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Chapter 5

"a message to unbelievers

that they are outsiders,

not full members of their

own community."(83)

Are atheists strangers in their own country?

God, the Cross

and America

"shape a culture for which there was no European parallel."(83)

What is the current

population of America?

  • 86% said they believe in God (1999)
  • Majority claim membership to a religious organization
  • 49% would vote for an atheist president (1999)
  • 69% would be bothered/refuse to accept the marriage of a family member to an atheist (2001)

A Religious People

"American Catholics are a nuisance for Rome just because they are... well, so Protestant."

Do Protestant values have the same influence on other Christian denominations?

Protestant America and Catholicism

"Civil religion enables Americans to bring together their secular politics and their religious society, to marry God and country, so as to give religious sanctity to their patriotism and nationalist legitimacy to their religious beliefs, and thus to merge what could be conflicting loyalties into loyalty towards a religiously endowed country." (Huntington 103)

"Overall, civil religion has converted Americans from a religious people of many denominations into a nation with the soul of a church." (Huntington 103)

Civil Religion

Religion and Christianity

Does the secular government operate with religious undertones? Or are these traditions just remnants of the past?

Deconstructionism began "to challenge the salience, the substance and the desirability of the concept of America."(Huntington 141)

How do we go about defining America's national identity?

How do we identify ourselves?

The Deconstructionist Movement

"The core of the American Creed involves the ideals of the essential dignity or the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice and fair opportunity." (146)

How do we define inalienable rights? Do we center them on natural rights, legal rights or both?

"racial gerrymandering"

"The dream of a Nation of equal citizens in a society where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs." (155)

Chapter 7

Should "America be race-blind or race-conscious?"

The Challenge to the Creed

Bilingual or English only?

Is there a real disadvantage to a citizen if they do not speak English?

"Parents do not want their children working in sweatshops of cleaning downtown office buildings when they grow up. They want them to get into Harvard or Stanford, and that won't happen unless they are truly fluent and literate in English." (170)

The Challenge to English

"America is not and should not be a society with a single pervasive national culture. The melting pot and tomato soup metaphors do not describe the true America. America is instead a mosaic, a salad, or even a tossed salad." (171)

Are we better off being a mosaic or a melting pot?

The Challenge to the Core Culture

Samuel Huntington's Who Are We?

What began as a "protest against Anglocentric culture" became an "ethnic upsurge."(Schlesinger 145)

Deconstructing America: The Rise of Subnational Identities

Movement of

Christians

to America

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