Creedalism Needs Culture

A s an African American, I welcome the discussion about the efficacy of America’s creedal identity. Michael Brendan Dougherty’s recent piece (“Are Americans a People with a Creed, or a Creed-Made People?”) raises some pertinent issues for those who appear to question America’s creedalist notions and their role in the formation of an American identity.  

It’s simply not the case that most of those who question the efficacy of creedalism would prefer to have a blood-and-soil or ethnicity-based understanding of what constitutes an American. I’m adamantly opposed to such a preference. One of the major sub-plots driving the current discussion about creedalism is the recent resignation of Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George from the Heritage Foundation board of trustees. He stepped down in protest over Heritage’s refusal to retract a video released by its president in response to Tucker Carlson’s interview of antisemite Nick Fuentes and Kevin Roberts’s doubling-down in his defense of Carlson. In a statement released following his resignation, Professor George effectively captured the power and appeal of creedalism: 

My hope for Heritage is that it will be unbending and unflinching in its fidelity to its founding vision, upholding the moral principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the civic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. I pray that Heritage’s research and advocacy will be guided by the conviction that each and every member of the human family, irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion, or anything else, as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, is “created equal” and “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.” 

The anchor for the Heritage Foundation, and for our Nation, and for every patriotic American is that creed. It must always be that creed. If we hold fast to it even when expediency counsels compromising it, we cannot go wrong. If we abandon it, we sign the death certificate of republican government and ordered liberty.         

His comments about the American creed also highlight the creed’s abstract nature. If DEI taught us anything valuable during its heyday, it’s that the creedal ideals we associate with the legacies of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. — equality, constitutionalism, and the rule of law — around which we’ve historically rallied in times of crisis, such as the Civil War and the civil rights movement, have not been effective at curbing identity politics in American life. In fact, these creedal ideals have sometimes come into conflict with each other. The notion of equality has been used to challenge the meaning of other foundational American principles. Case in point: It took the Supreme Court nearly 166 years, from the Dred Scott decision in 1857 to the Students for Fair Admissions decision in 2023, to finally uphold the principle of equality. This delay in fully embracing equality has caused significant damage to constitutionalism and the rule of law, particularly in relation to race.  

However, creedalism is only one part of the American identity, albeit an indispensable part. The other part is cultural. These two aspects of the American identity are not mutually exclusive. Ultimately, I’m suggesting that there is a middle way between a race-based or ethnicity-based understanding of American identity and the feeble conception of a notional, creedal, or civic American identity.  

My suggestion, not quite fleshed out but food for thought nonetheless, is that creedalism should be coupled with specific cultural practices as a way of reinvigorating the abstract, notional ideas that Lincoln referred to collectively as the “new birth of freedom.” I think we, as Americans, have come to a point where those uniquely American principles that make up our creed need to be made tangible again. The American Civil War made those beliefs very tangible for a previous generation. Today, such reinforcement is needed, I’m afraid, because many Americans are alienated from longstanding American convictions. They no longer know what those convictions mean in practice. 

As I’ve mentioned, creedalism without a cultural component or specific practices is especially ineffective in addressing the atavism of identity politics. Our creedal notions can be made tangible through certain cultural practices that reinforce them. I offer up two proposals: first, making English the official language of the United States, and second, implementing some version of a national-service program nationwide. Each of these practices would be enacted at the federal level — but by Congress, not through executive orders.  

I previously pointed out at greater length here that neither of these practices are foreign to American soil. In 1780, John Adams proposed that English hold a more formal role in the United States by the creation of an academy to preserve and improve the language, but for various reasons, the proposal was rejected. Elevating the status of the English language on the federal level would testify to the power of English and the democratic culture it embodies. In this vein, my proposal reflects Adams’s intent. Prioritizing American English as a culturally valuable heritage would serve as a basis for an educational program that includes classic American speeches, works of fiction, and founding documents. Each of these works would be annotated to ensure accessibility to students in the primary and secondary grades. Colleges and universities would be incentivized to offer required courses in American English and American culture at the undergraduate level for all four years. This program would operate as a government-supported institution, similar to France’s Académie Française or to Italy’s Accademia della Crusca, though with a more expansive prescriptive cultural mandate. 

Likewise, implementing a national-service program would further solidify our creedal culture, making it more tangible. Such a program would be directed mainly toward young adults and would be modeled on the integrative procedures currently used by the armed services to instill a sense of esprit de corps and belonging among its enlistees. Aside from our all-volunteer military force, there are few places or institutions where young adults socialize with those who are of a different social class, a different race, or from a different region of America. When young adults do come into contact with one another, it is often on a college campus with other middle- and upper-middle-class students. A national-service program would, hopefully, motivate Americans to think more sympathetically about their fellow citizens when sorting themselves along the lines of class, race, region, or other sub-national identities. 

These provisional suggestions for reinvigorating American creedalism may be insufficient for the task at hand. No doubt, there are many other ideas that deserve consideration. However, one thing is clear: We must be reminded, in a very real way, that unless we create conditions that make more Americans feel rooted and experience a sense of belonging, our creedal values — such as equality, constitutionalism, and the rule of law — will merely mask darker forces that are steadily moving closer to the center of our politics.