Some Thoughts on *Who Are We?*

Samuel Huntington has created a minor stir in academia by arguing in his book, Who Are We?, that the core culture of America is Anglo-Protestant. But he has created only a minor stir because he tells everyone in the introduction to his book that the preservation of the Anglo-Protestant culture, which he admires, does not depend on the survival of the Anglo-Protestant people who created it.

Huntington’s view, that the white man is not essential to the maintenance of the white man’s civilization, is common among conservatives, Catholics, and neocons. When the late Frederick Wilhelmsen said Western culture had nothing to do with race, he was expressing the common opinion of those who admired the West but did not think the white race was necessary for the survival of the West. It’s a seductive theory. I once believed in it myself. But it is false. It is false because the Incarnation is true.

Divinity comes through humanity. It cannot be manufactured in a test tube utilizing the rarefied vapors of the idiot savants of theology and science. A particular people created Western civilization in response to the love of a particular God. To claim that another people can carry the burden of that civilization and defend that civilization is the same as saying that all children should be placed, at birth, in a giant supermarket where they can be distributed at random to anybody who comes into the store. Christianity does not destroy ties of kinship and ties of blood. It deepens them. A curse on all those who would sever those ties which are the ties that bind us to Him.