“I believe in America.” These iconic words herald the beginning of what many hail as cinema’s greatest masterpiece—Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. In this saga, an unwavering belief in the American ideals of family and liberty embarks on a dialectical evolution. It’s a journey that ultimately finds its crescendo in The Godfather II, where those high-minded notions of Americanism die in the wake of abortion, fratricide, and the fracturing of family. The opening line of The Godfather encapsulates the understanding that America is more than a geographical location. It is a tapestry woven from profoundly practical virtues distinctively Western in origin, uniting Scots-Irish mountain men in West Virginia, Polish and Dutch steelworkers in Pennsylvania, French and African lumberjacks in Louisiana, Italian factory workers, and wealthy English socialites of New York. Just as the Corleone family’s decline symbolizes the consequences of moral compromise, the division in American society serves as a stark reminder of the perilous path that will befall a nation when its foundational virtues are distorted and eroded. This corrosion of national ideals has caused the national cognitive dissonance that is currently ripping the nation in two. Thus, America has two choices: to reject multiculturalism or succumb to America’s demise.
The cancerous fear about what pagan, communist barbarians think has emerged as a consequence of the conservatives’ loss of identity and confidence. As a result of this mass psychosis, the optimistic, family-focused conservatives who held sacred life, liberty, and property have devolved into a mass of degenerate, dependent, and divided secularists arguing over how hot the A/C should be in a car engulfed in flames.Amid the familial, religious, and political chaos, clear articulation of the shared national identity becomes paramount. As 1 Corinthians 14:8 says, “For if the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for battle?” Like that uncertain trumpet call, if conservative leaders offer an unclear answer to the foundational question of American identity, they’ll leave the future generation ill-equipped to face their Silicon Valley and Ivory Tower overlords. Conservative author Yuval Levin captures the complex nature of American nationalism as “a devotion to a people devoted to a set of ideas.” Those ideals, referencing the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, constituted a cohesive national culture greater than the sum of its parts. Those founding principles were ingrained in the initial Pilgrims who settled on the Atlantic shores.
This ideological heritage, combined with the New World, gave birth to a new ethnicity. These new people, hammered by unforeseen hardships, clung to each other and the conviction of John Winthrop that they would “be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” Those settlers knew that only through limited government would their inalienable rights be preserved. Thus, 52 protestants, a catholic, and three deists came together in the second Continental Congress and declared their independence from England. After winning their freedom from the most powerful empire in the world, those men reconvened to structure a constitutional republic that relied upon an upright citizenry dutifully seeking God’s will. The fusion of Western cultures and common religious and philosophical traditions once yielded significant freedom and prosperity. Yet, today, despite an unaltered constitution, America grapples with reduced freedom and prosperity, a clear result of massive moral deficiencies.
Naturally, individuals worldwide aspired to immigrate to America. This surge, coupled with advancements in global transportation, imported transformative ideas oftentimes at odds with those of the founding. Americans understood that loyalty to a nation’s principles and traditions was a sentiment not easily shared by recent immigrants, and would require several generations to develop. American immigration policy evolved in response: during this period, the total number of immigrants permitted from outside the Western Hemisphere was limited to 165,000. During his presidential campaign, Theodore Roosevelt recognized the cultural threat posed by such high levels of immigration in his time. Thus in his speech on “Americanism” to school board members in Iowa, he emphasized that there was “no room in the country for any 50-50 American,” advocating for a singular loyalty to the Stars and Stripes. Later, in his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis similarly argued that a native man does not want his culture dominated by immigrants for the same reasons he wouldn’t want his home burned down: because “he could not even begin to enumerate the things he would miss.” The prevailing sentiment of the time was that if new immigrants could not assimilate and successfully become “Americanized,” they ought not come.
Nevertheless, leftist progressives armed with a fundamentally secular understanding of the founding pushed back against theis sentiment, attempting to untether immigrants from the responsibility to assimilate by severing the founding ideals from the long, classically Western tradition. For instance, the National Origins Act of 1924, which sought to limit immigration from nations outside North America and Western Europe, faced vehement opposition from progressive activists, including those associated with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). They contended that the act was racially motivated and aimed to perpetuate the dominance of Anglo-Saxon and Northern European ethnic groups through the oppression of minorities such as Southern and Eastern European immigrants and Asians. These progressive activists championed the notion that all cultures and their respective values were as valid as American ones, advocating that a wholesale influx of diverse religions, beliefs, and cultures would enrich the American “melting pot.” The linking of democracy, equality, and individuality, or the more contemporary values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, faces a fundamental challenge.
This shift in American identity transforms ordinary political disagreements into perceived threats to the nation. As reported by the House Judiciary Committee in their 2022 report on FBI whistleblowers, the Biden administration deployed of the FBI and the IRS against parents opposing the DEI agenda in schools. This appears to be a justified and organic outcome of the redefinition of “American.” Dissenters are labeled as “traitors” and treated accordingly. Stephen Wolfe, in his controversial book The Case for Christian Nationalism, argues, “Our sense of familiarity with a particular place and the people in it– the sense of we– is rooted not in abstractions or judicial norms (e.g., equal protection) or truth statements– rather, the nation is rooted in a pre-reflective, pre-propositional love for one’s own, generated from intergenerational affections, daily life, and productive activity that link a society of the dead, living, and unborn.” The dilution of the traditionally American virtues through a detached embrace of all cultural “values” has had profound and destructive consequences for the cohesive identity of all Americans.
In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis frames the nationalist debate around what Christ calls the greatest commandment: to love your neighbor. “Those who do not love the fellow villagers are fellow townsmen whom they have seen or not likely to have got very far towards loving ‘man’ whom they have not.” In order to follow the greatest commandment, one must love his own nation and seek the preservation of the good in it. Lewis goes on to write, “the instinct to love the familiar more than the foreign is good and remains operative in all spiritual states of man,” and that “love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and in that is very like the love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town.” The ACLU and other progressive politicians have indeed made their mark, so radically shifting the public perception that by the 1960s, voters viewed past assimilationist ideals as racist or xenophobic. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national origins quota system, opening the floodgates to immigrants from a wide range of developing nations across Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Unlike previous generations who arrived in a developing nation, those new immigrants arrived on the soil of a nation promising security through the welfare state, established by FDR and radically expanded through President LBJ’s “Great Society.” Understandably, people from developing countries seek safety and financial prospects in the United States, but an influx of those not sharing in American culture’s classical Western heritage increased the erosion of America’s distinctive Western identity. This shift significantly impacted how Americans would perceive their national identity and would challenge the maintenance of a cohesive culture. So, while immigrants are integral to America’s story, they should contribute to an established identity, rather than reshaping it in their own image. After 55 years of following this model, there is no longer a defined American culture.
The extreme backlash against Stephen Wolfe’s work of political theory reveals that in contemporary society, arguing the importance of native populations to a nation’s identity will garner accusations of xenophobia, racism, and ethnonationalism. Since when did conservatives start worrying about what those who war against life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness think? In this crucial battle over American identity, conservatives must draw from that great and untouched reservoir of classical Western traditions, revive a sober sense of duty to the Triune God, and uniformly cry out for a return to the nation’s founding documents and principles with the same fervor of the protestant reformers’ cry of “ad fontes” — “back to the sources.” We must reevaluate mass immigration and assimilation’s status as the lifeblood of progress. This is not exclusion but preservation—without a home, there will be nowhere to invite others. The indomitable, self-sacrificing spirit of America saved the West twice in the past century and will do so again through the rekindling of American families, culture, and history.
