This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
America, the Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch said in early May, is a “creedal nation”. It is not “founded on a religion”, or “based on a common culture, even, or heritage”. Gorsuch, a conservative nominated in 2017 by Donald Trump, argued that America is founded on three ideas: “That all of us are equal; that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not government and that we have the right to govern ourselves”.
This is the political creed of the American republic. It is taught in high school civics classes and practised in everyday life. It is, as G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1921, propounded with “dogmatic and even theological lucidity” in the Declaration of Independence.
It was confirmed just over a century later by a YouGov poll in July 2025 that asked: “What makes an adult American?” The top three answers were obeying American laws (90 per cent), supporting the Constitution (86 per cent) and believing in the principles of the Declaration of Independence (85 per cent).
These are the self-evident truths of life in 21st century America. But they are not what anthropologists would call a “thick” description. Gorsuch described legal foundations and the thin mesh of common values that stabilise a multiracial and increasingly bilingual society. Though he is an originalist in legal philosophy, Gorsuch did not describe the roots of the American idea in the common culture and heritage of the Founders or the sources of their political ideas and religious aspirations.
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Look further down the YouGov poll, and we see a different definition of what makes an American. Growing up outside the United States is a deal-breaker for 61 per cent; there go Bruce Willis, Barack Obama and Kobe Bryant, who all grew up abroad. For 43 per cent, having American parents is essential; goodbye to Presidents Andrew Jackson (both parents born in Ireland), Donald Trump (Scottish-born mother) and Barack Obama again (Kenyan father), as well as the fifth of current Americans with at least one foreign-born parent.
More than a third (37 per cent) require “having many generations of American ancestors”. There are no recent figures on how many of their fellow Americans this would exclude from full membership. But a 2001 Gallup poll found that 56 per cent of Americans were at least the third generation to be born in the country. Given the high rate of immigration since then, that figure is likely to have fallen. This would mean that more than a third of Americans do not consider at least half of Americans to be real Americans. A third (34 per cent) believe an American should be Christian. For nearly one in five (18 per cent), being American means “being white”.
The rebels’ creed was Protestant
These respondents do not see America as merely a “propositional nation”. They subscribe to both the thick and thin definitions of Americanness. They revere the civic constitution, but they also see themselves as a people bound by continuities of kinship and religion.
These are the other kind of originalists. Their backlash to decades of mass immigration from non-European countries, the reorganisation of government by identity politics and the marginalisation of Christianity in public life is redefining American politics. In the emergent demography of multiracial America, some of them now self-identify as “Christian nationalists” or Heritage Americans. It is as though they see themselves as akin to the rare breeds of apples that early settlers brought from the British Isles, which, though they no longer grow in the old country, still grow in New England. But New World identity differs from Old World identity like apples and pears.
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Whites were always a minority in Spain’s American empire. At the time of the American Revolution, about a fifth of the population of Mexico was white. In Britain’s American colonies, however, whites comprised nearly 80 per cent of the population by 1776. Every one of the 56 delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776 was born a white British subject; eight of them had been born in the British Isles.
The ideas that justified the American tax revolt came from their “common culture and heritage”: British traditions of liberty, from “Anglo-Saxon” origins to the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution — Whiggery with a pinch of John Locke. Thomas Jefferson laid it out in his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), a last warning that reads like an early draft of the Declaration of 1776.
“[O]ur ancestors, before their emigration to America, were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe,” Jefferson reminded George III. When they emigrated, they “carried with them not just the laws but the rights that they possessed before they emigrated”. They took possession of America as their “Saxon ancestors” had taken possession of Britain and retained the same rights as his subjects in “that part of his empire called Great Britain”. By dissolving the Americans’ assembly, the King had violated rights bestowed under “the British constitution, at the glorious revolution, on its free and antient principles”.
There were no atheists in the foxholes of the American Revolution. The rebels came from a “creedal nation” whose creed was Protestant. They were “covenantal nationalists” in conscious imitation of the ancient Jews. All but one of the 56 signatories of the Declaration were Protestant Christians.
The deist vocabulary of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin was a Protestant-coded precursor of comparative religion. The “Laws of Nature” that Jefferson invoked in the Declaration came from “Nature’s God”, the rationally inferred “Creator” who would later license American Unitarianism. The only Catholic signatory was a French-educated planter named Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland. He was perhaps the richest man in the colonies but was barred from serving in Maryland’s colonial government due to laws designed to “prevent the growth of Popery”.
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The formal description of America as Judeo-Christian is not, as the online right claims, a fiction promoted to draw America into the Second World War. It was an accurate description of America’s Protestant origins and the founding public culture that defined America until the 1960s and in many ways still does. In America, the Protestantism of the Founders was, as Tocqueville saw, the first “political institution” of democracy precisely because it secularised into “civic religion”. There was no parallel to this in the Old World. From the start, race and religion worked differently in the New World.
European nations defined membership by ethnicity and religion, but, in the New World, race was the key marker of enfranchisement. The Congress of 1789 did not establish Protestant religion or privilege British extraction. But it did restrict eligibility for citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” who had lived in the United States for two years.
As New World societies had higher immigration rates than Old World ones, racial boundaries shifted to reflect a population’s composition. In the New World way, America’s “Anglo-Saxon” civic religion absorbed the late-19th-century influx of Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe as political whites, with consequent high levels of intermarriage.
The opening of non-European immigration after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 and the softening of the Southern border reduced whites to 72.4 per cent of the population in the 2010 census and 61.6 per cent in the 2020 census. But whiteness is also undergoing a further New World redefinition. About a fifth of those self-identifying with the semi-fictional administrative category “Hispanic or Latino” also self-identify as whites.
Intermarriage between all groups is rising. As the second Trump administration tightens the borders, the challenge is to reconcile demographic facts, including the existence of “thick” American identity, with a revived civic religion. The answer is not in racial sorting, but in reviving “Americanisation” through the education system.
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“You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea,” J.D. Vance said when he accepted the vice presidential nomination at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
Vance specified that he seeks to reconcile the organic and contractual aspects of American identity. A second Trump administration would, he said, “put the citizens of America first, whatever the colour of their skin”.
His wife Usha is the daughter of Hindu immigrants and a product of post-1965 immigration. Their children are amongst the third of under-eighteens who are multiracial. Born from the “thick” American heritage of the Scots-Irish Protestants of Appalachia, he is a convert to Catholicism. Vance is the avatar of Heritage America, but he lives in Gorsuch’s America and is already the next iteration of its civic culture.
