Approaching the 250th year of American independence, I found myself contemplating what I thought it meant to be an American. I could not come up with an answer, and this troubled me. So, hoping to find one, I decided to put my question to the people. It seemed a fittingly American solution. Over the last two months, I have been asking what various people thought it meant to be an American, or what being an American meant to them (I found asking both was more conducive to a good conversation). This article is the result of that research.

More interesting than what I heard was what I experienced. My question prompted agitation and defensiveness. I know people don’t like being put on the spot, but I imagine their emotional state would be different if I were asking about their favorite color, the best restaurant in town, or what it means to be a Bengals fan. I have drawn two conclusions from this. First: it is a manifestation of frustration at being called upon and unable to give a good answer, analogous to the experience of the teacher asking a question when you didn’t do your reading. Second: it is the result of having been asked what might not seem to be, but actually is, an extremely politically charged and controversial question. And I think that’s the heart of the issue. If we are intellectually honest, we cannot clearly define what it means to be an American. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In part, this means that “Americanness,” or what it means to be an American, is up for grabs. We should be working to ensure it means something good.

Types of “Americans”

I have categorized my interlocutor’s responses into several broad categories, which are not entirely mutually exclusive.^[1] In no particular order, they are:

The Propositional American. This response views Americanness as marked by adherence to values, such as freedom, independence, industriousness, the principles of our Constitution, or longstanding American institutions (both political and civil). Respondents who gave a version of this answer were generally hopeful and positive regarding the future of the country. They recognized problems but were confident that our American values would see us through.

The Economic Zone Participant. This response saw Americanness as primarily defined by being a part of the American economy. They envisioned the country as a particular marketplace (one said a bazaar because he thought “marketplace” conveyed too much of a sense of order). The American is free to act in the marketplace, while the migrant (lawful or otherwise) or foreigner is subject to limitations. These answers were characterized by negativity and cynicism. No respondent viewed this as a positive sense of identity, and many viewed themselves as (more or less) exploited.

The Heritage American. This response expressed Americanness in ethnic and cultural terms, generally seeing Americans as British, or at least European, and Christian. They are generally skeptical of the ability to integrate foreigners as true “Americans.” That said, they accept Black American descendants of slaves as true Americans.^[2] People who expressed this view, while concerned about the direction of the country, were tranquil in their assessments and responses. If Americanness is in one’s blood, then it cannot be “lost,” and can only be destroyed through genocide.

Analyzing the Results

I feel confident to say that I am an American, but I do not think my questions got me closer to an answer.

I do know that didn’t care for the answer: “If you’re born here.” Although I rather liked: “If you grew up here.”

I also think that the Economic Zone Participants answer is incorrect, but it is very interesting and was very common. I assume that this outlook has something to do with materialism’s infection of our thinking. Or, perhaps these respondents are accurately seeing and appraising the lack of a current American identity in our deracinated globalist age as connected with oligarchic greed. There’s certainly something to that. However, I think American identity must exist. We may not love how it looks, but where there are people, there will be some identity. It is part of being human.

I have trouble with a pure version of the Propositional American view when both the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Vivek Ramaswamy can claim to be American based on having American values. And perhaps one or the other (or both?) don’t hold true American values? But that presents two new problems, as it moves the goalposts and doesn’t offer a source for true American values.

The Constitution seems like a good source, but it is frequently interpreted and reinterpreted by the Supreme Court. And while the Supreme Court does make decisions that are influenced by and proceed to influence American values, I don’t think anyone intelligent seriously views them as some sort of latter-day Sanhedrin. Further, America already existed when the Constitution was written, so it cannot be the source of Americanness.

I think that there is something to the view that “Americanness” is achieved by being a citizen of the United States, as all citizens share the same rights and responsibilities. But I don’t think this is a useful answer. It is a clean answer, but is also obviously insufficient. If Americanness is fully conferred by citizenship, then why would anyone be concerned about migration? The answer is simple: a slip of paper does not change who you are. St. Paul was a Jew, but also a Roman citizen. He held special Roman rights and privileges, but that didn’t make him Italian.

Perhaps what it means to be an American comes from history and tradition? That leads toward the Heritage American view. I think they are on to something with the Christian requirement. All Western Philosophy is descended from Christian thought, except for that of the Ancient Greeks, which was baptized and incorporated into Christianity. Even the “isms” that have gained prominence since the Enlightenment still see the world through a Christian lens—just without Christ. The American legal, economic, and governmental systems are thoroughly Western, and so in that way, America, at least structurally, is and remains a Christian nation, albeit a secular Christian nation at present.

But I have trouble with a pure version of the Heritage American view’s ethnic requirement as well. First, I think a serious answer to this question requires admitting the descendants of slaves as Americans, which does serious damage to the “Europeans only” theory from the start. I also think a “Europeans only” view glosses over substantial ethnic strife between Europeans. For example, Benjamin Franklin famously described Germans as “Palatine Boors” that should not be “suffered to swarm into our settlements,” he objected to their “herding together [and] establish[ing] their languages and manners to the exclusion of ours.” He asked, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?” And of course, there was much hostility to the Irish and Italians (among others), who are now accepted fully as Americans, even to the extent that they are today viewed as White oppressors alongside the descendants of the very people who oppressed their ancestors.

However, it is impossible to fully refute the core claims of the Heritage American view. The United States of America was founded by specific people at a specific moment in history. The colonies that declared independence had a specific ethnic and religious composition. The founders and the American population were overwhelmingly Protestant and overwhelmingly British (specifically, overwhelmingly English). The Declaration of Independence cites the “abolition of the free System of English Laws” and enlargement of Quebec (which involved concessions to French Catholics in the recently acquired territory) as one of the injustices justifying war with Britain. While one could point to the influence of Deism and Enlightenment thinking, Charles Carroll, Jefferson’s bizarre miracle-less “bible,” or George Washington’s warm letter to Jews of Rhode Island, those exceptions prove the rule. They do not change the fundamental character of the American founding as distinctly British English and Protestant. To argue otherwise is indefensible and intellectually dishonest.

That might be how America started, but not how it stayed. If we are serious about understanding what it means to be American, then we need to be placing Americanness in the full context of history and comparing it with other peoples. The founding cannot be the end of the discussion.

The history of the German peoples offers an analogous, instructive example of a diverse but still common culture.

There is Germany, and then there are the German peoples. It was not until 1871 that Protestant Prussians “unified” Germany, but even then, the Austrian-dominated Habsburg Empire remained (to say nothing of the Swiss, Dutch, Scandinavians, and even English who all recognized a certain degree of “Germanness” in themselves). Since ancient times, the question of Germany’s extent and what constituted being German has had no complete answer. People understood and appreciated “Germanness,” but it was not clear just exactly what it meant to be a German.^[3] Thus, the history of the German peoples offers interesting parallels to that of the Americans, except we have the benefit of hindsight studying them, and so the opportunity to learn from their successes and errors.

In the Gallic Wars, Caesar discusses the differences between the Gauls and the Germans. The Rhine River separated Eastern Gaul from Western Germania, but the Romans never conquered its thick forests and never determined its Eastern boundary. Caesar described the ancient Northwest Germans as warlike, hard-living forest nomads, who did not practicing agriculture, held property in common, prized chastity, and whose “greatest glory” was to have “as wide deserts as possible around them… that their neighbors shall be driven out of their lands and abandon them, and that no one dare settle near them; at the same time they think that they shall be on that account the more secure.” The Romans could not permanently hold greater Germania, but they held lands in what is today Western and Southern Germany and conquered all of contemporary Austria.

As the Western Roman Empire declined, Germanic tribes migrated into (or invaded) its lands. Famously, the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain as the Franks crossed the Rhine to conquer Northern Gaul. Eventually, Charlemagne would rule a united Frankish realm stretching from Spain to central Germany and become the first Holy Roman Emperor. He would wage a brutal, and ultimately successful, war of conquest and conversion against the pagan Saxons who controlled the lands between the Rhine and Elbe rivers. During these tumultuous centuries, which the Germans refer to as the Völkerwanderung (the migration of peoples), the Slavs migrated out from the East to the banks of the Elbe and into the Balkans, depopulated by Hun massacres and conscriptions for the Eastern Roman Empire’s wars with Persia. After the death of Charlemagne, his realm was split between his heirs. The Western portion, which would become France, split from the Eastern portion, which retained the Holy Roman Empire and would rule over Central Europe.

Just as Charlemagne waged war on the pagan Saxons, the now-Christian Saxons in the Holy Roman Empire waged war against the pagan Slavs. During these years, the Germans conquered what is Eastern Germany today. The Teutonic Knights and other military orders continued these conquests, waging the Northern Crusades and conquering the Baltic coast. The German knights ruled Slavic peasants and brought German merchants and artisans to grow trading ports and populate Baltic cities. But the Slavic pagans were not annihilated. They were converted and Germanized (some to a greater, others to a lesser extent). Prussia, the Teutonic Order’s heartland that took its name from a Slavic tribe, would eventually establish the German Empire of 1871, and the Prussians’ austere, martial, Protestant character still defines “Germanness” for many Americans today.

In contrast to their Northern Cousins, the Bavarians, Rhinelanders, Westphalians, Alsatians, Swabians, Swiss, and other Southern and Western Germans were hemmed in by France and Austria and could not engage in grand wars of conquest. Bavaria would remain a leader among the smaller German states, retain its Catholicism (which was generally the case among the Southern and Western Germans), and famously patronized fine art, including Neuschwanstein and Wagner. Goethe, a polymath and great writer, would emerge from Frankfurt, settle in Leipzig and Weimar, and would contribute massively to the German literary tradition. Mozart, of course, emerges from Austria. Beethoven emerged from Bonn. Trapped by geography, these Western and Southern German states produced great works of art and science, offering a cultured soft-power idea of Germanness to counter the warlike Northerners.

But there was still some expansion in the South. Germans settled the Sudetenland and cities in Eastern Bohemia, mixing with the local Czechs. The Czechs kept their language but adopted many German customs as a result of their proximity and role as a leading state in the Holy Roman Empire. Austrians, through strategic marriages, came to rule a cosmopolitan domain stretching from Southern Germany up to Bohemia, over to Northern Italy, and across the Balkans. The Habsburgs invited Swabians to settle the Danube River basin to strengthen their authority and defend against the Turks. These settlers would come to be known as the Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians). Some Germans even migrated to Russia, invited by Catherine the Great (herself a German), to both enrich her newly conquered lands and to serve as a bulwark against the Turks.

Located in the center of Europe and subject to constant pressures, incursions, interactions, and varyingly capable or incapable of conquest, the German peoples were constantly pulled and pushed in different directions. All of Europe recognized “the Germans,” but there were still many states, many cultures, a profusion of languages, many of which were only mutually intelligible within the same region. The medieval Germans conquered, but they did not annihilate, but rather absorbed and mixed with Western Slavs.

The Americans, like the Germans, began in a specific time and a specific place, but have since expanded and incorporated new peoples. North America was settled by distinct yet similar groups of people that became more distinct as they expanded across the continent. While we now have Yankees, Southerners, Texans, Appalachians, Californians, and more, an American would likely not mistake one for another, and an outsider would recognize them all as American.^[4]

And like the Germans mixed with and absorbed different Slavic peoples, so too did the Americans with the many European peoples that migrated to North America in the 19th Century. Americans have happily embraced foreign foods and festivals, but otherwise, the descendants of practically all the European peoples are present in the United States and are thoroughly Americanized. Few more so than the German-Americans themselves! They may still have foreign last names (although many Americanized those), but they speak the American language, think of themselves as primarily Americans, and if they returned to their ancestral homelands would be seen as foreigners for having adopted American customs. Most “White” Americans now have a thoroughly mixed ancestry, usually with at least a touch of Italian, German, Irish, French, Scottish, Italian, Polish, English, or Cherokee (or all of the above!) blood in their veins. And today, we see significant intermarrying between all races.

This has led some to refer to Americans derisively as “Amerimutts,” and that might be true, but isn’t everyone a “mutt” of sorts? The English are a touch of Ancient Britons, Celts, a good amount of Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (where Anglo-Saxon comes from), and topped off by a Viking-descended Norman French aristocracy. The Romans, buffeted by waves of Germanic migration, ultimately became French, Spanish, and Italian. The ancient Greeks intermixed with peoples across Alexander’s Empire. After the Western Roman Empire fell, the Eastern Romans continued to refer to themselves as Rhomaioi and integrated many Slavs who were needed to fight their pyrrhic wars against the Persians and Turks.^[5] And these are only a few examples. A more than casual understanding of any people will show a rich mixture of influences, resulting in each specific group having a different specific composition and character at a given specific time. History is a great continuum, where everything is constantly bleeding into everything else.

There are Americans, Americans, and American Americans.

To be an American, like what it meant to be a German, or a Roman, is both an ethnic reality and a developing cultural and social idea. But I think it can be broken down into three categories:

First, Civil Americans, latter-day St. Pauls, who hold American legal status, but do not share American ancestry or morality.

Second, Spiritual Americans, the first couple of generations of migrants who gradually adopt American culture, customs, and morals while lacking a deep (or possibly any) ancestral connection to existing Americans.

Third, American Americans, who share deep ancestral and moral ties with other Americans.

This system acknowledges, warts and all, that being “American” excluded Irishmen when they arrived in the 19th Century and Carl Schurz when he worked for Lincoln, yet also now allows “American” to include the descendants of those Irishmen and Schurz, while currently excluding Arnold Schwarzenegger and Guatemalans arriving in the 21st Century. Over time, different peoples can be integrated, but it takes a lot of time.

I’ll admit that I don’t find those particularly satisfying, but I think that’s about the best we can do. We cannot clearly articulate what it means to be an American because the country is so young and because it has been experiencing massive immigration since its inception. 250 years is a blip in history. The Völkerwanderung lasted for approximately 300 years.

America has essentially been taking in and assimilating peoples for its entire history without pause. This has occurred at different rates, do doubt because of similarities and differences between various peoples and the Americans of a given moment in history. The United States now seems to be taking in entirely new peoples from across the globe. Discerning a common identity from that is impossible and would be unprecedented in human history, except, perhaps, for Babel. And the United States is too vast for a unitary culture anyway. Over this whole article, I have been discussing European peoples in (hopefully interesting and not frustrating) detail. But consider that the lower 48 states dwarf the whole of Europe.

To close, I want to revisit my thought that the Heritage American view has a strong point regarding religion. My use of “morality” in my attempt to define Americanness, essentially, is the general Christian worldview that informs all Western philosophy. I think even adopting the de-Christianized Western philosophical outlook would be sufficient to be American (it would be silly to assert otherwise), but in the long run, America needs Catholic morality to hold together.

Setting aside the Catholic faith’s Truth, no other moral system has a record of or capacity for achieving the unity of so many peoples,^[6] other than, perhaps, Islam. The Protestant American experiment has led us to our current predicament, and so cannot be expected to offer a solution. The old pagans, essentially, worship their own cultures and ancestry, making them incapable of cultural toleration, and Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, and Confucianism really just serve to add philosophical depth to paganism.^[7] The new pagans, the many “isms” by which our society is currently beset (Secularism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Capitalism, Feminism, Environmentalism, and Woke-ism to name a few) operate according to a secularized Christian morality, but replace God with a created thing or idea, and so suffer the same particularist problems of the old pagans. I will admit that I think, on paper, a neo-Ottoman caliphate centered on Washington, D.C., (or Dearborn, if we’re being serious) would actually have a lot going for it (materially speaking), but is absurd and will never happen because America is fundamentally a Western Country. Too many American people and institutions are too Western for it to work.^[8]

In a country as vast and diverse as the United States, I do not see how we can sustain ourselves without major decentralization and the unity between different peoples that is only possible through the country’s conversion to Catholicism. Perhaps the United States could yet have a great and glorious destiny, restoring Christendom and becoming the seat of a renewed, global, Holy Roman Empire.

1. Some additional related or opposed view include:

   The Woke American view, more or less (it is more extreme), is the opposite of the Heritage American.

   The view of certain Libertarians that would earnestly embrace and agree with the Economic Zone Participant view, but I did not come across such a person, nor would I want to.

   The Know-Nothing American view opposing the Propositional American view, seeing the United States as a Free Masonic Protestant conspiracy, and so “American values” are evil, and we should strive not to be “American.”

   The Folk American would treat Americanness as the sum of being born here, growing up here, practicing common daily customs, and holding certain values, like hard work, finds Europeans “rude,” has a positive disposition toward hard-working migrants (legal or otherwise), and disdains lazy citizens. ↑

2. Some interesting reasons were given for this, including the presence of African slaves alongside European colonists in the first settlements, the assertion that Black American culture is Scotch-Irish in character (described in detail by Thomas Sowell in Black Rednecks and White Liberals), and the fact that many Blacks with long family histories in this country have European ancestry. ↑

3. If you, like me, find this interesting, see this shortform and longform introductory discussion about the concept. ↑

4. See Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer; The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau; and American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodward. ↑

5. In 1912, the population of Lemnos identified themselves as Rhomaioi rather than Hellenes when questioned by a visiting scholar. ↑

6. See Modernity’s Alternative by Rocco Buttiglione. ↑

7. God-willing, Confucius may eventually be hailed the Aristotle of the East. ↑

8. For the same reason, Eastern Orthodoxy will not have a significant impact and will instead serve as a waystation for American Protestants’ conversion to Catholicism. ↑