America is Not a Creedal Nation

America is based on English culture and Christian civilization - a heritage that came before our civic creed and upon which our ideals rest...

If we were really a creedal nation, and in order to be fully American you had to believe and live by a certain civic creed derived from the Declaration and the Constitution, enshrining those three ideals Gorsuch mentions, then millions of our fellow citizens today would not be considered true Americans - to say nothing of the millions of recent immigrants who have never even heard of the ideals supposedly at the heart of our creed.

If we’re a creedal nation, such people cannot be our countrymen. If we were serious about our creed, we would denaturalize and deport them. We would expel heretics and unbelievers... That’s what creedal nations do...

But what of Gorsuch’s claim that we have always been a creedal nation? That our Founding Fathers in the late eighteenth century understood themselves to be creating a nation based on abstract ideals rather than a common culture or civilizational patrimony?... Before the 1950s, almost nothing in our history suggests that Americans thought of their country as a "creedal nation," unmoored from a common culture and heritage, as Gorsuch insists...

Indeed, it was the cultural homogeneity of the Founding generation that allowed for a scheme of government based on individual rights, consent, and common law.

John Jay said this explicitly in a famous passage from Federalist No. 2, that "Providence has been pleased to give us 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, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence."...

They were in short, one united people - united not by assent to abstract Enlightenment ideals, which were assumed, but by a common culture and heritage in both America and England...

As one commentator on X put it: "Gorsuch misses the harder point: America's constitutional creed was not designed to float above culture. It was built by an individualist people and assumed citizens capable of living under common, impersonal rules."...

Culture and religion are the real basis of the American nation, both of which came directly from England and found a unique expression in the American colonies. Without that heritage and history, without our civilizational patrimony, we would not be America. The creed, if that’s what you want to call it, is necessary but not sufficient to establish a nation like ours. On some deep level, elites like Gorsuch know this, but for whatever reason they're afraid to say it, so they retreat into these nonsense arguments about a "creedal nation.”

- The 1847 Constitution of Liberia was explicitly modeled on the US Constitution of 1787 (including the Bill of Rights)

- Both begin with "We the People" establishing a republican government to secure liberty, justice, peace, and welfare.

- Declaration of Rights (Article I in Liberia): Very close to the US Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence principles: Natural rights (life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness).

- Separation of Powers: Both divide government into three branches (legislative, executive, judicial) with checks and balances. No person from one branch exercises powers of another

- Legislative Branch (Article II in Liberia): Bicameral legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) with similar powers: making laws, impeachment (House), trying impeachments (Senate), veto override by two- thirds, revenue bills originating in the House, etc. Bills become law via presidential signature or override.

- Executive Branch (Article III): President as head, elected by popular vote , commander- in- chief, with veto power.

- Judicial Branch (Article IV): Supreme Court and inferior courts, with judges serving during good behavior (life tenure, removable by impeachment). Implied or explicit judicial review.

- Freedom of religion (with no established sect, no religious tests).

- Assembly, petition, speech/press, jury trials, due process, no double jeopardy, grand jury, confrontation of witnesses, no self- incrimination, habeas corpus, no excessive bail/fines, no unreasonable searches/seizures, just compensation for takings, right to bear arms, etc.

Yet Liberia did not turn out like America. Ideal constitutions flow organically from the experiences of particular peoples and can't simply be randomly engrafted almost whole onto different peoples. Successful nations must build constitutions rooted in their own experience, history, and values. Liberia isn't the only nation to closely Mimic America's constitution or declaration - but none of those nations have turned out at all like America.

in 1890, the approximate year in which America became the world's largest economy, between 85% - 95% of the American political community (i.e. those with voting rights) was still of Northern and Northwestern European origin.

Virtually the entire government for the first 300 years of our history since Jamestown had been comprised of Northern European Protestants.

Yes, the creeds that they enshrined in the Declaration and Constitution were important and necessary, but they were not sufficient for America to become the world's greatest country.

As I said in an early post, I am a raging moderate on this question - people from different origins could be and were successfully adopted into the American political community (virtually all of my ancestors were in America before 1890, but none of them were Northern Europeans.)

But in the 20th century and (particularly) the 21st centuries, the left has been dedicated to the reckless and intellectually unsupportable proposition that it simply does not matter the pace or scale at which we try to bring in immigrants, nor how far their culture and values of their countries of origin are from American culture and values. We can just magically speak of "creeds" and this will somehow solve the very real and very thorny problems of assimilation and integration of foreigners into the American people.

Justice Gorsuch speaks of "creeds" without ever being willing to really test or have accountability for whether those coming en masse from our "new immigration" countries are likely to embrace those creeds - or even agree on what they are. He and the rest of America's elites have conducted a vast and uncontrolled experiment on the American people, with total disregard for the consequences.

Expect the feeble intellectual abstractions of Gorsuch and his "conservative" colleagues on the Court to carry the day for the birthright citizenship case.

We should greet their historically unmoored "reasoning" with the full mockery and contempt that it deserves.