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What Is an American?
The chaotic confrontation in Dearborn, Michigan, on Tuesday—when a demonstrator attempted to burn a Quran and Muslim counter-protesters surged—was more than a brief flash of drama. Along with other recent controversies in Arab-majority Dearborn, such as when the Muslim mayor told a Christian minister he “was not welcome here” and was an “Islamophobe” for objecting to renaming a local street after a Hezbollah-supporting journalist, this latest cultural skirmish yet again underscores longstanding concerns about America’s immigration regime—and, above all, the nature of American identity itself.
What, exactly, is an American? It’s a question that was increasingly on my friend Charlie Kirk’s mind in what tragically proved to be his final months. And in light of the Dearborn fracas and the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of America’s most iconic metropolis, it’s a question that has never been more pressing.
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.
It was true at the time of founding, and it’s still true today. Take it from me: I’m an observant Jew who cherishes the fact that America has always been exceptional not in spite of but in large part due to that culturally dominant Hebrew Bible/Old Testament-heavy Protestant inheritance.
The United States was never a “blank slate” society. Like any nation, it has a distinct inheritance, and it has always relied on a broad cultural consensus: Someone can bring their own private customs and traditions to America, but they are expected to assimilate into the public framework that has always made the country coherent—“out of many, one.” And that public framework is not merely a technical or legalistic one but a “thicker” one where acceptance of such notions as the proverbial “Protestant work ethic” constitute a core part of American citizenship.
The challenge in Dearborn—and elsewhere—is that too many distinct cultural communities now reject this framework. It wasn’t always this way. My own ancestors, Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, readily understood that they had to learn the English language and acculturate themselves to the nation’s longstanding Protestant-informed public ways of life. Laws alone cannot create broad solidarity; only culture can do so.
We should also not be hesitant to say that American Muslim assimilation, specifically, is not going well at this time. A poll of American Muslims taken less than three weeks after the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel found that 57.5% of American Muslims believed the atrocities were at least “somewhat justified.” Plenty of other shocking examples abound—including the aforementioned troubling antics of Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud. The truth is that values such as support for Hamas or Hezbollah are simply incompatible with Americanism—period.
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— ets that trend fester at its own grave peril.
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