Who Are We?
by Samuel Huntington - published by Simon and Schuster, 2004
A Book Review by Father John McCloskey
Samuel Huntington is one of a group of "big-picture" authors, including Niall Ferguson, Philip Jenkins and Francis Fukuyama, who help us to understand the seismic, global, geopolitical changes taking place in this century.
They base their opinions variously on demography, patterns of immigration, growth in numbers, intensity of religious belief and, of course, economics. All of this is of vital importance for Catholics as members of the global Christian religion and for the Church's prospects for evangelization and worldwide influence.
Huntington is best known for his seminal work written 10 years ago and translated into 37 languages, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington's basic thesis in that book is that future conflicts would be largely non-ideological, but rather based upon geographical fault lines that reflect cultures and religious beliefs, e.g. fundamentalist Islamists versus the Christian West. Controversial in its time, it jumped back onto the bestseller list after the events of Sept. 11, 2002, seemed to prove its thesis.
Huntington has written a challenging new book in Who Are We? (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2004), a must-read for anyone interested in the present state and future of the United States.
Not surprisingly, Huntington's new book has also proven highly controversial, in part for insisting that America is at a turning point that could lead to one or more futures:
1.A people espousing the American creed (the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution), but lacking the knowledge of the historical cultural core in which the creed was rooted;
2.A bifurcated country, part Anglo, part Hispanic (due to massive immigration with unsuccessful assimilation), in both language and culture;
3.An exclusivist America that embraces white, European identity, as in the past, and subordinates or excludes other groups;
4.A revitalized America that reaffirms its historic Anglo-Protestant culture and religious commitments in the face of conflicts with an unfriendly world.
Huntington argues that America's greatest strength is its core national values, which are a product of the Anglo-Protestant culture of the 17th and 18th centuries.
"In its origins, America was not a nation of immigrants, it was a society, or societies, of settlers who came to the New World. Settlers and immigrants are fundamentally different. Settlers leave an existing society in order to create a new community, a city on a hill, in a new and often distant territory.
"In America, the Reformation created a new society…without it, there would be no America as we have known it." The settlers' vision for "the promised land" expressed in the American creed included commitment to individualism and a strong work ethic, as well as democratic forms of government.
Huntington is most worried about the large influx of Spanish-speaking, Mexican émigrés to our country. He points out that there are so many millions that assimilation may be close to impossible, setting up over time a country like Canada, Belgium or Switzerland, divided at least by language, if not also by culture.
Empires and countries, even within the past 50 years, have come and gone. During the past 500 years alone, we have seen centuries dominated by the Spanish, French and English, and even the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union. Clearly, the 20th century was dominated by the United States, and at the beginning of the century, in terms of political, cultural and economic power, its dominance is still unmatched. However, the nation is facing challenges, both from within and without, that threaten its current hegemony.
What makes the United States unlike these other former world powers is that its identity is not based on ethnicity but rather on an agreement among free people to undertake an experiment as a democratic republic based on what came to be known as the American creed, i.e. the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If its people are not united in agreeing on what the Unites States is about, it could go the way of the others.
Although on the whole, I agree with many of the points Huntington makes in the book, I have two strong disagreements. First, we should be welcoming the large influx of Christians into our country, even though they are certainly not Anglo-Protestant. What they do provide is an increase in hard-working Christians into our country, making up for what has become the end result of the decline of white Anglo-Protestantism —increasingly small and often disunited families brought on by divorce, contraception and abortion.
While the government tries to form the Spanish-speaking immigrants into good American citizens with respect and admiration for the American creed, it will be the role of the Church to catechize and evangelize them so they, in their turn, will provide a strong Christian influence in the United States.
Second, Huntington barely mentions Catholicism at all, other than to say that it became largely assimilated to the Anglo-Protestant majority. There is some truth to that, and in some ways it helps to explain, in part, the long crisis that the Church in America has suffered for the past 40 years.
However, now close to a quarter of the population of the United States is Catholic. And the Church is the only institution that has stood firm and unequivocally on the sacredness of human life, the dignity of the human person, the value of human work, the centrality of the family, the sanctity of marriage and the importance of the solidarity that can continue to unite us as Americans, or at least assure that we do not drown without a struggle in a cesspool of moral relativism.
It appears somewhat strange, given the multiple quotations in his book from the Frenchman Alexis De Tocqueville in his landmark book Democracy in America, that Huntington finds no room for the attached quote.
Huntington has written a challenging book that asks all the right questions and provides many good answers. However, he falls short in not understanding that the moral decline of America stems, in part, from the disintegration of a mainstream Protestantism that no longer proposes an authoritative moral teaching based on either natural law or sacred Scripture. There is no possibility of turning the clock back. Evangelical Christianity, while more orthodox in its belief, is ahistorical, aliturgical, nonsacramental and ultimately reliant on private judgment. It ebbs and flows based on enthusiasm.
Such a religion cannot transform a society. As De Tocqueville suggested above, perhaps are we now finally seeing the taking of sides between a resurgent Catholicism and a secularist consumerism? In this new century, we will either return home to a Rome that teaches with authority, or live for and in an increasingly brutal and coarse world where the principle end of life is pleasure, life is cheap and there is no expectation of a life hereafter.
As the Catholic Church in the United States regains its health and continues to grow in numbers and vocations through larger families, conversions and immigration, its influence may provide the only foundation for a just and virtuous society of which the Founding Fathers would be proud. While respecting religious freedom, the American creed may well find a firm foundation on the Nicene Creed and the Church it professes. The continued thriving or even survival of the American experiment may depend upon it.
Catholics in America
In the 1840s when Catholics were still a very small minority in the United States Alexis De Tocqueville in his landmark book Democracy in America wrote:
"America is the most democratic country in the world, and it is at the same time (according to reports worthy of belief) the country in which the Roman Catholic religion makes most progress. At first sight this is surprising. Two things must here be accurately distinguished: Equality makes men want to form their own opinions; but, on the other hand, it imbues them with the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity and impartiality in the power that governs society.
"Men living in democratic times are therefore very prone to shake off all religious authority; but if they consent to subject themselves to any authority of this kind, they choose at least that it should be single and uniform. Religious powers not radiating from a common center are naturally repugnant to their minds; and they almost as readily conceive that there should be no religion as that there should be several.
"At the present time, more than in any preceding age, Roman Catholics are seen to lapse into infidelity, and Protestants to be converted to Roman Catholicism. If you consider Catholicism within its own organization, it seems to be losing; if you consider it from outside, it seems to be gaining. Nor is this difficult to explain.
"The men of our days are naturally little disposed to believe; but as soon as they have any religion, they immediately find in themselves a latent instinct that urges them unconsciously towards Catholicism. Many of the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church astonish them, but they feel a secret admiration for its discipline, and its great unity attracts them.
"If Catholicism could at length withdraw itself from the political animosities to which it has given rise, I have hardly any doubt but that the same spirit of the age which appears to be so opposed to it would become so favorable as to admit of its great and sudden advancement.
"One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles and to purchase peace at the expense of logic. Thus there have ever been and will ever be men who, after having submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle of authority, will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from it and to keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience.
"But I am inclined to believe that the number of these thinkers will be less in democratic than in other ages, and that our posterity will tend more and more to a division into only two parts, some relinquishing Christianity entirely and others returning to the Church of Rome."
