Does a Hindu statue in Sugar Land, Texas, threaten America’s stability and cohesion? Andrew Beck thinks so. He wants the government to “curate or protect the dominant and preferred culture of its historic people.”
In a column I wrote to which Beck responds, I suggested America’s Christian culture is not imperiled by a lone statue in a community like Sugar Land, where Christianity and churches are quite strong. Recalling the U.S. Nazi Party based in the community where I lived during my 1970s boyhood, I extolled the U.S. Constitution for protecting free speech—even for the “absurd and the hateful,” which is “parcel to our freedom from despotism.” The Constitution, I argued, “expresses a providential trust that if truth and virtue are free to argue their case, they can in the open market of ideas survive and even prevail, at least to a certain extent, in our fallen world.”
Beck evidently has less providential trust in the power of truth and virtue, warning that “What you elevate in the public eye is what you encourage the people to idealize in their hearts.” He asks, do “we want immigrants to be looking backwards at what they left? Or looking forward to what they now are privileged to inherit?”
Beck surmises that my evident indifference about Hindu idols reveals my wider complacency about the “cost of pluralism.” He warns:
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.
But Hindus comprise less than 1% of the U.S. population. In fact, all non-Christian religions together (for example, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism) constitute just 7% of America, according to the latest Pew survey. Beck says these non-Christian groups are “rapidly expanding.” Seventy years ago, about 5% of America was non-Christian, and were mostly Jewish. Is a great republic shaped by Christianity truly under threat by small numbers of religious minorities? Does not their full equality as citizens illustrate the confidence of our “Christian order” that Beck extols?
Contrary to his assertions, the actual challenge to our “Christian order” is the self-created retreat of Christianity in America. Fifty years ago, over 90% of the population identified as Christian. Today it’s estimated at 62%. The decline comes not because of Buddhist or Islamic advances (both only 1% of the population) but because of collapsing Christian affiliation by Americans raised as Christians or with parents who identified with Christianity. Twenty-nine percent of Americans say they are religiously unaffiliated. Five percent categorize themselves as atheist, 6% as agnostic, and 19% as “nothing in particular.”
Does a “Christian order” need a strong majority Christian culture? Some European nations now have majorities that no longer identify with Christianity or any religion. These nations are still prosperous and in relatively good order. We shall in coming decades learn if these post-Christian cultures, absent Christian revival, can survive as Western democracies based on the moral legacy of the past.
Beck wants American citizenship to include a “pledge of allegiance to the republic” that excludes obeisance to a “foreign idol” and features “assimilation into its culture, of which its civil religion—Christianity—is a cornerstone.” Should the 1% of America professing Hinduism therefore be excluded from American citizenship? What if they are only cultural or nominal Hindus? Should only the fans of the statue in Sugar Land be targeted for exclusion? Are they really such a threat to us?
Very likely many if not most American Hindus of foreign origin, among those who practice other non-Christian religions, are already assimilating. Most likely already accept the major premises of American democracy and culture, including its broad originally Protestant-inspired civil religion. America tends to turn immigrants or their children toward secularism or Protestantism. Most foreign-born Hindus and other immigrants are not planning to be long-term “hyphenated” Americans. American mass consumer culture, for better or for worse, absorbs today’s immigrants into Americanism far faster than it did for the Germans or Irish of the 19th century, who could potentially self-ghettoize, or be ghettoized, for decades if not generations.
Indian immigrants, unlike immigrants from Latin America, already speak English. Also unlike immigrants from South America, they come from a stable democracy that originated in the British Empire. And unlike many from the southern continent, Indians are mostly highly educated and high-income professionals. They contribute mightily to American prosperity. Sixteen percent of Indian immigrants are Christian. Only about half are Hindu. Weeding out those who support the statue could be complicated. In our nation of over 340 million, should we worry about a mere hundreds of thousands of Hindus who might esteem statues?
Or should we instead focus on the religiously unaffiliated Americans who have disconnected from Christianity and institutional religion? Law and policy in any nation flow from that nation’s culture. Our “Christian order” originates in Christian people and Christian churches teaching Christian principles. Perhaps better than fretting about Hindus and their occasional statues, we should upgrade our churches and Christian institutions for more effective evangelism, discipleship, and spiritual formation. Perhaps we Christians should pray more often, more expansively witness to our faith, and live in ways that draw non-believers to the Gospel. This is how Christianity traditionally grows—not by suppressing non-Christians. And it is important not to confuse Christianity, a global and transcultural faith, with our nationality.
Beck speaks of American citizenship 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.” The “new, better man” rises, “who gives loyalty to a better nation, with better laws, a better people, and a better God.” Most Christians save this language for their conversion into Christianity, which calls us to die to self and be “born again.” God willing, the Gospel will always burn bright in America, preserving us from His judgment and keeping us in His mercy. But America is not the Kingdom of God. And the Kingdom of God does not advance in this current age through coercion or compulsion.
Our “stable, civilized society,” whose “dominant” culture has never been static, is most secure when upholding traditional American principles of free speech, freedom of religion, and legal equality for all. Pluralism is not the end goal. But pluralism in our fallen world—if it upholds approximate human dignity, sustains relative social harmony, and protects the church’s freedom to share the Gospel—is providentially the best mechanism available to fallen humanity for “Christian order.”