Ch 2.2 | 🤔Founded on a creed

In 1921, an English writer named G.K. Chesterton wrote, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.” 

He writes that other states don’t have a need for a unifying doctrine because they are also nations, sharing history, tradition, and language. He explains “England is English, France is French, and Ireland is Irish.”

As he put it, an Englishman never questions the fact that he’s English. Many have rightly remarked on the importance of this statement — it’s quoted all the time. America was different, as Chesterton wrote. It wasn’t just that America was already ethnically (not culturally) diverse at its founding.

It was the provenance of government authority that mattered, not where the people came from.

As Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation (an conservative think tank), wrote in “‘Founded on a Creed’: Understanding America’s Unique Beginning”:

What is unique is that we are based on that, and the Founders discussed this ad infinitum, and they were very proud of the fact that they were unique in this. I think Hamilton puts it best when he wrote, “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide whether societies of man are really capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice and whether therefore are destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. So America was created not by accident or force, but by reflection and choice.”

He continued:

... it couldn’t be just a creed. It couldn’t just be based on mere practicality. Man is not made that way. 

A deeper loyalty was commanded, and Madison wrote that the documents required something more instinctive and primitive. They deserved veneration. 

There’s a need for a culture to emerge that instills this veneration in the creed, and it’s precisely because of the exceptional nature of this culture and this creed that something I write about often, the attacks on America’s culture and creed over the last thirty or forty years is such a threat to our ability to sustain republican government.

Do you see the problem? If we no longer share a common vision of the “idea” of America, then America ceases to exist! What else binds us?