God first, America second

Pat Buchanan is onto something true here:

But it is to raise the issue of conflicting loyalties in the hearts of men in a nation that has declared religious, racial and ethnic diversity to be not only a national good but a national goal.

Whence came this idea? No previous generation believed this.

In World War I, Wilson feared that if he went to war, German-Americans might march on Washington. FDR was so fearful that the blood ties of Japanese citizens and residents would trump their loyalty to the United States he ordered 110,000 transferred from California to detention camps for the duration of the war.

In Arkansas last year, a Muslim opposed to the U.S. wars shot two soldiers at a recruitment center, killing one. In Kuwait, before the invasion of Iraq, a Muslim soldier threw a grenade into the tent of his commanding officer, killing two and wounding 14.

This is not to suggest that all American Muslims or Arabs should be citizens under suspicion. Muslims have died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, as German-Americans died fighting against Germany in two world wars. But it is to say this:

America is unraveling. No longer are we one nation and one people. Tens of millions have come and tens of millions are coming whose first loyalty is to the kinfolk and country they left behind, and to the faith they carry in their hearts. And if, in our long war against "Islamofascism," we are seen as trampling on their nation, faith or kinsmen, they will see us, as Hasan came to see us, as the enemy of their sacred identity.

There is no American Melting Pot anymore. It was discarded by our elites as an instrument of cultural genocide. Now we celebrate America as the most multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural country on earth, the Universal Nation of Ben Wattenberg's warblings.

And, yet, we are surprised by ethnic espionage in our midst, the cursing of America from mosques in our cities, the news that Somali immigrants are going home to fight our Somali allies, and that illegal aliens march under Mexican flags to demand American citizenship.

I know what Buchanan has written about this stuff in the past, and I don't endorse it. But in general, he's onto something -- something analyzed from the old-school liberal left by the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the early 1990s. From a Commentary review of his 1992 book "The Disuniting of America":

Schlesinger's thesis is that the current cult of ethnicity imperils the very basis of the American experiment. Although multiculturalists may think they own the patent on "diversity," Schlesinger shows that diversity has been America's trademark since inception. Our unique admixture of peoples has prompted both native-born and foreign observers to ask: what can hold so variegated a nation together? From the 18th to the 20th century the answer has remained constant: the "American Creed." As Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944, Americans hold in common "the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals" of any country in the West: the ideals of equality and the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity. It is adherence to those ideals, not one's race, original nationality, or ethnicity, that makes one an American.

Today, says Schlesinger, the American identity is in jeopardy as multiculturalism and Afrocentrism ["Afrocentrism"? Wow, haven't heard that word in a long time. This does come from the early 1990s, though. -- RD] elevate racial and ethnic over national affiliation. At the end of this road, he warns, lie Yugoslavia and other contemporary battlegrounds of racial and ethnic separatism. While the analogy may seem a touch overwrought, there can be no question that multiculturalists are playing with weapons that can wreak havoc on our already inadequate schools, our social structure, and economy.

Don't lose that point. Schlesinger says America has always been diverse, but whatever its sins and failings, it always insisted that to be an American was to live up to certain ideals -- and that, not tribalism (as is the case for every other nation on earth), is what held us together as a country. You may find Buchanan's bristly nativism repulsive, but the deeper point he makes is a profound one, one that has been acknowledged by liberals like Schlesinger, who rightly worry about where this is going over time.

I was thinking the other day when I read that Nidal Hasan had told colleagues that he was "Muslim first, American second," that Hasan had that exactly right. If any Jew or Christian would put his national identity over his religious identity, he is an idolater and should repent. I pray that I will in all times and at every opportunity choose fidelity to God over fidelity to nation. The thing is, as a Christian, one has pretty much never had to make that choice. I do not worry, and indeed honor, the Muslim soldier who places God above country -- but only as long as there is no serious conflict between serving both. If he believes that serving God precludes him from serving his country in the military, that is a very, very big problem.

If we ever get to the place where serious Christians have to choose between serving God and serving the nation -- as German Christians had to choose in the Nazi years -- America is over ... unless, of course, the church becomes co-opted by nationalism, as the Nazis managed to do in their day. I don't think it would be all that difficult to do today, I'm sorry to say. But give it time. The country may well be changing in ways that will make it harder and harder for even halfway serious Christians to identify with the regime. What then for Christians in America? And: is this "diversity is our strength" mantra really a tacit admission that diversity -- insofar as it implies that what divides us should be more important than what unites us -- is feared as our weakness?

I know, these are separate questions. Mostly.

UPDATE: To clarify, I am genuinely happy that we live in a culture where White Male Hegemony is no longer privileged. That was unjust. My objection is the philosophical shift employed to get there -- embracing the idea of a demographically-determined distributive justice. I find that un-American, and merely replacing one ethnic-gender-and-culture-based injustice with another one.