"Only Christians can be Americans, and those who are not Christians should hide their religion."
Quote:We should expect anyone who wishes to be a citizen of the land of the free to adopt our way of life.
In Sugar Land, Texas, a giant statue depicting the monkey-faced Hindu deity, Hanuman, was erected in August 2024. Officially titled Statue of Union, many Texans and Americans elsewhere have found this monument to be an aberration. For some it is the aesthetic unsightliness. For others it is a religious aversion to having a pagan idol be raised to such heights.
America requires Americans. No, we don’t all need to look and sound identical, but we do need to be specific about what makes an American an American. American culture, with its Christian civil religion, is required to maintain this union of states and their self-governing peoples. You cannot take people from any other civic, commercial, or cultural context, drop them within American borders, and expect that you will get the same results as those who are fully assimilated to our country’s historic way of life.
The Sugar Land statue, or murti, along with other religious displays such as celebrations of Diwali, are not simple public practices of faith: they are cultural statements meant to pacify fears among Hindus that their native culture and its religion will be lost to America’s material excesses and its Christian religion. Large numbers of Hindu Indians living in proximity to each other enable them to speak their native language, eat their traditional foods, and practice their religion.
In essence, Indian culture is kept intact, and Indians remain insulated from and unassimilated to American culture. Many do not become American, but remain Indians who just happen to live in America.
English is unwritten and unspoken in increasing numbers of our cities and towns, with residents unable to speak our nation’s language and being offered the choice to vote for a foreign-born Marxist in New York City. Dueling demonstrations carrying Palestinian and Israeli flags have become almost commonplace in our streets, just as residents of California wave Mexican flags in protest of their forthcoming deportations. Somalis in Minnesota celebrate their native country’s independence day en masse together with local officials—then vote them out in favor of alternatives they consider their own.
[Funny how he doesn't complain about people who wave Nazi flags and Confederate Battle Flags.]
When thinking of small ethno-religious minorities in America like Hassidic Jews (180,000) or the Amish (395,000) who have historically kept mostly to themselves, this point may seem trite. But it is consequential when the sheer number of Hindus—and the potential for many, many more—is truly understood.
Though I have no flat objection to the arrival of specific individuals from elsewhere in the world who wish to become unhyphenated Americans in order to better themselves and the United States, the construction of a foreign idol by a rapidly expanding minority population of newcomers underscores the loss of what used to be a requirement to live in America: assimilation into its culture, of which its civil religion—Christianity—is a cornerstone.
The present-day case of Sugar Land, Texas, where a towering Hindu idol has been erected, should be unacceptable to Americans (especially Christians), and doubly so to those of Indian heritage who see this land as their own and this people as their people.
Pluralism is not an end in itself. It is the fruit of a Christian order that’s confident enough to tolerate minority views, because it assumes its own cultural hegemony. If that majority is disregarded and that confidence eroded, pluralism becomes its opposite: a Babel of conflicting gods and moralities, doomed to be abandoned and fall.
The First Amendment guarantees religious liberty. But let’s be honest about our Founders’ intentions: the purpose of that liberty was to protect dissenting Christian sects within a Christian moral framework—not to permit the importation of rival civilizational orders.
The statue itself is a public manifestation of an under-examined reality: that unassimilated cultures exist in America. Beyond that, it is a declaration of intent to remain unassimilated. For the idol to be excused and dismissed shows a resignation of this reality and a toleration for this intention—and it is this nihilism that is unprecedented in our history and fundamentally un-American, not the protestations of I or anyone who would refuse to bow to it.
https://americanmind.org/features/assimi...scontents/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
