Returning to America’s foundational values
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with diversity as a social or organizational goal — bringing together different outlooks prevents groupthink and facilitates creativity — but our modern fixation on celebrating different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds is a shift from the conception of diversity that’s part of this country’s birthright.
Indeed, one of the distinctive, even unique, characteristics and achievements of the early American republic was that it stood for religious diversity — and came into being without state sanction of any particular religion. That the Puritans of New England, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, and the Catholics of Maryland would coalesce into a single political entity with no denomination holding sovereign sway would have been unheard-of on the other side of the Atlantic, where religious wars had ravaged Britain and the European continent for centuries. In the words of Yale historian Jon Butler:
Through their daily interactions, these Americans created a living foundation for the First Amendment. After Independence their active diversity of faiths led Americans to the groundbreaking idea that government should abandon the use of law to support any religious group and should instead guarantee free exercise of religion for everyone.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute.
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