The upshot is that we need to get reaquainted with the Bible in our public schools, eject opponents of our common law from the judiciary, and speaka da English.
Ancient Israel was, for generations of Bible-literate Americans, the prototype of a “nation.” ...
While biblical nations aren’t defined by race, they are also not merely “an idea.” Biblical Israel consists of a diversity of tribes, who are nonetheless bound to one another by language and law, and a mutual loyalty arising from facing adversity together in the past. ...
American nationalists used to think of their nation in just this way: Neither as a race, nor as an abstract “idea” — but rather as a diversity of tribes sharing a heritage and a mutual loyalty born of a joint history. The original American states, while internally diverse, nonetheless largely shared the English language, Protestant religion and the common law, and had fought Britain together. ...
American nationalists sought to counterbalance increasing diversity with a carefully protected common cultural inheritance: New territories were admitted as American states only once they had an English-speaking majority and adopted the common law. The eradication of slavery in the South and polygamy among the Mormons was likewise the result of a common cultural inheritance, descended from English Puritanism, which Americans insisted on maintaining even at the price of coercion. It was not until after World War II that these core institutions at the heart of classical American nationalism — Biblical religion, the Anglo-American legal inheritance, and the English language — began to fade.
