Heritage Americans?

Does the “right” ancestry based on religion, ethnicity and chronology offer moral, spiritual, and even political superiority or entitlement?

The term “Heritage American” caught my eye when, Stephen Wolfe, the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, tweeted his disdain for conservative Catholic philosopher Robert George whose “donor base sent thousands of Heritage Americans to die in an unjust war.” He was referring to Iraq.

“Heritage American” is now popular among self-identified “Christian Nationalists” who seek special privilege for Christians, especially Protestants, whose ancestry dates to colonial America.

Wolfe’s tweet privileges the deaths of “Heritage Americans” over American soldiers whose parents or grandparents may have been born in Mexico, Vietnam, or India. Their sacrifice evidently was less lamentable. But this is where “Christian Nationalism,” which, in this author’s work, advocates a Calvinist confessional state, often leads. It’s definitely where “Heritage American” leads, esteeming some people by their ancestry and race, with Anglo Protestants at the top of the pyramid. It’s almost like a Daughters of the American Revolution tea party of 100 years ago, but without the refinement.

The Atlantic recently covered the phenomenon, sharing an exchange between podcaster Auron MacIntyre and Tucker Carlson:

“You could find their last names in the Civil War registry,” MacIntyre explained. This ancestry matters, he said, because America is not “a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.” It is a specific set of people who embody an “Anglo-Protestant spirit” and “have a tie to history and to the land.” MacIntyre continued: “If you change the people, you change the culture.” “All true,” Carlson replied.

The Atlantic piece also cites C. Jay Engle, credited with crafting “Heritage American,” who explains in a tweet:

…I can’t be a racial essentialist. Like the old main lady in gone with the wind. I like the Old South and many blacks that came out of it. I agree with Flannery O Conner that it’s mostly the new postwar radicalized blacks that are obnoxious. But they are predominate these days.

Engle also says:

“The majority of blacks have demonstrated that they cannot function within the old European cultural standards” and that the concept of heritage Americans affirms “the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life.”

The Atlantic writer continued:

When I called Engel to ask him about all of this, he told me that he does not believe that genetics are “the chief explanation” for how Anglo-Protestant ideals are transferred from generation to generation—but added that “there is an ethnic or racial correlation” between who embodies such ideals and who doesn’t. Our conversation was polite, but strange at times. I mentioned that as a half-Iranian American who was born and raised in the U.S., I share more in common ideologically with the Anglo-Protestant Founders of the United States than I do with Middle Eastern theocrats. “I would also contend that there is something deep inside of you that is attracted to or finds familiar portions of Iranian history,” he said, as though I am genetically predisposed to find the conquests of Darius the Great uniquely moving. I don’t, and told him as much.

A recent Politico article also cites Engel, who admits blacks and native peoples could qualify for Heritage America yet warns:

But at its most fundamental, said Engel, “heritage American” refers to the offspring of the Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish settlers — in other words, the white people — who populated the original colonies before heading west to settle the American frontier.

Last year, Engle explained:

When I say Heritage American, this is what I mean: those who are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II. This therefore includes the type of people that came here during the Ellis Island generation, even if that was a significant sociopolitical mistake. We are also the product of our mistakes as a nation. It includes the blacks of the Old South (like Booker T Washington), though it repudiates any instinct that some of them have to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time. It also includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation. It affirms however the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life. Heritage America is centered around the experiences and norms of Anglo-Protestants. It was their customs, their instincts, their priorities, their norms, their struggles, their perspectives, that set the tone and vision of Heritage America. Anything outside of that either assimilated or was killed off. When we speak of heritage America, we speak of an actual body of institutions created by a nexus of a specific people; dominated and defined by Anglos and their children. It is not an idea, it is a body of actual ways and habits and standards of culture and behavior, connected by a shared experience and the inheritance of that memory. It is communicated by certain aesthetics, certain art, certain, folklore, certain music, and certain symbols. Excludes all of the items in those categories that are not consistent with the character of our version of them. Once that ethos was liquidated, America was subverted and taken over.

And:

Heritage America, of course, is most consistent with Anglo Protestantism. But that does not mean that all groups outside of that core are equally dangerous to it. There is a spectrum at play wherein some peoples are less threatening to its ethos than others. There is a high correlation between that spectrum and the broadening circles extending out from Western Europe. Such that peoples like Indians, or Southeast Asians or Ecuadorians or immigrated Africans are the least capable of fitting in and should be sent home immediately. Whereas groups, like Irish or Italians or Catholics may not fit the original core, but were closer on the spectrum, being Europeans. All politics is contextual and situational.

In February, Engle announced he is co-authoring a new book with Stephen Wolfe as a “rallying cry for our group, as a vanguard of the blossoming American Christian right wing.”

American Reformer, an online Christian Nationalist journal that advocates a Christian confessional state, offered its definition of Heritage American last year.  Can blacks qualify as Heritage American? Its answer:

Black Americans have ancestral roots that go back to the beginning of the American colonies as well as collective memories from every period of American history. Black Americans speak English, even if in distinctive and sub-cultural dialects; they have historically been Christians, and in a tragic way, they have a relationship to America’s land unlike anyone else. Even though blacks were historically denied liberty, equality under the law, and participation in government, they have slowly been accorded these rights and privileges. I consider black Americans to be Heritage Americans.

Can non-Christians be Heritage Americans?

Non-Christians can be tolerated, as long as they acquiesce to living in an unashamedly Christian America (i.e., submitting to Christian civil law, government support for Christianity, Christian moral, civil, and religious norms and customs, etc.).

Although Heritage America advocates claim to sync with American history, their vision is very different. Abraham Lincoln in 1858 explained in biblical language that the human equality claimed by the Declaration of Independence applied not just to the Founders’ descendants but also to subsequent immigrations regardless of ancestry:  “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.” 

Lincoln called this ongoing claim to human equality the “the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

The moral genius of the Anglo Protestants who crafted The Declaration was its aspiration of human equality for all, not just for people like themselves. Self-professed Christian Nationalists and Heritage Americans prioritize ancestry and birth over The Declaration’s universality. Their theology more resembles a 1920s Klan rally than traditional American principles, much less historic Christian anthropology. It’s tempting to dismiss their extremism as irrelevant. But as we have seen with Nick Fuentes, what is online esoteric today can quickly become mainstream tomorrow.

As issues once thought closed are now reopened, it is imperative for American Christianity to defend human dignity without qualification. And it is imperative for all Americans who believe in human equality, which is our true heritage, emphatically to reject “Heritage America.”

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