A modest proposal for healthy American assimilation.
Andrew Beck argues that America needs to revive the ideal of assimilation if our country is to survive as a country. It must not have its distinctive culture washed away by the influx of immigrants coming from many different cultures and religions. New Americans, he believes, should not only pledge allegiance to the nation’s official creed, as enshrined in its founding documents and laws, but also defer to its dominant culture and way of life, including the majority religion, Christianity.
There is much to agree with in this view, which Beck is at pains to distinguish from “Christian nationalism,” whatever that is. The message of assimilation, as it used to be practiced in the 20th century, was that we Americans were proud of what we had built in this country. We assumed that foreigners were coming to America to share our freedoms and prosperity, and we were eager for them to know why America was free and why it was prosperous. Prejudices they might have brought with them, in favor of monarchy or against private property, for example, should be left behind at Ellis Island. The main instrument of assimilation was public schools, which accepted their responsibility to teach what it was to be American.
For most of modern American history, however, public schools avoided the subject of religion and did not teach the Christian faith. This was learned behavior, to be sure. The first public schools in America, established in the decades before the Civil War, regularly taught the Bible and a non-sectarian form of Protestant Christianity. This practice was challenged only when a million Irish immigrants moved to America in the wake of the Great Potato Famine of the 1850s. The Irish continued to immigrate in large numbers until the 1920s and were joined from the 1870s forward by Poles and Italians, ethnicities that were also predominantly Catholic.
The surge of Catholic immigration motivated a greater determination to exclude religion from the public schools, beginning with the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, a Republican, supported “good common [i.e., public] schools,” but strongly opposed the use of public monies for sectarian schools run by “religious organizations” (meaning especially Catholic dioceses and religious orders as well as Mormons). In an 1875 speech he stated that public education should be “unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheistical dogmas.” “Church and State” ought to be “forever separate.” “Religion should be left to families, churches, and private schools, devoid of public funds.” It was hoped that this would defuse concerns about Catholic influence in publicly supported schools, and many states adopted measures in line with Grant’s thinking.
In place of Christianity, public schools in the 20th century taught the civil religion of America. The chief doctrines of this quasi-religion were equality under the law; freedom of speech and religion; respect for God (a monotheistic but non-denominational God to be sure); respect for pillars of public order like the police, the churches, and the courts; and gratitude to those who had sacrificed themselves to preserve American freedom for future generations. Immigrants were encouraged to participate in our common American culture, especially in sports and music. For most of the 20th century, the public schools were egalitarian and public-spirited. They helped integrate waves of immigrants from all over the world into a common American culture and shared political values. With prodding from the Supreme Court, public schools were careful for over 60 years to exclude religious instruction entirely, but without, for the most part, adopting policies that were openly antagonistic to Americans’ faith traditions.
Since the 1960s, however, the public schools and other cultural institutions, public and private, have embraced a new religious faith: that of multiculturalism. Hollywood, of course, has been celebrating diversity for decades, casting its ghastly gaslight on our common life and history with ever-increasing detachment from reality. By now, after half a century, the lumpen Left have completely internalized the faith’s assumptions so that multiculturalism, with its subordinate dogmas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, is understood simply as Moral, its opposite Immoral. Even more insidiously, traditional love of country has become “cringe,” the opposite of “cool.”
Multiculturalism sends the message to new Americans that, without you, our culture is lame and imperfect. Bring us your wondrous diversity so that we may learn how to be made better! Enrich our tasteless stew with your exotic flavors, give us more sauces and toppings for our pizza bianca. The America we have inherited from the white supremacist past has nothing to teach you, the virtuous refugee, except perhaps the importance of avoiding racism, sexism, and religious dogmas. These are horrors that of course you could never have experienced in your countries of origin, which are much cooler places to be from than Topeka, Kansas.
That’s how we arrive at giant statues of “monkey-faced” pagan deities in Sugar Land, Texas, or, more alarmingly, an amplified muezzin sounding the Islamic call to prayer (including the catchy phrase Allahu Akbar!) in the streets of Minneapolis and New York City. I’m sure this makes the followers of Zohran Mamdani feel much more comfortable. Everyone being comfortable is of course part of the prime directive of multiculturalism. If certain people, those run over or knifed or sprayed with bullets by jihadis, for example, are not comfortable, they should keep quiet about it so as not to disturb anyone else’s comfort.
In English, Please
I suspect that most readers of this forum are more sympathetic, as I am, to policies favoring assimilation than to the warm, milky comforts of multiculturalism. We do not want America to lose its soul, decompose in the corrosive gases of globalism, and become a mere geographical expression. The question before those who favor a return to assimilation is not Whether, but To what extent? and How? Once we were, overwhelmingly, a nation happy to be under a vaguely Protestant, monotheistic God. Are we still? Do we want or need to employ the brutal police tactics of Wilsonian America and force those German speakers to speak English and eat good, old-fashioned American foods like hamburgers and frankfurters? I can almost hear my readers cry, “No sauerkraut, please!”
The difficult issue here, of course, is religion. America is not a confessional state with an established church or religion, unlike all other Christian states and empires from the 4th through the 18th century AD. That’s one thing that made us (along with the Netherlands) the first among modern Western nations. We rejected confessionalism and embraced freedom of religion in the very first amendment to the federal Constitution. The amendment was carefully written, to be sure, so as not to conflict with individual states that still possessed established churches, but it was not long before the new states of the Union ended confessionalism too.
I doubt there is much serious support for re-confessionalization today, with the possible exception of “integralists.” But for the record, over the 1,300 years or so when confessional states and empires existed in the West, most tolerated non-Christian religions, stipulating only that they not proselytize and that they refrain from displaying symbols of their faith in public places. Periods of persecution were relatively brief. The same provisions applied, and still apply, in Islamic countries under sharia law and mutatis mutandis in China as ruled by the secular religion of Communism. If, as Andrew Beck seems to be implying, there should be laws restricting egregious expressions of paganism in public spaces, following the example of confessional states, such laws would be unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny. They are medieval, and not in a good way.
What it should be possible to do without tyrannous enactments at odds with our traditions and the Constitution is to strengthen public sentiment in favor of our American civil religion and to weaken the multiculturalist faith. When love of country and confidence in our principles and way of life were strong, minority religions tended to avoid confrontational behavior such as that currently modeled by the Hindus of Sugar Land or the muezzins of Minneapolis. Back when the American civil religion unashamedly commanded the high places of our culture, religious minorities tended to adopt the strategy of the chameleon: they tried to blend in.
Even now, most Muslims in America meet in “Islamic cultural centers” rather than mosques. Like the Catholic Church when it began to build out its parish school system after 1870, minority religions until very recently were careful to align their teachings with the capacious American civil religion. Catholic schools, sensitive to criticism that their real loyalty was to Rome rather than America, took pains to ensure that the education they offered was patriotic and taught American values. The Mormons did the same. Catholic parochial schools and Mormon schools often mimicked the practices and even borrowed curricular materials from district public schools so as to appear as “normal” as possible.
So what we have to do, I think, is what the Trump Administration has been doing so energetically (if at times ham-fistedly) since January: undermine in every way possible the religion of multiculturalism. Fumigate the schools and drive out the infection of DEI enforcers. Where possible (and this would probably be doable only in red states), state departments of education should, Samson-like, knock down the Five Pillars of Wokery: multiculturalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, radical gender ideology, and the environmentalist cult. Get divisive, politicized programming out of public school. Replace it with a new model army of civics instructors teaching a K-12 version of Paul Carrese’s Civic Thought and Leadership curriculum. Hey, hey, ho, ho! Woke enforcers have got to go!
There is another way to strengthen assimilation that would be even bolder. Public schools could be freed from state mandates requiring them to offer education in every language spoken by a given percentage of the local population. Parents should be told firmly that all public school education will be conducted in English. Such a tough-love provision will undoubtedly raise a wail of protest from progressive educators. But wise parents will understand that the provision will ultimately benefit their children. Even public school advocates might be honest enough to recognize that banning polyglot teaching may be the only way to save the public schools from imminent ruin.
On current trends, district public schools, especially in the inner cities, will be faced with the obligation to educate exploding numbers of non-Anglophone immigrants speaking multiple languages and dialects for the next decade at least. These new students make up a growing percentage of the public school population. In Boston public schools, a city far from the southern border, some 31% of K-12 students are classified as “English learners.” Another 13% are classified as “former English learners” who have achieved proficiency. The demands of polyglot teaching are breaking budgets and burdening staff even in the wealthiest school districts. In Boston public schools, thanks to state and city mandates, instruction is offered in seven different languages, including Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Naturally there is a severe shortage of teachers. How many mathematics teachers are available to teach geometry in Cape Verdean Creole? No wonder the numbers for literacy and numeracy have been falling off a cliff. To use a favorite locution of the environmentalists, this situation is unsustainable.
For most of the 20th century, absent the crutch of publicly sponsored multiculturalism, it commonly took only one generation for new arrivals on our shores to fully assimilate. This has been true for the entire history of the republic. Parents and grandparents held on to their native culture and language; their children assimilated. If we want the new immigrant populations of Indians and Asians and Hispanics to assimilate—all of them, in my experience, hard-working, ambitious, family-oriented ethnicities who make excellent citizens—we should make sure they learn to value America’s greatness in our schools and learn a skill that can only bring them huge benefits: the skill of speaking fluent English.
