Native Son: Samuel Huntington Defends the Homeland

It is, first of all, incorrect to claim that American identity was shaped by dissenting Anglo-Protestantism. Two of the churches prominent at the United States' founding were established rather than dissenting: the Church of England became the established church of Virginia under the Episcopal name, and Presbyterianism had been established in Scotland. To be sure, the Puritans had been a dissenting sect in England, but they became an established church in Massachusetts. New York and New Jersey, meanwhile, were populated largely by Dutch settlers; Catholics were a powerful force in Maryland; Rhode Island was founded by Baptists (many of whom had British roots but followed a sect with German origins); and Germans and British Quakers were prominent in Pennsylvania.

To claim that there exists a common "Anglo-Protestant culture" also ignores the fact that Protestants have disagreed vehemently with each other over what that culture is. Dissenting Protestants, not all that prominent at the American founding, shaped the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s. In doing so, however, they had to rebel against the creedal orthodoxies of the more established Calvinist churches. They rejected the idea that salvation was strictly in the hands of an arbitrary and capricious God -- violating, as it does, every principle of American democratic individualism -- in favor of an evangelical sympathy for Arminianism, which held that individuals could play a role in their own salvation. There really is no such thing as the Protestant religion; there are many Protestant sects whose ideas on everything from scriptural authority to the role of the liturgy are in conflict. If religion shapes identity, the United States has had many identities because it has had so many religions. Huntington knows all of these things; his command of American religious history is impressive. He just never incorporates them into his argument.

It is true that non-Protestant immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to accept many aspects of Protestant worship: all American religions, even Catholicism and Judaism, eventually become congregational ones. But Huntington fails to appreciate the degree to which immigrants shaped American culture even as they assimilated. Catholicism was already the largest Christian denomination in the United States by the second half of the nineteenth century, and its distinctive ethos changed the way Americans celebrate Easter, attend school, play sports, and conduct foreign policy. American Jews adapted their faith to American culture, but the paradigmatic embodiment of American culture, the motion picture, was from its early days shaped by a distinctly Jewish sensibility.

Huntington's contention that recent immigrants are more hostile to the American tradition of assimilation than those who came before them is similarly flawed. He reviews evidence that Mexicans, the largest immigrant group, are not as well educated as others, are less likely to apply for citizenship, and do not intermarry as frequently. Yet contrary to popular opinion, Mexican-Americans acquire English in ways similar to previous immigrants and, according to at least one important measure of assimilation -- conversion to evangelical Protestantism -- are likely ahead of all other immigrant groups except Koreans. Huntington's claims that Mexican immigration will result in "the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s" and that immigrants may try to reconnect Southwestern states to Mexico are not only incendiary, they have little basis in fact.

PATRIOT GAMES

Only one of Huntington's points withstands the test of empirical reality: ordinary Americans are more likely to be patriotic and nationalistic than are liberal elites. This finding, however, undermines Huntington's argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture.

Huntington believes, on the one hand, that there are too many recent immigrants and, on the other hand, that ordinary Americans are more patriotic than elites. Both cannot be true: with such a large number of immigrants in the general population, the patriotic mass of ordinary Americans must surely include many immigrants.

Huntington's own data affirm this. Eighty-one percent of non-Hispanic whites say that they are willing to fight for their country, whereas the figure among immigrants is 75 percent -- not all that different. (Another poll he reviews actually shows that more Hispanic parents than white parents agreed with the statement "The United States is a better country than most other countries in the world.") Of the 525 U.S. fatalities in Iraq as of early February 2004, four were named Perez (Hector, Joel, Jose, and Wilfredo). By my rough count, 64 of the 525 possessed Hispanic surnames. This is 12 percent of the total, exactly equal to the percentage of the U.S. population that is Hispanic. One of them, Jose Gutierrez, an orphan, came to the United States at the age of 14 by train, foot, and bus and was granted posthumous citizenship by the U.S. government. Like countless immigrants before him, he assimilated by dying in defense of the society he worked so hard to reach. Indeed, recent immigrants to the United States are more patriotic toward their new home than long-settled Britons toward the United Kingdom, French toward France, or Germans toward Germany. Other countries would be delighted to have immigrants with such assimilationist sympathies.