Dinesh D' Souza, an immigrant from India who is now a U.S. citizen, is author of the New York Times best-seller What’s So Great About America. A few years ago, he wrote a paper for the Heritage Foundation called What’s Great About America. For seven days, I'm posting, one each day, the qualities D'Souza listed in his paper. Here's #5.
Religious Liberty
America has found a solution to religious and ethnic conflict. In many countries today, people from different faiths or tribes are engaged in bloody conflict: Serbs and Croatians, Sikhs and Hindus, Hindus and Muslims, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Jews and Palestinians, Hutu and Tutsi—the list of religious and ethnic combatants goes on and on. Even in countries where ethnic or religious differences do not lead to extreme violence, there is generally no framework for people to coexist harmoniously. In France and Germany, for example, nonwhite immigrants have proved largely indigestible. They form an alien underclass within Europe, and Europeans seem divided about whether to subjugate them or to expel them. One option that is not available to the nonwhite immigrants is to become full citizens. They cannot “become French” or “become German” because being French and German is a function of blood and birth. You become French by having French parents.
In America, things are different. Consider the example of New York City. It is a tumultuous place, teeming with diversity. New York has black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and native. I have noticed two striking things about these people. They are energetic, hard-working, opportunistic: They want to succeed and believe there is a good chance they can. Second, for all their profound differences, they manage somehow to get along. This raises a question about New York and about America: How does it manage both to reconcile such fantastic ethnic and religious and socioeconomic diversity and give hope and inspiration to so many people from all over the world?
The credit, I believe, goes largely to the American Founders. The Founders were all too familiar with the history of the religious wars in Europe, specifically their legacy of havoc and destruction. They were determined to avoid that bloodshed in the New World. Not that the Founders were anti-religion. On the contrary, they were religious men (some Deist, some orthodox Christian) who insisted that political legitimacy and rights derive from God. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, insists that the source of our rights is “our Creator.” It is because rights come from God, and not us, that they are “inalienable.”
Despite the religious foundation for the American system of government, the Founders were determined not to permit theological differences to become the basis for political conflict. The solution they came up with was as simple as it was unique: separation of religion and government. This is not the same thing as religious tolerance. Think about what tolerance means. If I tolerate you, that implies I believe you are wrong: I object to your views, but I will put up with you. England had enacted a series of acts of religious toleration, but England also had an official church. The American system went beyond toleration in refusing to establish a national church and in recognizing that all citizens, as a matter of right, were free to practice their religion. As America’s first President, George Washington, put it in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, of August 1790:
It is now that tolerance is no more spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
One reason that separation of religion and government worked is that colonial America was made up of numerous, mostly Protestant sects. The Puritans dominated in Massachusetts; the Anglicans, in Virginia; the Catholics were concentrated in Maryland; and so on. No group was strong enough to subdue the others, and so it was in every group’s interest to “live and let live.” The ingenuity of the American solution is evident in Voltaire’s remark that where there is one religion, you have tyranny; where there are two, you have civil conflict; but where they are many, you have freedom.
A second reason the American Founders were able to avoid religious oppression and conflict is that they found a way to channel people’s energies away from theological quarrels and into commercial activity. The American system is founded on property rights and trade, and The Federalist tells us that the protection of the unequal faculties of obtaining property is “the first object of government.” The logic of this position is best expressed by Samuel Johnson’s remark: “there are few ways in which a man is so innocently occupied than in getting money.” The Founders reasoned that people who are working assiduously to better their condition, people who are planning to make an addition to their kitchen and who are saving up for a vacation, are not likely to go around spearing their neighbors.
America has found a similar solution to the problem of racial and ethnic division: Do not extend rights to ethnic groups, only to individuals; in this way, all are equal in the eyes of the law, opportunity is open to everyone who can take advantage of it, and everybody who embraces the law and the American way of life can “become American.”
Of course, Americans have not always lived by these principles, and there are exceptions, such as affirmative action. Such policies remain controversial because, in a sense, they are un-American. In general, however, America is the only country in the world that extends full membership to outsiders. The typical American could go to India and stay for 40 years, perhaps even taking Indian citizenship, but he could not “become Indian.” Indians would not consider such a person Indian, nor would it be possible for him to think of himself in that way. In America, by contrast, millions of people come from all over the world, and over time most of them come to think of themselves as Americans. Their experience suggests that becoming Americans is less a function of birth or blood and more a function of embracing a set of ideas and a way of life.
Today in America, we see how the experiment that the Founders embarked upon two centuries ago has turned out. In American cities like New York, for example, tribal and religious battles, such as we see in Lebanon, Mogadishu, Kashmir, and Belfast, are nowhere in evidence. In Manhattan restaurants, white and African–American secretaries have lunch together. In Silicon Valley, Americans of Jewish and Palestinian descent collaborate on e-commerce solutions and play racquetball after work. Hindus and Muslims, Serbs and Croatians, Turks and Armenians all seem to have forgotten their ancestral differences and joined the vast and varied parade of New Yorkers. Everyone wants to “make it,” to “get ahead,” to “hit it big.” And even as they compete, people recognize that, somehow, they are all in this together in pursuit of some great, elusive American dream.
