What Is An American? How the History of Marriage Explains It All

By Alan W. Cohen 

     Are we a credal nation, or something entirely different? Is, as some on the Far Right, claim, a descendent of the Mayflower more American than a third-generation citizen from Ukraine, or a second-generation citizen from India?  Or are we, as Ben Shapiro is more apt to say, a credal nation, where we all agree to be Americans? Should we accept all comers regardless of their cultures? 

   Vivek Ramaswamy reopened this old can when he penned an article the week before Christmas. Michael Knowles presented his take on his podcast where he discussed assimilation. Of all the points, Knowles was closest to the historical truth, but he was unable to articulate the true reason for his distinctions. 

   Allow me to elaborate. In my new book, Free Market Marriage, Restoring the Foundation of American Society, I delve into the reason we have had government intervention into marriage since the late Nineteenth Century: Assimilation. That is forced assimilation. The force came from the United States Supreme Court of all places, not from an act of Congress. Certainly not an Executive Order. That is a Twentieth Century phenomenon. 

    Here is where Ben Shapiro is right. England, the Mother Country, was a theocracy. The Enlightenment rejected theocracy and presented an Old Testament understanding of the relationship between the individual and God, that every individual has a personal relationship with God. Therefore, every individual is blessed with the ability to choose how to worship God. In Free Market Marriage, I discuss the class system that existed in England at the time of the Revolution. The Crown recognized the marriage of George and Martha Washington, but not the marriage of Benjamin and Sarah Franklin. George and Martha were Anglicans. They married in the Anglican Church. The Franklins were Quakers. Even when England developed its first written laws on marriage and divorce in the 1830s, those laws specifically excluded Jews, Quakers and anyone who didn’t marry in the Anglican Church.  

     In essence, England was a class system. The Crown saw one type of citizen as superior to the other.  The Founders rejected this concept in favor of John Locke’s theory of agency, that we all have the capacity to agree and to choose. Thus, the vote. Before adopting the Declaration of Independence, representatives of each colony voted on behalf of their respective citizens. When the Constitution was up for ratification, each new State had elected representatives who voted on their behalf to adopt it. Each new state that entered the Union chose to adopt it. Each new citizen who emigrated chose to adopt it. We exist in privity of those agreements, meaning that we assimilate into the concept of the Declaration, that our fellow citizens have the right to choose, the right to worship, the right to raise their children in their chosen faith and to pursue happiness. 

    Here is where history is a cautionary tale. What if people come from a culture that rejects the concept of individual liberty? Can they assimilate? At the Founding, a vast majority were Protestants with a small spattering of Catholics and a smaller smattering of Jews. In the 1830s, Catholics began to stream in from Ireland. For Protestants, Catholics were not a free people, but acted under the direction of the Pope, by and through the Papal Bureaucracy right on down to the local priest. Then came the Mormons, who, in the eyes of the Protestants, were a cult acting under the direction of a charismatic leader. Many of those Protestants were so terrified of the inability of Catholics to assimilate, they created an entire political party, the American Party, nicknamed the Know Nothings.  

   In the eyes of the Protestant leadership, Mormons were a dangerous cult. In 1862, amid the Civil War, Vermont Senator John Smith Morrill convinced Congress to pass the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act to render one of the key tenants of Mormonism a crime: Polygamy. In fact, the Act played a key role in state regulation of marriage, something the Founders had rejected. In 1871, the Supreme Court acknowledged that marriage in the United States was a private contract and thus protected under Contracts Clause of the Constitution. Seventeen years later, that same Supreme Court (in a vote of 4-2) proclaimed that marriage had always been under the control of the State as it had been under English Law (a theocracy). Which State? They never really explain. Yet, four self-anointed men in black robes created a new form of American theocracy when it came to marriage, leaving it each State, by and through its legislature and judiciary, to determine the terms of each American marriage. While States varied, they coalesced around a single concept called the Fault System. Thus, rather than a different marriage rule for each culture, religion and even community, America had just one, a weird concoction based on the Law of the Anglican Church mixed with the latest social fad, chivalry. 

  As a result, since the later part of the Nineteenth Century, all Americans were forced to live under a new faith, a singular American faith, at least when it came to the laws of marriage and divorce, therefore forcing the creation of an American culture, one that built itself into the mighty force we have today. Yet, the true difference, as Michael Knowles points out, is the nature of the cultures America imported. Europeans had the capacity to agree to the concept of individual liberty, as did many other cultures. As Knowles explained just last week, Catholics are not under some mind control of the Pope but rather vary in their piety. The same can be said of the Mormons, and many other cultures that have immigrated to America. And, since most Americans agreed with the general concepts of marital duties as well as religious liberty, American culture thrived. The Know Nothings well ... knew nothing about the future. 

     As the Fault System died in the 1970s, so did American belief both in God and in marriage their duty to serve God by having children and raising them in the faith. In 1968, forced morality turned into quasi-forced morality with the end to a distinction between children born of the marriage and children born outside of marriage. A change in immigration policy in 1965 began another flood of peoples from divergent cultures, many of whom assimilated. In the past two decades, however, that, too, has changed for the worse, as an increasing number has refused to agree to the concept of religious liberty and individual choice. In fact, they lack the capacity to do so. 

   Radical Muslims, as a guest on Knowles program recently explained, completely reject the concept. Rather they believe that Americans must be conquered, transformed into their belief system, or must otherwise be eradicated. While Catholics, Mormons, Jews and even Asians have comported into Americana, they did so willingly, seeking, as the Irish immigrants of the 1830s did, to find the American dream, Radical Muslims are continuing a battle that originated in the Seventh Century and continued through the Sixteenth with Christianity dominating the world. Five hundred years later, true believers see the wane of Western Civilization and are actively seeking its downfall. They isolate themselves from outside influence. They do not respect our laws, our people, or our beliefs. They see us only as objects to use, women to rape, governments to fleece. Most of Europe has all but succumbed to the invasion. America is next. 

    Thus, in the end, while the Know-Nothings acted out of rational fear, Americans of the Twenty-first Century see a very real invasion. America is a credal nation, but we should keep out all who reject the concept of individual liberty, who reject the Constitution, who reject the Declaration. They are not Americans. They are invaders.