The American Ethnicity

Introduction

Before defining the boundaries of the American tribe, the American ethnos, we must first decide if there is even anything there to be defined. Is there such a thing as an American, or is everything up for grabs now?

Various Takes

We have various phrases floating around today that clearly show that we have not yet made up our minds about it. There are heritage Americans. There are paperwork Americans. There are illegal Americans. There are anchor baby Americans. There are propositional Americans. There are the haters-of-America-Americans. Will the real Americans please stand up? What is an essential American?

To complicate matters a bit further, there have been periods in our history when the question was actually uncontroversial—our central identity was that of the WASP, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It is unsettled now, but this wasn’t always the case. This was the way it was as recently as when I was a boy. Not that everyone was like this, because they weren’t, but rather because that was the undisputed center.

So how are we to sort through all of this?

Definitions

Because we are dealing with people, and not parallel lines in Euclid, the boundaries of our definitions can smudge up a good deal. They move and scootch around—kind of like European borders in the Middle Ages, when the identity of a particular region depended on whether a particular wedding had or had not yet taken place. I think also of that time when King Solomon just gave twenty cities to Hiram. Some of the residents there may have thought, “Wait, what?”

Under normal circumstances, although the lines can smudge, they generally change slowly and organically. They change slowly enough that everybody can stay current. But in cases of famine, invasion, or plague, the character of populations can sometimes change radically and drastically, almost overnight. Sometimes it will be something like the Black Death, and other times it is the result of human action. There are times when these changes are brought about by malevolent actors. Malevolent action could include, for example, a policy of unrestricted open borders. And the issue there would be the impact of a manifest inability to assimilate those who are coming in.

Imagine America in 1925, and let us say that our immigration policy at that time allowed in 15 Muslims, 12 Hindus, 75 Buddhists, and 15,000 immigrants from western Europe. It is hard to imagine anything like this ever becoming a hot domestic political issue. Nobody would care. The reason it would not become a political issue is that America, remaining what it was before, could easily assimilate all these individuals. They would all be digested.

But the issue confronting us now is one that is entirely different. During the Biden years alone upwards of 13 million people came across the border, and maybe more. That is the equivalent of 6 states—enough to merit up to 12 senators.

Let me illustrate this with an absurd example. Suppose we gathered up 3 million Pakistanis and deposited them in the counties surrounding Lincoln, NE. We are no longer dealing with anything so simple as “extra Nebraskans,” but are rather dealing with a new region in our country, a new kind of region, an area that might be called New Pakistan. And you cannot import the Third World without becoming the Third World.

Speaking of absurd examples, here is another one. Suppose a Christian couple had three kids of their own, and decided to take in two foster kids. They found they were good at it, and everybody was thriving. The two foster kids were folded into the family culture, and everything was going swimmingly. Then one day a bus from the government showed up, and it was discovered that someone in authority had decided just to drop off 28 more foster kids. The father objected to the bus driver, who just wanted him to sign some papers, and so the driver asked him what he had against “foster kids.” The father said he had nothing against foster kids, as they already had two, and that they were loving their own children, and were able to love the foster children without ripping off their own kids. “But if you drop these new kids off,” he said, “it won’t be ten minutes before we won’t be loving anybody.”

In other words, with two kids you can see compassion in action. With thirty kids, you discover that in a realm with limited resources, the kind you and your wife have, compassion does not scale. Let me say that again. There is a point where compassion does not scale, and pretending that it does simply creates counterfeit compassion.

If you doubt what I say, ask yourself whether you are distressed by world poverty. Is that the case? And I would say, if you were genuinely distressed then you would just write everybody a check. Right? Why don’t you just write a check? You don’t have the money? Oh.

Comparisons & Complications

But in order for this illustration to work, we have to understand the definitions. We know who the natural children are. We know what foster children are. We know where the property lines are for this family’s house. We have definitions and boundaries.

When it comes to tribes, empires, and nationalities, the question of borders can get pretty complicated. This is even more the case when there are bad actors about, trying to make it more complicated than it needed to be.

And in addition to the question of geographical boundaries, we also have the issue of loyalties.

Who was the true Israelite? Absalom, the son of the king (2 Sam. 16:11)? or Ittai the Gittite, the man who graduated from the same high school that Goliath had (2 Sam. 15:19-22)? The son who was disloyal, or the stranger who was loyal?

Who was the obedient son? The one who said he would go and didn’t? Or the one who said he wouldn’t, but then did (Matt. 21:28-32)?

Let’s make it a little harder. Let’s take two sets of comparisons, and hold them up against one another. First let us compare a fifth-generation white farmer in Iowa, on the one hand, to a child born in Texas three weeks ago to an illegal Guatemalan woman on welfare. Who is the real American? Easy, right? Give me a hard one.

Okay. Now let’s do a fifth-generation faculty member of MIT, whose people have lived in New England forever, and who has been selling technological secrets to China for the last fifteen years. We shall compare him with the grandson of one of the Vietnamese boat people, a man who speaks flawless English, is a citizen, and has done two tours in the Marines. A little more complicated now, isn’t it?    

We also have the challenge of layered loyalties. The apostle Paul was quite aware of his Jewish heritage, a Hebrew of Hebrews, circumcised on the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin (Phil. 3:5). He was also proud of being a citizen of Tarsus, which was no obscure city (Acts 21:39). In addition to all that, we also learn that he had been born a Roman citizen (Acts 16: 37; 22:25), a status that he appealed to more than once.

Because we are dealing with people, sometimes it looks really simple and other times it seems as though it is the polar opposite of simple. Defining what it means to be Japanese is relatively straightforward. Defining what it means to be Swiss is a different kettle of . . . crawdads. The Swiss speak four languages—German, Italian, French, and Romansk. The Swiss are divided into three different religious groups—Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed. They are geographically related, and are a single nation, but please note. Two men can live on the same mountain, both speaking Italian, and one of them is Swiss and the other Italian. Now what?

An Ethnos is Where You Hang Your Hat

There is a difference between the natural and organic ways of smudging the boundaries, which is always going to happen wherever people interact. Europe merges into Asia, and it shows up in the people who live in the merge zone—you know, Chinese types with blue eyes.

But there are other times when the alterations are introduced on purpose, by malevolent bad actors. The problem is not that our situation is weird, or offbeat. The problem is that a play is being run on us by globalists, who want to make the problem insoluble.  

So we live in a time when there is a drastic need for clarity. With that in mind, I have long enjoyed appealing to Steven Bryan’s definition of ethnic identity. Here it is again:

And if we are going beyond simply ethnic to include the nation state, I would add a shared mechanism for making corporate decisions.

The key word in this definition, a word that occurs over and over again, is the word shared. Things that are shared in common are the things that can be assumed without conflict. If you grow up with everyone around you speaking English, that is a shared experience, and no conflict is associated with it. If you have a shared sense of the past, there is no need for conflict.

Now let me drop the indictment. Under all ordinary circumstances, apart from two things, the category American is a genuine ethnic type. Absolutely. The two things I have in mind are these. The first is the one I have already addressed—the problem of massive and uncontrolled immigration. But the second thing is this. Looking at the definition above, our government school system is at war with numbers 3,4, and 5. The government school system is the fifth column for the globalists. The government school system is not just anti-Christian, although it is that. It is also at war with the idea of America. Just get your kids out of there.   

On the flip side, what happens when there is not a shared name, or a shared sense of place, or a shared sense of the past, or a shared sense of belonging, or a shared faith? What happens? Well, wars for starters.