By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, July 04, 2026
Happy 250, minus a day. Unless you’re reading this on
Saturday, in which case: Happy 250!
When I say “Happy 250,” “Happy Fourth of July,” or “Happy
Independence Day,” it doesn’t matter whether you just got your green card or if
you’re a family that came over and farmed Massachusetts soil two-and-a-half
centuries ago. It’s the same holiday, and you have the same ownership of it. Or
at least the same right to claim ownership of it.
There are lots of people who like to talk about America
as if “ownership” of America builds up in the bloodlines of patriots over time.
If you have ancestors who came over on a sailboat in the 18th century,
they view you as more American than if your parents came here in a lifeboat
from Vietnam in the 1970s. Some even assign letter grades based on how far back your American family tree
goes. If your family came through Ellis Island a century ago, you’ll never be
more than a Grade C American.
We should be clear: This is just a form of identity
politics. It literally grades individuals on a metric they have zero control
over. It’s no different than assigning grades based on skin color, sex, or
height. You have as much control over who your grandparents were as you do over
how tall you are. It’s fine to be proud of your grandparents or grateful that
you’re tall, but don’t pretend it’s a personal accomplishment.
I have no problem with people being proud of their family
histories; in fact, I applaud it when a family history is something to be proud
of. But grading the quality of Americans by their ancestry is disgusting to me.
It’s also stupid.
But I should also say this metric of patriotism flatly
contradicts my personal experience. I know people with ancestors going back to
Colonial America (as I do on my mother’s side), and I’ve known people who have no American
ancestors at all because they’re immigrants. All along that spectrum, from
“heritage Americans” to just-off-the-boat Americans and everyone in between, I
don’t think I’ve seen any meaningful correlation with someone’s patriotism.
This is not to say that all first- or second-generation
immigrant families are super patriotic and all “heritage Americans” aren’t.
Some recent arrivals are remarkably ungrateful to be here (indeed, some market
their ingratitude to get elected to public office). And some old families pass
their love of country from one generation to the next like they’re making
additions to an ever-improving family project. I’m just saying that in my
experience, you can’t predict who is patriotic based on how long their family
has been here. Love of country is distributed according to different criteria than the number
of branches on your American family tree.
Creed, culture, and Christianity.
One of the oldest debates on the right is whether America
is a nation or an idea. Much like the nature-vs.-nurture debate, when serious
people discuss it in good faith, the consensus is virtually always “both.” Here’s my friend Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of National
Review, on the most recent edition of The Editors podcast:
I think we’re
obviously both a creed and a culture. We’re a culture that includes a creed.
And the creed is to a significant extent, an extrusion from that culture. It’s
a cultural achievement. The creed is important because it serves the people,
the American people. They’re the point of it. They’re what instantiates its
value. So I just think that this creed versus culture argument just ends up
being a false dichotomy and should be basically abandoned.
When unserious people, or serious demagogues, debate
this, they almost always straw-man their opponents. J.D. Vance rejects “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation.”
Because according to that logic, he says, “billions” of people can become
Americans if they “agree with the principles of the Declaration of
Independence.” Precious few people are making that argument. But it sounds
brave to stand up to it all the same.
Some people I admire do say “America is an idea.” But
I’ve never heard any of them follow up such statements with “and therefore
let’s open the borders to everyone who agrees with it.”
But I don’t want to hash out the creed vs. culture debate
again. Instead, I want to push back against my own position, in part by
extruding from Ramesh’s remarks about the creed being an extrusion of the
culture.
Normally when you hear people—including me—argue “it’s
both,” we talk about it like the creed and culture arguments are two sides of
the same coin. But that analogy implies alternating states. The possible
results of a coin flip are binary: Either heads wins, or tails does. The coin
has both a creed and culture side, but it’s still zero-sum. As with the nature
vs. nurture argument, we say it’s “both,” but what we often mean is that some
things are 100 percent nature and some are 100 percent nurture. And sometimes
that’s true. Your eye color is 100 percent genetic. The language you speak is
100 percent nurture.
But the creed and the culture are marbled, blended, mixed.
Our culture is very creedal. Our creed is very much the product of a
culture, even though our creed has some vital universal principles within it.
Comparatively few Americans know who John Locke was, but the cultural stew they
live in has all sorts of Lockean bits and flavors.
I wrote a lot about all this in Suicide of the West. In
that book, I was largely trying to persuade progressives that the ideas and
ideals that define America, and liberal democratic capitalism more broadly, are
the best tools to accomplish what they claim to want. If you think the goals of
the state or politics should be to improve health, education, autonomy,
freedom, happiness, and prosperity, then the tribalisms of socialism and
identity politics won’t get you there.
Because I was trying to convince people to my left, I
tried to make arguments on their terms, starting with the book’s opening
sentence: “There is no God in this book.” I probably should have started, “God
doesn’t need to be in this book,” because he sneaked in at the end. But the
point of that line was to say that you can defend the moral superiority of our
system without appeals to divine authority.
I’m working on a new book, and it’s aimed in a different
direction. I don’t want to cannibalize any of that while I’m still working on
it. But there’s one realization that I think is worth discussing here and now.
One of the most radical things about Christianity was the
way it undermined notions of ethnicity and nationality. For a Viking, Celt,
Roman, or Gaul to become Christian meant largely—though obviously not entirely—
jettisoning your tribal notions of ethnicity and ancestry and adopting those of
another people. Matthew Rose writes in A World After Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the
Radical Right:
Christianity also
disrupts our relation to history, weakening the traditions and bonds of memory
that link us to ancestors. Christian faith is anti-traditional in one glaring
respect: it requires gentiles to adopt the sacred history and even the deity of
another community, connecting their deepest beliefs to the unique experiences
of a foreign people. Perhaps no aspect of Christian life is so spiritually
deracinating, so subtly subversive of human customs. In requiring this of
gentiles, Christianity revolutionized their experience of time, turning history
into a story defined by its overcoming.
This aspect of Christianity infuriated many radical
right-wing critics of liberalism. Many doctrinaire Nazis resented the way
Christianity replaced reverence for Teutonic ancestors with reverence for a
Mediterranean Jew.
In Galatians 3:26-29, Christians are told:
For in Christ
Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were
baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there
is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs
according to promise.
By becoming a Christian, your story becomes part of the
story of Abraham, Israel, and of course, Jesus. This was one of the most
transformative changes in all of history, and it was the foundation of what
became known as Western Civilization.”
The point I want to make is that the American founding
does something similar. When you become an American, the Founding Fathers
become in a real way your ancestors. The American story becomes your
national story.
Whatever you think of Justice Clarence Thomas, it is an
amazing thing that this descendant of slaves stolen from Africa is the most
zealous originalist on the Supreme Court, and in some ways the most influential
“descendant” of the Founding Fathers in American intellectual life. He is
certainly one of the most revered figures among those inclined to insist we are
a nation of culture, not creed. But for Thomas, the culture is his creed, and
the creed is his culture. Talking about where one leaves off and the other
begins is a fool’s errand.
Which brings me back to where I started. When a Christian
tells another Christian “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Easter,” it’s the same
thing as an American saying “Happy Fourth of July” to another American. That
Christian can be one in a long line of Christians going back to Jerusalem. Or
he can be a Christian who converted yesterday. Once you become an American, you
have the same patrimony, at least in the civic sense. Once you become a
Christian, you have the same patrimony in a theological sense. That is an
amazing thing, to me at least.
American culture is many things, but one of the things it
most obviously is, is liberal. Americans
don’t consult a text to demand their liberties and rights; they consult their
hearts and souls. To talk about removing the love of liberty, the belief in
equality before the law, or the sovereignty of the individual from the American
character, like it’s as easy as erasing some words on a piece of paper, is a
form of magical thinking common to intellectuals who like to fight with texts.
Most nationalists’ rhetoric about what is in a people’s
“blood” is either harmless poetry or ugly nonsense. But if a people can have
something in their blood, the American creed is in the blood of Americans. It
doesn’t always show itself as much as I would like, but it’s there—and it can
be called upon whether you’re a Grade A American or a Grade E American not long
off the boat.
And that is worth celebrating.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone.
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