What Makes A People A People

“Democracy and free markets do not a country make. Constitutions, no matter how eloquent — abstract ideas no matter how lovely do not create a nation. A nation writes its constitution. A nation drafts its own birth certificate. What makes a people and a nation is a common and unique homeland and people, history and heritage, language and literature, song and story, traditions and customs.”

Pat Buchanan
Day Of Reckoning

You cannot import thousands of Muslim Somalians into Lewiston Maine and expect them to become Americans all because they wanted ‘Freedom.’ You can not import tens of thousands of Laotian Hmong to Minnesota and expect them to fit into American culture. You cannot allow millions of illegal immigrants from Hispaniola and expect that they will reinforce Americana. A nation is not defined by its propositions but by the shared participation that its citizenry has in its historical tapestry.
Generational participation in a nations Historical tapestry is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Nations are built on what Abraham Lincoln referred to as the ‘shared chords of mystic memory.’ These shared chords are made up first and foremost by a shared religion which produces a common culture that expresses and reinforces itself through societal institutions. When aliens are introduced in overwhelming numbers into the life of a nation without time to assimilate and with only marginal cultural touchstones the result is not diversity that strengthens but rather diversity that divides and balkanizes.

Those who suggest that these United States are a propositional nation should well consider how other nations have lately done who were formed by means of cobbled together nationalities and religions trying to live as one Nation. Yugoslavia is now five nations going on six. Czechoslovakia divided itself between its Czech people and its Slovak people. Quebec does all it can to distinguish itself from British Canadians. Nations are not formed by shared economic interests. Such an arrangement may be a means of building alliances but it is not a means of building cultures or peoples. Nations are not formed by assenting to a set of abstract propositions. Proposition nations are only as deep as the fortunes of economic prosperity, whithering with the advent of national misfortune. Nations are formed first by a common faith, and then by years of sharing the land together informed by that shared faith as it produces a shared culture that results in shared literature, song, legal structures, economic paradigms and family relationships.

Those who are insisting that nations are made by people from different religions and cultures having only in common the desire to own the latest technological gadget are in for a rude awakening when something happens to turn the market upside down. Shared mystic chords of memory can sustain and carry a people through difficult and adverse times. The absence of those shared chords will result, when adversity arrives, in the different nationalities and religions splitting along their natural lines just as they have been doing in the nations already named.

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him. View all posts by jetbrane