What Makes an American? Northwood Professor Examines the Convictions That Define a Nation.
What makes Americans one people?
Is it a shared ancestry, culture or historical experience? Or is American identity ultimately grounded in a common commitment to enduring ideas?
Northwood University Professor Dr. Glenn A. Moots examines those timely questions in a new essay published by Ad Fontes, a journal produced by The Davenant Institute.
Titled “Is America a People or an Idea? The Case Study of Protestant Constitutionalism in Our Semiquincentennial,” Moots’ essay challenges readers to consider what united Americans at the nation’s founding — and what must continue to unite them today.
Moots, professor and department chair of political science and philosophy at Northwood, begins with a familiar image from Thomas Jefferson: the rejection of the notion that some people are born with saddles on their backs while others are born “booted and spurred” to rule them.
Jefferson used that language while reflecting on the Declaration of Independence in 1826, but the image originated with Richard Rumbold, a 17th-century English Protestant who defended what he considered the ancient rights and liberties of the British constitutional tradition.
That connection serves as the starting point for Moots’ examination of an intellectual inheritance that preceded the American Revolution by generations.
In Britain and colonial America, Moots explains, Protestant identity often represented more than a collection of theological doctrines. It also became associated with political independence, constitutional government, the rule of law and the conviction that rulers — like citizens — must remain subject to legal limits.
This shared commitment helped unite people who otherwise possessed significant regional, cultural and religious differences.
The English, Welsh and Scots did not begin as a single, culturally uniform people. Nor did residents of the American colonies share one seamless identity. New Englanders and Virginians had different customs, experiences and interests, and colonists remained sharply divided over independence.
What brought Patriots together was not their membership in a perfectly homogeneous population. It was their belief that fundamental rights and liberties had been violated — and that constitutional principles worth preserving were at stake.
“Protestantism” therefore came to express a broader political conviction: that legitimate authority must be constrained by law and that liberty depends on preserving a just constitutional order.
Moots also examines an important transformation during the Revolution. As the United States sought assistance from Catholic France and appealed to residents of Quebec, Americans increasingly separated constitutionalism from its earlier Protestant and anti-Catholic language.
The terminology changed, but the underlying commitment remained.
The American cause continued to rest on the belief that government exists within legitimate limits, that rights cannot be discarded for political convenience and that no ruler stands above the law.
That history informs Moots’ answer to the question at the center of his essay.
A nation cannot rely solely on ancestry, ethnicity or cultural similarity to preserve its institutions. People who share the same background do not necessarily share the same political convictions. Americans were divided over independence in 1776, just as Americans remain divided over constitutional questions today.
Yet Moots also cautions against treating America’s defining principles as abstract slogans that can survive without study, practice or common experience.
The ideas that sustain a free society must become convictions.
For Moots, the most important inheritance of 1776 is a commitment to constitutionalism: liberty under law, the preservation of longstanding rights and the restraint of both arbitrary rulers and unrestricted popular passion.
That inheritance can unite people with different backgrounds, but only when citizens understand it, value it and accept responsibility for preserving it.
As the United States observes the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Moots’ essay offers a timely reminder that a nation’s future depends on more than remembering its founding. Each generation must decide whether it will continue to uphold the principles that made self-government and ordered liberty possible.