In Sugar Land, Texas, a giant statue depicting the monkey-faced Hindu deity, Hanuman, was erected in August 2024. Officially titled Statue of Union, many Texans and Americans elsewhere have found this monument to be an aberration. For some it is the aesthetic unsightliness. For others it is a religious aversion to having a pagan idol be raised to such heights. And for others it is a demonstration of just how many foreigners now live in Texas.

I see each of these points as pins on a board that, when connected, reveal a fault line in American civic life: we are divided culturally—and the divide is widening.

America is not an abstract, universal idea that anyone can adopt, as a former Obama-appointed global citizen opined recently in his chiding of Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award dinner. America requires Americans. No, we don’t all need to look and sound identical, but we do need to be specific about what makes an American an American. American culture, with its Christian civil religion, is required to maintain this union of states and their self-governing peoples. You cannot take people from any other civic, commercial, or cultural context, drop them within American borders, and expect that you will get the same results as those who are fully assimilated to our country’s historic way of life.

Indians are from an old civilization that is distinct from the one built in Europe, globalized by Britain and Spain, and that America currently is an inheritor and torchbearer of. While many Indians have successfully adopted the Western way of life, there are many more who carry an apprehension toward American culture.

Many of the Hindu Indians I live around in the suburbs north of Dallas will freely admit they moved here merely for higher-paying jobs and the availability of nice things they were unable to obtain in India. “We had a farm. I was happy. But my son wanted a better job,” one sweet matron told my wife with a resigned sadness. “My family is here, so I must be here.” Another has remarked how she loves to sit at her window and watch my six children playing outside, as she only has one grandchild who has been raised in America—and her children want no more, as it would interfere with their work.

I feel a certain sympathy with these immigrants who are struggling with culture shock. They may have nicer homes in America—but they are not at home. This is a strange land to them, just as India would be to me if I lived there. And the American is a stranger to them. They do not consider themselves Americans, and they are worried that their children and descendants will become like the strangers they live among.

The Sugar Land statue, or murti, along with other religious displays such as celebrations of Diwali, are not simple public practices of faith: they are cultural statements meant to pacify fears among Hindus that their native culture and its religion will be lost to America’s material excesses and its Christian religion. Large numbers of Hindu Indians living in proximity to each other enable them to speak their native language, eat their traditional foods, and practice their religion.

In essence, Indian culture is kept intact, and Indians remain insulated from and unassimilated to American culture. Many do not become American, but remain Indians who just happen to live in America.

I regret that I must use Indian immigrants as my example of unassimilated America. They are merely responding to what has become commonplace in America, England, Canada, and the West more broadly—and therefore what they believe to be the norm.

English is unwritten and unspoken in increasing numbers of our cities and towns, with residents unable to speak our nation’s language and being offered the choice to vote for a foreign-born Marxist in New York City. Dueling demonstrations carrying Palestinian and Israeli flags have become almost commonplace in our streets, just as residents of California wave Mexican flags in protest of their forthcoming deportations. Somalis in Minnesota celebrate their native country’s independence day en masse together with local officials—then vote them out in favor of alternatives they consider their own. When I asked one recently naturalized immigrant from Colombia if she considered herself an American now that she is a citizen, she said bluntly, “No. I am Colombian.”

What would have been thought of as egregious foreign incursions a hundred years ago is the message America now sends: becoming an American is not akin to living in America or being a citizen of America. It is completely optional. If citizenship is only a piece of paper that protects you from deportation and allows you access to our material goods and services, then we have devalued it to the point of being worthless.

No Hyphenated Americans

When thinking of small ethno-religious minorities in America like Hassidic Jews (180,000) or the Amish (395,000) who have historically kept mostly to themselves, this point may seem trite. But it is consequential when the sheer number of Hindus—and the potential for many, many more—is truly understood.

The last U.S. census posits that there are over 450,000 Hindus in Texas alone, doubled from a decade ago. In 2022, Indians comprised the largest share of international homebuyers in Central Texas, according to an Austin Board of Realtors report. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has gone to India twice on diplomatic missions, touting mutually beneficial financial arrangements and “common values of family, faith, compassion, and hard work.”

Economics aside, these are supposed cultural values that the governor is identifying. While all the words Governor Abbott used are perhaps debatable, the biggest equivocation is “faith.” Quite obviously in contradiction to the governor, the historic faith of Texans, Christianity, is not held in common with the vast majority of Indians, who are Hindu.

Though I have no flat objection to the arrival of specific individuals from elsewhere in the world who wish to become unhyphenated Americans in order to better themselves and the United States, the construction of a foreign idol by a rapidly expanding minority population of newcomers underscores the loss of what used to be a requirement to live in America: assimilation into its culture, of which its civil religion—Christianity—is a cornerstone.

In a post for the Institute of Religion and Democracy’s blog Juicy Ecumenism, Mark Tooley rebuked me and others for expressing the desire for a shared American culture and dismay at literal pagan idols being raised in our homeland. Tooley asks what “Christian nationalists” (a label I’ve rejected as an inaccurate pejorative used by militant anti-Christians) think the government should do in this matter? We can debate specific proposals, but my wish is for those in government and our nation’s institutions to be conscious of the part a homogenous culture plays in a stable, civilized society. The thought that “government might do something!” to curate or protect the dominant and preferred culture of its historic people is apparently beyond the comprehension of some. So to help fire the imagination, let us look at another people who came to America—and to Texas! The German people.

In his book Turning Germans into Texans: World War I and the Assimilation and Survival of German Culture in Texas, 1900-1930, Matthew D. Tippens offers an instructive case study in assimilation and the formation of civic identity. He traces the journey of German immigrants who arrived in Texas in the mid-19th century, with their own language, customs, religion, and ethos. Lutheran, Catholic, or freethinking, these settlers had formed a broad but still insular group, slow to integrate into the already established fabric of American and regional Texan life. Tippens’s narrative is sympathetic (as am I) to the losses of ethnic distinctiveness, but it provides a compelling portrait of how cultural assimilation, often aided by state policy, forged a cohesive national character.

Germans in Texas preserved their linguistic and institutional separateness into the 20th century. They published German-language newspapers, conducted German-speaking services in German churches, maintained German schools that taught in the German tongue, and established community halls and festivals that reinforced their communal boundaries. Tippens documents this with care, noting how these practices kept the “German-Texan” identity distinct from the “Anglo-Texan” majority. But the arrival of World War I marked a decisive rupture.

Amid rising national insecurity over split loyalties among the public, the government of the State of Texas, and in some cases the federal government in Washington, moved swiftly to eliminate internal doubts. The German language was prohibited in public schools. Pastors were pressured to preach in English. Local officials even began treating private speech in German as potentially seditious. In short, the state, backed by public sentiment, enforced a program of assimilation with remarkable efficiency. Tippens, while critical of its harshness, acknowledges its efficacy: within a generation, German cultural institutions in Texas collapsed.

But the German people did not. They endured—not as a separate ethnos, but as Americans. They married across ethnic lines, adapted to prevailing civic norms, and ceased to think of themselves as Germans first. In place of a hyphenated identity, they adopted a national one. This transformation of Germans into Americans may have been jarring while it was taking place, but it stands as a triumph of political formation and moral cohesion. It demonstrated that assimilation is not merely possible, but necessary, and that cultural inheritance need not be lost in the midst of it—it can be transformed and incorporated into a higher unity.

Tippens and some Americans of German descent still feel a sense of sadness over the loss of our distinct traditions and language inherited from the old country—but not a single one would prefer to go back to Europe or transform America into Germany. We are Americans. Not German-Americans. Just Americans. America is their home. And they love it. Though they may hold aspects of their peculiar subculture near and dear in food, songs, and stories, they have submitted that culture to this land’s particular culture, the American culture.

Is the history of this forced assimilation a tragedy? Perhaps, to a degree. But it was politically and morally justified. And those who care for national unity should view it as a welcome precedent. A nation’s people and their governing bodies have both the right and the duty to demand that newcomers conform to its cultural and religious norms. Without a shared group identity, no nation can survive. The American nation, particularly in moments of strain, has always exercised this prerogative. It was this principled assertiveness that transformed a continent of European colonists and later immigrants into a single people.

In our present moment, we have reversed that logic. To insist that immigrants adopt our language, mores, and civic ideals is now seen not as patriotic, but as prejudicial. Not only do we not hold recent immigrants to this standard, but we’ve reversed course on historical minorities who were on their way to full assimilation by decrying “whiteness” (another word for American cultural norms) as something that should be scorned, rejected, and outright rebelled against—the invisible hand of bigotry and oppression we all must condemn without reservation. You could say, “It is not enough to not be an American: you must be anti-American.”

Without a unifying identity—what makes the “pluribus” an “unum”—pluralism will rapidly dissolve into tribalism. Americans less than a hundred years ago understood this. Why should we play dumb now?

Refusing to Worship the Ideal of Another

The present-day case of Sugar Land, Texas, where a towering Hindu idol has been erected, should be unacceptable to Americans (especially Christians), and doubly so to those of Indian heritage who see this land as their own and this people as their people.

Unlike a German store or Lutheran school of the 19th century, which could be and were quickly subordinated to American norms, a monument to a god from a distinctly foreign civilization proclaims a parallel order that makes no pretense of assimilation. It is not a gesture of integration, but of presence—and an intention of permanence. This goes for any statue, temple, campus, mural, or other declarations of occupation.

What you elevate in the public eye is what you encourage the people to idealize in their hearts. Do we want immigrants to be looking backwards at what they left? Or looking forward to what they now are privileged to inherit?

Tooley says this is simply the cost of pluralism. But pluralism is not an end in itself. It is the fruit of a Christian order that’s confident enough to tolerate minority views, because it assumes its own cultural hegemony. If that majority is disregarded and that confidence eroded, pluralism becomes its opposite: a Babel of conflicting gods and moralities, doomed to be abandoned and fall.

No one is advocating deliberate government persecution of American citizens who observe certain religious tenets or have recent ancestors from foreign nations. The First Amendment guarantees religious liberty. But let’s be honest about our Founders’ intentions: the purpose of that liberty was to protect dissenting Christian sects within a Christian moral framework—not to permit the importation of rival civilizational orders.

The crux of the issue is not that there exists private practice of Hinduism in some form, or even simply that an offensive statue to one of their deities stands against the Texas sky. The statue itself is a public manifestation of an under-examined reality: that unassimilated cultures exist in America. Beyond that, it is a declaration of intent to remain unassimilated. For the idol to be excused and dismissed shows a resignation of this reality and a toleration for this intention—and it is this nihilism that is unprecedented in our history and fundamentally un-American, not the protestations of I or anyone who would refuse to bow to it.

As Kevin D. Williamson recently noted, America is a Christian nation not by legal fiat but by cultural fact—just as it is an English-speaking nation without a statute requiring it. Christianity shaped our institutions, our conception of law and liberty, our ethos of charity, and our traditions of self-rule. The civic peace that Tooley praises is not sustained by diversity for the sake of itself, but by the cultural cohesion that Christian norms and people who valued that culture once ensured.

The deeper question, then, is not whether non-Christian Americans have a right to worship, or if immigrants can hold to elements of their historic culture, but whether Americans retain the right to shape their own nation’s future. Are we permitted to determine whether the foundation we build upon remains a distinctly Western, Christian civilization that assimilates outsiders into its mold? Or is becoming a polyglot holding pen for mutually exclusive, competing cultures the only acceptable answer?

This Land Is Our Land

Germans were made into Americans not because they were coerced by mobs. The government prevented such unrest by heeding the concerns of the citizenry. By understanding the requirements of cohesion and acting decisively to incentivize the transformation, America avoided the dangers of sectarian strife when international affairs came to the forefront. Through intentional public policy and community expression of displeasure, clear expectations were conveyed that immigrants were required to become Americans. And the Germans, to their credit, responded. They quite rapidly entered the civic mainstream after years of delay.

What we face now is more intractable. The newest arrivals—not only Indians but many others as well—are coming in greater numbers than any prior groups and do not believe they need to change for America. To the contrary, America must change for them. They establish communities that replicate the political and cultural norms of their homelands. They vote as blocs. They see the issues of their native countries as taking preeminence over their present states. And they raise monuments to foreign gods—not in private devotion, but in public affirmation of the lands, lives, and loyalties they were supposed to have left behind.

This is not assimilation. It is colonization. And it is too often encouraged by Americans who have lost the sense of what this country is and ought to be. In an insipid diatribe railing against Vance and the pro-American tone of the government, a blogger for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “I learned in high school that people come here not because of how Americans live, but because they have the freedom to live however they want.” He speaks truthfully, as this lie is taught in our education system and preached by formerly elite institutions. The message is loud and clear: come to America, live in America—but do not become an American.

If a distinctly American identity undergirded by a Christian civilization is no longer asserted, what shall replace it? A thousand shrines? A hundred languages? No common law, no common culture, no shared moral grammar?

Is this what you want for America? Perhaps you do, or you do not care. But for those of us who love it, we want an America that holds to its roots and maintains our constitutional order and our civilization. To do so, we must not shy away from reasserting a distinctly American identity and setting the conditions for acceptance into its culture, not just our borders.

Pluralism rests on the center trunk of a dominant culture, a Leitkultur, not the absence of one. Subcultures can be preserved when there is a monoculture that all can live in accordance with.

We must find again the will to expect—not merely invite—assimilation from any and all who wish to call this land their home. And we must recognize that the choice before us is not a specter of the “Christian nationalism” of secularist smear campaigns versus perfect tolerance, but a distinctly American nation built on a Christian civilization versus fractious, tribal chaos.

If the United States of America is to endure as one indivisible nation under God, we must take these signs seriously and raise our expectations for citizenship, which is a precious thing. It should not be portrayed as just a piece of paper awarded for correctly answering multiple-choice questions on a test and meeting some material preconditions. It must resolve the question of loyalty. It must involve a pledge of allegiance to the republic. For it is a sacred oath that symbolizes the bond with your fellow citizens. It is as a baptism, where the old man and his old loyalties to his old nation and its old laws, his old people and their old gods, die with him. But a new, better man rises. One who gives loyalty to a better nation, with better laws, a better people, and a better God.