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  "path": "/2026/05/re-americanizing-america-the-american-heritage-with-subcultures/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-20T18:35:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://providencemag.com",
  "tags": [
    "America’s Founding",
    "American Civil War",
    "Civilization",
    "The Latest",
    "heritage Americans",
    "brought here through immigrant groups",
    "Muslims Shouldn’t Have to Assimilate to Belong",
    "anti-Sharia movement",
    "claims",
    "the story of Pastor Edward Barham",
    "Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud"
  ],
  "textContent": "## Part II of a Two-Part Essay\n\nAbraham Lincoln understood the covenantal nature of America, which he called “the electric cord.” The 16th president articulated the skeletal form of America’s cultural identity in Chicago on July 10, 1858:\n\n> We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men. They are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us. But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that _it is the father of all moral principle_ in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.\n\nWhat is the basis of the American covenant? It is the creed, the “father of all moral principles” found in the Declaration of Independence:\n\n> We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.\n\nIn these words lies the summation of the moral premise on which America was founded: that there is a Creator who made man with equal dignity, rights, and obligations. On this foundation our cohesive cultural identity was built and must be maintained. This is the moral law to which we as a people are subject. Without agreement on these fundamentals, we cannot hope for unity on much else.\n\nToday we have a breakdown in both creed and covenant, not only because we have so many immigrants from cultures that do not espouse this understanding of man and the world, but also from years of moral erosion by liberal elites who disdain the covenant and wish to dismantle the creed. The more irreligious we became as a nation, the less meaningful our covenant, bond, promise, and oath became. Once we rejected God— _the_ Truth, _the_ Creator, _the_ Bond of the universe itself—how much easier it became to reject our fellow citizens.\n\n**The American Heritage**\n\nThe American heritage is the transmission of _both_ _creed and covenant_ from one generation to the next. In the current controversies around the idea of American heritage (or “heritage Americans”), three truths are too often overlooked.\n\nFirst, the creed is not a list of ideas rattled off by politicians about opportunity and the American dream. The creed, as articulated by Lincoln and Jefferson, is the “father of all moral principles.” Second, properly understood, the covenant model allows for immigrants, such as myself, who take seriously covenant-making and oath-taking to enter into the American heritage. It is not my intellectual or verbal assent to a set of ideas about what America stands for that makes me an American; _it is specifically my acceptance of, in Lincoln’s words, the “father of all moral principles” as the creed, and the oath of allegiance that I make and keep_. Third, covenant breaking—both by native-born Americans and immigrants—has gone on far too long. Too often, we see native-born Americans who degrade the creed and disregard the transcendent nature of the covenant. And then we have immigrants, legal and illegal, who have no intention of taking seriously the naturalization oath, whether from lack of understanding, ideological indifference, or even outright hostility.\n\n**One Dominant Culture, Many Subcultures**\n\nRe-Americanizing America requires reviving American culture, and that begins by acknowledging that the God of America is the Christian God; without Him, the covenants of the colonies, the Declaration of Independence, and our Constitution would not exist, nor make any sense.\n\nThis does not mean that everyone who lives here must be a Christian—that is an advantage of the capaciousness of the covenant model—but it does mean there can only be one dominant culture, and that dominant culture is the one that was handed down to us from the beginning, from the time of the colonies.\n\nIn one of his papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote:\n\n> “Foreign influence is truly the Grecian Horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its entrance. Nor ought we to imagine, that it can only make its approaches in the gross form of direct bribery. [deletion] It is then most dangerous, when it comes under the patronage of our passions, under the auspices of national prejudice and partiality.”\n\nAs I see it, one of the methods by which foreign powers can gain entrance into our society, or as Hamilton writes in _Federalist No. 68_ , “gain an improper ascendant in our councils,” is via a multiculturalism that sets itself in competition for dominance. Multiculturalism subverted the American dominant culture in favor of multiple subcultures, raising them and nominally making them “equal,” while in practice setting them in an arena to _compete_ _for_ _dominance_.\n\nSince the colonial era, Anglo-Saxon culture has been central to American identity. No matter how many immigrants came, from whatever region, the dominant culture held; the relationship between the immigrant subcultures and the Anglo-Saxon culture was hierarchical yet natural. This created an assimilation pathway and what would eventually become a canonical assimilation theory.\n\nThe twentieth-century sociologist Milton Gordon wrote,\n\n> one must make a distinction between influencing the cultural patterns themselves and contributing to the progress and development of the society.\n\nImmigrants throughout American history—as Gordon writes—have contributed greatly in all areas of society, something to be acknowledged and appreciated. But to keep America America, there can be only one dominant culture. Subcultures can exist in harmony with the dominant culture (e.g. verbal accents, local customs and fare across the different American states; and yes, even ethnic markets)—but the dominant culture must always act as the reference point. And that dominant culture, as Gordon wrote, is irrevocably rooted in the Anglo-Saxon culture with its particular characteristics.\n\nForeign cultures that pose a challenge to oath-taking and covenant-making—including antisemitism brought here through immigrant groups—threaten the covenant understanding of America—becoming a threat not just to the cohesion of society, but to the very survival of the republic. An example of this kind of challenge to the creed and covenant understanding of America can be seen in Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid’s article “Muslims Shouldn’t Have to Assimilate to Belong_.”_ Like so many today, he asserts that anyone can come to America without expecting to conform at all to mainstream American culture. This is the essence of the tired ideology of multiculturalism.\n\nHamid’s piece is carefully crafted to make one sympathize with Muslims seeking to retain a semblance of their Islamic identity while embracing the core elements of American culture, but in reality he seeks to discredit the growing anti-Sharia movement. Hamid, and other Islamist groups, are attempting to desensitize the broader culture to Sharia as Islamic communities grow and form parallel societies. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood backed–organization, one of the organizations behind Zohran Mamdani, claims that Sharia is no different than Jewish kosher laws. In the end, all this talk presumes that America is just an idea that has created a space for economic success open for the taking.\n\nThose who come to America must understand the national covenant that undergirds our country. It doesn’t matter that not everyone in America believes in the Christian God; that has been the case since the beginning. What matters is that no group (including Christians!) attempts to usurp Him, or have the nation itself usurp Him. America—if she is to survive as a self-governing free republic—cannot tolerate parallel societies founded on the idea that “There is no God except Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”\n\nThis is why Islam can become problematic under certain conditions. On an ideological level, it cannot tolerate minority status and instead quite explicitly vies for dominance. America is expansive both physically and culturally; it can and has absorbed many subgroups and cultures. But as the concentration of Muslims has increased—coinciding with an increased reluctance to assert the need to assimilate—we now see a subculture unwilling to be a subculture, one that will not live under an American covenant but rather would see its own rise to dominance.\n\nA clear example of what this attempt at cultural and political domination begins to look like is the story of Pastor Edward Barham in Dearborn, Michigan. At a city council meeting this American pastor brought up his concerns about renaming a city street after Osama Siblani, the radical editor of Arab American News who has supported Hamas and Hezbollah. In response, the mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, called Mr. Barham an Islamophobe, and said: “Although you live here, I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here. The day you move out of the city will be the day I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of the city.”\n\nThere are certain steps we can take to stop the advancement of this cultural and political corruption of the body politic: The anti-Sharia movement must gain momentum. The Ten Commandments should be allowed in classrooms as a moral and cultural guide and part of the inheritance that made this country possible. Spiritual awakening must be prayed for. Civic education must be implemented. Politicians, writers, thinkers, and speakers should be tutored in American history and its covenantal nature. A rightly ordered patriotism should be encouraged.\n\nEvery time we speak of our country, our history, our traditions, our identity, our society, our speech should be replete with creed and covenant language. Our creed is that there is a Creator who made man with equal dignity, rights, and obligations, and that America is a country that started when our forefathers (physical or spiritual) made a covenant with that Creator and with each other to combine into a civil body politic and structure a country according to that creed. We must internalize it, act upon it, pass it down to the next generation.\n\nWhen our children and grandchildren ask us, “What is America?” “Who are we?” “What do we believe?” this is how we answer. Re-Americanizing America is an enterprise; it will take education, creativity, time, and civic courage. As an adopted citizen, I ask my fellow countrymen to join me in this endeavor.",
  "title": "Re-Americanizing America: The American Heritage with Subcultures"
}