What Kind of Nation?

The source: “The Founding of Nations” by Wilfred M. McClay, in ___First Things___, March ­2006.

Today’s swirling debates over fundamental issues such as immigration, religion, and spreading democracy abroad have sparked a fresh crisis of identity in the United States. Forced “to think more deeply and clearly about who and what we are,” writes historian Wilfred McClay, Americans have looked instinctively to the past.

But what past will they find? For a century, historians and intellectuals have been busy hacking away at the “myths” of the Founding and at the very notion that it exists as a unique historical moment. (For an example, see “Tom Paine’s Myth,” p. 80.) In this view, as McClay summarizes it, the Founding was the work of “flawed, unheroic, and ­self-­interested white men [that] offers nothing to which we should grant any abiding authority.” It sees the Constitution as “a mere political deal meant to be superseded by other political deals.”

In attacking founding “myths,” historians are taking sides in the age-old tension between the respective roles of creed and culture in the making of American national identity. It’s a tension between “on the one hand, the idea of the United States as a nation built on the foundation of ­self-­evident, rational, and universally applicable propositions about human nature and human society; and, on the other hand, the idea of the United States as a very unusual, historically specific and contingent entity, underwritten by a long, intricately evolved, and very particular legacy of English law, language, and customs, ­Greco-­Roman cultural antecedents, and ­Judeo-­Christian sacred texts and theological and moral teachings.”

In attacking the legitimacy of the Founders, historians attempt to erase the cultural side of the equation, reducing American identity to all creed and no culture. That would leave nothing, according to McClay, but “abstract normative ideas about freedom and democracy and self-government that can flourish just as easily in any cultural and historical soil, including a multilingual, post-religious, or post-national one.”

McClay, who teaches at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, is no partisan of a purely cultural view of American identity, and he thinks that American sentimentality about the Founding needs occasional cor­rection, but debunking alone is not enough. Founding myths are not prettified fairy tales, as detractors think, but “a structure of meaning, a manner of giving a manageable shape to the cosmos.” And they are surprising in their moral complexity and capacity to instruct. Consider the often hair-raising creation myths of antiquity, such as the story of Rom­ulus and Remus, the foun­ders of Rome, or the Scriptural account of the ups and downs of the “feckless” Israelites, who continually broke the laws of their ­covenant-­making God. No American understood the value of the nation’s foun­ding myths better than Abra­ham Lincoln, who summoned America to fulfill its ideals by invoking the “mystic chords of memory.”

As Lincoln understood, Amer­ica’s founding myth “does not depend on a belief in the moral perfection of the Founders them­selves,” McClay writes. “We should not try to edit out those stories’ strange moral complexity, because it is there for a reason. Indeed, it is precisely our encounter with the surprise of their strangeness that reminds us of how much we have yet to learn from them.”