July 4, 2026 (the 250th) deserves sincere reflection, but on that day, and especially from public voices, some of it will be mere political convenience. So I want to pin down one claim that keeps surfacing in my writing because it’s a line worth defending in public: America is a creed, not a tribe.
By “creed” I don’t mean a church statement of faith. I mean a civic proposition—a set of commitments about what makes a government legitimate and what kind of dignity a person has before the state gets a vote. That’s why I’ve always been drawn back to the second paragraph of the Declaration: it’s not just rhetoric, it’s a moral measuring stick, and it indicts us precisely because it’s universal. That’s also why I’ve said America is “great precisely because it is founded on a creed…rather than a race/blood/people/language/religion” (2019-02-23).
A creedal nation works in the opposite direction of bloodline politics. Race is boundary. Ethnicity is inheritance. Religion—often profound in a person’s private life—becomes a political sorting mechanism the moment it’s turned into a membership test. When “American” quietly starts meaning “my lineage,” “my church,” “my kind of people,” the operating system shifts. You can hear it in the possessive language: take it back, this is our country, they’re replacing us. That’s not patriotism; it’s ownership. But America’s essential creed refuses exclusion.
That’s why “blood and soil” isn’t a mere insult or metaphor to me. It’s diagnostic language—an alarm bell. And it’s exactly what I mean when I say Trump-style politics tries to flip American nationalism into something ethnic: “Trump’s blood & soil nationalism overturns American nationalism: we are united by creed, not blood” (2018-11-06). If your definition of the nation can’t be adopted by consent, then it isn’t a democratic identity—it’s a hereditary possession.
One reason the creedal idea matters is that it’s the only version of America that can honestly include the people we’ve historically excluded. It’s also the only version that lets critique be patriotic. The abolitionist appeal is creedal. The civil-rights appeal is creedal. The immigrant’s appeal is creedal: judge the country by its own stated commitments. That argument only works if those commitments are not genetic or sectarian.
By “creed” I don’t mean a church statement of faith. I mean a civic proposition—a set of commitments about what makes a government legitimate and what kind of dignity a person has before the state gets a vote. That’s why I’ve always been drawn back to the second paragraph of the Declaration: it’s not just rhetoric, it’s a moral measuring stick, and it indicts us precisely because it’s universal. That’s also why I’ve said America is “great precisely because it is founded on a creed…rather than a race/blood/people/language/religion” (2019-02-23).
A creedal nation works in the opposite direction of bloodline politics. Race is boundary. Ethnicity is inheritance. Religion—often profound in a person’s private life—becomes a political sorting mechanism the moment it’s turned into a membership test. When “American” quietly starts meaning “my lineage,” “my church,” “my kind of people,” the operating system shifts. You can hear it in the possessive language: take it back, this is our country, they’re replacing us. That’s not patriotism; it’s ownership. But America’s essential creed refuses exclusion.
That’s why “blood and soil” isn’t a mere insult or metaphor to me. It’s diagnostic language—an alarm bell. And it’s exactly what I mean when I say Trump-style politics tries to flip American nationalism into something ethnic: “Trump’s blood & soil nationalism overturns American nationalism: we are united by creed, not blood” (2018-11-06). If your definition of the nation can’t be adopted by consent, then it isn’t a democratic identity—it’s a hereditary possession.
One reason the creedal idea matters is that it’s the only version of America that can honestly include the people we’ve historically excluded. It’s also the only version that lets critique be patriotic. The abolitionist appeal is creedal. The civil-rights appeal is creedal. The immigrant’s appeal is creedal: judge the country by its own stated commitments. That argument only works if those commitments are not genetic or sectarian.
America has asked itself this question over and over, in each generation’s dialect of fear: who “belongs,” and why—Know-Nothing panic about Catholics, suspicion of immigrants as disloyal “foreign” bodies, even the old reflex to warn about “Turks” at the gate. The cast changes; the underlying test stays the same: do we define the nation by blood and heritage, or by consent to the creed?
You can see this most clearly whenever someone tries to narrow who “counts” as American. Years ago I wrote about the claim that “Muslims cannot be good Americans,” and what struck me wasn’t just the prejudice—it was the underlying confusion about how citizenship works in a pluralist republic (2008-01-20). If America is a creed, then a person’s religion may shape their conscience, but it can’t be the price of admission. The moment we make it that, we aren’t protecting the nation; we’re redefining it into a sect.
Likewise, when public religion tries to become public coercion, it reveals the same impulse: “we” own the state, so “they” must be instructed, fenced out, or shamed into conformity. I wrote about that dynamic in the Ten Commandments monument battles—how symbolic establishment isn’t neutral, it’s a bid to recode civic space into religious space (2007-03-11).
So here’s my 250th test for American-ness: not ancestry, not accent, not church, not tribal politics, but whether you assent to the obligations inside the creed—
You can see this most clearly whenever someone tries to narrow who “counts” as American. Years ago I wrote about the claim that “Muslims cannot be good Americans,” and what struck me wasn’t just the prejudice—it was the underlying confusion about how citizenship works in a pluralist republic (2008-01-20). If America is a creed, then a person’s religion may shape their conscience, but it can’t be the price of admission. The moment we make it that, we aren’t protecting the nation; we’re redefining it into a sect.
Likewise, when public religion tries to become public coercion, it reveals the same impulse: “we” own the state, so “they” must be instructed, fenced out, or shamed into conformity. I wrote about that dynamic in the Ten Commandments monument battles—how symbolic establishment isn’t neutral, it’s a bid to recode civic space into religious space (2007-03-11).
So here’s my 250th test for American-ness: not ancestry, not accent, not church, not tribal politics, but whether you assent to the obligations inside the creed—
equal dignity and equal protection; rights that remain real for people you dislike; elections you accept when you lose; law that binds the powerful; pluralism that treats difference as normal instead of contamination.
A creed is hard. It demands restraint. It asks us to prefer principles over possession—especially when fear makes possession feel good. But possession is an illusion, and if America is going to mean anything in its third century, it will be because we keep choosing the creedal version over the blood-and-soil counterfeit, to form a more perfect union.
A creed is hard. It demands restraint. It asks us to prefer principles over possession—especially when fear makes possession feel good. But possession is an illusion, and if America is going to mean anything in its third century, it will be because we keep choosing the creedal version over the blood-and-soil counterfeit, to form a more perfect union.
