of prejudice reflect who we really are as a people or as a nation. But we need to confront these dark chapters to remind us of who we are prone to become if we are not careful.

The common thread of prejudice we find throughout American history is the desire to define “who is an American” along narrow racial, ethnic and religious grounds. Abraham Lincoln warned of this disturbing pattern in our civic life in a pessimistic letter he wrote in August 1855, about a year after the Washington Monument incident.

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.”

Lincoln points us to the basic irony of American history, as Reverend King would a century later. The irony is the persistent conflict between our founding principles and our political actions and attitudes. The conflict between the ideals of America and the reality.

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America remains unique among the family of nations. Other nations have been established on the basis of a common territory or a common race, ethnicity or religion — on the ties of land or kinship or faith. America is built instead on the foundation of an ideal, a vision, a dream.

G. K. Chesterton said famously, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.”

It has always interested me that outsiders have written some of the most penetrating commentaries on America. The greatest, of course, is Democracy in America (1840), written by a French Catholic, Alexis de Tocqueville. But in some ways, I find Chesterton’s What I Saw in America (1922) more insightful and even prophetic about our current realities.

Writing as a British Catholic, Chesterton found America’s “creed” expressed “with dogmatic and even theological lucidity” in the first lines of our Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …

The American creed, as Chesterton and many others have recognized, is rooted in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and the culture and thought-world created by those traditions. Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran martyred at the hands of the Nazis, taught for a time in New York City in the 1930s. In his Ethics, he later wrote about the Christian spirit he found in America’s national charter.

American democracy is not founded upon the emancipated man but quite the contrary, upon the Kingdom of God and the limitation of earthly powers by the sovereignty of God. … The federal Constitution was written by men who were conscious of original sin and of the wickedness of the human heart. Earthly wielders of power, and also the people, are directed into their proper bounds, in due consideration of man’s innate longing for power and of the fact that Power pertains only to God.

The men who wrote America’s Declaration of Independence and federal Constitution were not all orthodox Christians. They were men of the Enlightenment who were proud to rely more on reason than on faith. Many of them were, in fact, Deists. Nonetheless, they gave us a political philosophy and a system of law and government that reflects the Jewish and Christian understanding of God, nature and the human person. As the French philosopher Jacques Maritain observed in his Reflections on America (1957):

Far beyond the influences received either from Locke or the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the American Constitution … is deep-rooted in the age-old heritage of Christian thought and civilization. … The founding fathers were neither metaphysicians nor theologians, but their philosophy of life and their political philosophy, their notion of natural law and of human rights, were permeated with concepts worked out by Christian reason and backed up by an unshakeable religious feeling.

The American creed reflects both the Christian humanism of America’s political founders and the redemptive motives that impelled the first missionaries more than a century before our founding documents were written.

We need to remember that America’s founding documents do more than set forth principles and procedures to give order to our common life together. Like all creeds, our founding documents define the identity of those who “believe” in them. These documents reflect a set of assumptions about human life — about who we are, about our destiny and about how we should live our lives. This understanding is the heart of what we might call the American spirit. This understanding is the answer the question, “What is an American?”

If we want to know what it means to be an American — and we must if we are going to meet the challenge of immigration in our day — then we need to reflect on the essentially religious vision that America’s founders intended for this country. We need to know the articles of the American creed.

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The fact is that our democracy and national identity are built on the pillars of four essentially religious assumptions. The first assumption is the sovereignty of God, who is the Lord of nations, peoples and history. In the language of the Declaration of Independence, the American system is founded on a belief that the world is governed by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” who is the “Supreme Judge of the World.”

The second religious assumption that underlies America’s national identity and institutions is the belief all men and women have a divine beginning and a transcendent destiny. They are “created” by God and for God’s purposes. The third assumption follows from the second: the God who created us also “endows” us with rights and freedoms so that we can fulfill his purposes for our lives.

In the founders’ religious vision, human rights and freedoms are universal — they do not depend on where one is born or what racial or ethnic group one is born into. These rights and freedoms are also “unalienable.” In those stirring words from President Kennedy’s inaugural address, “The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” It follows that what comes from God’s hands can never be denied or taken away by any government of men.

The fourth and final religious assumption that underlies American democracy is the belief that government exists to secure justice, which is defined as the promotion and protection of these God-given “unalienable” rights. In fact, for America’s founders, government has no other purpose than to secure these rights — most especially the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

It is seldom talked about today or even in our history books, but some of America’s founders believed strongly that the essential liberties given by God include the natural right to immigration. In a pamphlet he wrote in 1774, Thomas Jefferson said that our natural human freedom demands that we have

a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness.

It should be added that in practice Jefferson and his fellow founders struggled between this universalist vision of immigration and their own racial bias toward the superiority of white anglo-Saxons. But they left us a Declaration of Independence that forever calls America to “the naturalization of foreigners” and “to encourage their migrations.”

America’s founders also believed that freedom of conscience and the right to religious liberty were endowed by God and must be promoted and protected by our government. They went further than that — they held that democracy depends on having a moral and virtuous population. And they knew the best guarantee for that is a civil society in which individuals and religious institutions were free to live, act, and vote according to their values and principles.

As John Adams put it famously in a message to the Massachusetts militia in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

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The American creed reflects the amazing universalism of the Christian Gospel and the later prophets of Israel. This creed has helped make our country home to a flourishing diversity of cultures, religions and ways of life. As a result, we have always been a nation of nationalities. E pluribus unum. One people made from peoples of many nations, races, and creeds.

For sure, there were moral blind spots in the founders’ vision of how this creed should be interpreted; the Constitution they drafted denies full rights to slaves and women. And as commentators from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King have observed, throughout our history we have faced the persistent challenge of living up to our ideals.

This is the challenge we now face in our immigration debate. This challenge requires that we examine our conscience about our commitment to the American creed. It also requires that we take a hard look at our attitudes about race and our assumptions about what it means to be an American. Because as we see throughout our history, in times of fear and uncertainty, we have often been tempted to abandon our commitment to liberty and justice for all in favor of an insular, racial definition of who can be a true American.

This temptation has contributed to those moments in our history that we are the least proud of — slavery and segregation; our treatment of Native Americans; the periodic outbreaks of nativism, anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the rise of white supremacist ideology and groups like the Ku Klux Klan; the eugenics experiments of the 1920s; the misadventures caused by the ideology of “manifest destiny” — the sense that God is on our side as his chosen people and “redeemer nation.”

These dark moments in our history reflect a basic tension in our national soul. Do we really believe that America is one nation under God, made up from every other people? Or is America instead a nation that is essentially white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that permits the presence of peoples of other races, colors and religions?

This tension has been reflected in our immigration policy from the beginning. America’s first naturalization law, passed in 1790, limited citizenship to immigrants who were “free white persons.” Even from the start, civic leaders assumed America’s “melting pot” was meant for whites Europeans only. Over the years, many of our ideas about who is a true American have unfortunately been shaped by a “founding” belief that the white race is superior to all others.

In the late nineteenth century, paranoia about a “Yellow Peril” — that “Orientals” were overrunning the country — led Congress to pass a series of laws that banned Asians from emigrating or becoming citizens. In 1924, Congress established a quota system to block Japanese, Chinese and Filipino immigration. At the same time, Congress blocked Jewish immigration from Poland and Russia and immigration from India and the Middle East. This racial quota system remained in place until the comprehensive immigration reform legislation of 1965.

The motive behind these policies was that “America must be kept American.” That’s how President Calvin Coolidge explained it in 1923. But the idea of America reflected in these policies was never worthy of America’s founders — because it was based on an idea of America that was not true to the creed they gave us.

We face a similar dilemma today. Fears about America’s future have given rise to a new nativism. The arguments of today’s nativists aren’t much different than those of nativists in years gone by. Their idea is that “real” Americans descend from white Europeans and that our culture is based on the individualism, work ethic and rule of law that we inherited from our Anglo-Protestant forebears.

The intellectual and political justification for the new nativism was set out a few years ago in Who Are We? an influential book by the now late Samuel Huntington of Harvard. The book is the product of more than a decade of speeches and articles in which Huntington issued a kind of increasingly anxious call to arms — to defend America against what he described as a literal invasion of immigrants, especially Mexicans. In his words:

Mexican immigration is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity and potentially to our future as a country.

Demographically, socially and culturally, the Reconquista (reconquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway.

In the face of this demographic threat, Huntington proposed his own version of what he called the “American Creed.” For him, the founders’ creed was not a commitment to an essentially religious vision of humanity and government. Instead, America’s creed is a set of propositions that emerge from an exclusively European cultural background.

The Creed … was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Key elements of that culture include: the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a “city on the hill.”

Huntington insisted he was not claiming that America is an Anglo-Protestant country. But it sure sounded like he was. He argued that Mexicans were a threat to our American identity and way of life precisely because there are “profound differences” between their culture and America’s Anglo-Protestant culture. According to Huntington, Mexican traditions and values are rooted in a “culture of Catholicism” — a culture that he said can can never be reconciled with the American creed.

It is astounding how boldly Huntington presented a catalog of anti-Catholic and anti-Mexican stereotypes. He was careful to make sure that he was always quoting someone else, usually a Latino, to make his case. But his intent was plain — to “prove” that Mexicans’ values keep them poor, uneducated, unable to learn English and unfit to be welcomed in America.

Mexicans, he argued, suffer from the “mañana syndrome” — they don’t care about the quality of the work they do or getting it done on time. Their attitude is “Who cares? That is good enough,” he said. Huntington quoted for evidence one Latino who claimed he didn’t know anyone in his Mexican neighborhood who believed in “education and hard work.”

Huntington quoted another who said that Mexicans will never succeed in America because they have a “mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance and ambition; low priority for education; acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven.”

Those of us who are Mexican might respond to this kind of intellectual bigotry by pointing to the proud legacy of Mexican and Latin American literature, art and architecture, and to the great achievements of Spanish theology and spirituality. Or we could talk about the Mexicans we know who are the tops in their fields in business, government, medicine and culture.

We could also point out that Huntington’s anti-Mexican stereotypes have been all been deployed before — by the Know-Nothings and other nativist groups — to describe earlier generations of immigrants. Whether it’s Mexicans or Irish, Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Chinese, Jews or Poles, it’s always the same set of libels — they are inferior people, they don’t work hard; they aren’t smart enough; they won’t learn our language; they’re loyal to their own country and they resent our laws and traditions.

I would never deny that Mexican and Hispanic culture are different. The Hispanic sense of law and government is shaped by a continental European perspective — which is definitely different from the Anglo-Saxon ideas of America’s founders. There is also a different “sense of life” that comes from Hispanic culture.

But Huntington would have us see these cultural differences as evidence of cultural deficiency and inferiority. In this, he makes the mistake we have seen too often in American history — the mistake of assuming European white racial superiority. Sad to say, in our immigration debates today, we often hear ideas like Huntington’s being repeated on cable television, talk radio and Internet blogs, and even by some of our political leaders.

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Huntington is right that English Protestants gave us our basic institutions and assumptions about government, work and the common law. But like the nativists before him, he misses the genius of America. The laws, culture and traditions that our Anglo-Protestant founders gave us aren’t meant to exclude and divide. They are meant to include and unite. Huntington misses this because he forgets that underlying our institutions and traditions is the true American creed — based on God’s sovereignty and the equality of the human person.

That is what Chesterton saw in America. That’s what he described as “the great American experiment, the experiment of a democracy of diverse races.” For Chesterton, what makes America unique — even revolutionary — is our expansive and inclusive ideal of citizenship: “America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship.”

What Chesterton calls our “dogma” of citizenship is based on the founders’ belief in “the divine origin of man” and the “fact that God created all men equal.”The nativist impulse is to deny this dogma. The nativist presumes that those who came to this country earlier are somehow superior or “more equal” than those who came after and those who are still coming. Citizenship, for them, is not open to all men and women. It is reserved for those who fit certain economic and racial categories.

But nativism is a heresy, a perversion of the American creed. Of course, only those descended from the tribes that greeted the first missionaries have any claim to being called “natives.” We are all children of immigrants. All are worthy to be welcomed as our fellow citizens.

This is not who we are as Americans. We are not nativists and we are not racists and we are not xenophobes. But we must acknowlege that there have been times in our history when we have allowed our fears to drag us down and cause us to forget our creed and our national identity. We cannot let this become one of those times. Our task today is to confront our fears and resist the temptations to narrow the horizons of who can be an American.

So we need to tell a new story about ourselves and about America — a new story that includes the mission to the New World, the story of the “greater America.” The story of how this country was formed from the blood and sacrifice and faith of many peoples.

We also need to make a new commitment to the American creed, as it was taught by the first missionaries and the founding fathers alike. We need to have the courage to honor and carry on their vision. We need to believe what they believed — that we are all children of the same God and that God does not make some of his children from inferior, less worthy stock.