Assimilation, liberty, and the American compact
At nearly 71, I write as an American who was born and raised here—a Baby Boomer shaped by a country that was often imperfect, sometimes prejudiced, but ultimately capable of drawing different peoples into a common civic life. I believe deeply in assimilation: not the abandonment of one’s family heritage, food, language, faith, or private traditions, but an affirmative commitment to America’s constitutional order, equal citizenship, peaceful coexistence, and the rule of law.
My experience has taught me that the United States has repeatedly absorbed communities once treated as alien. I witnessed old and ugly suspicions directed at the Irish, then Italians, Puerto Ricans, and many others. Those groups retained pride in their origins, churches, neighborhoods, music, and family customs. Yet over time, overwhelmingly and peacefully, they became ever more fully woven into the larger American fabric. They did not need to erase themselves in order to become Americans. They did, however, participate in an American bargain: shared civic obligations, respect for the law, and acceptance that no ethnicity, church, or inherited custom stands above the rights of the individual.
That is what assimilation should mean. It is a two-way civic process—not a demand for cultural sameness, and not an invitation to establish separate systems of authority within a constitutional republic.
The America I knew
I grew up in an environment where people of different religions and backgrounds lived close enough to disagree seriously. As a Missouri Synod Lutheran, I saw spirited arguments over theology, morality, public policy, and the meaning of faith. There were strong convictions. There were disagreements that could be blunt, even heated.
But the underlying assumption was that disagreement remained disagreement.
No one’s theology gave him a license to threaten another person’s life. No church’s doctrine entitled it to control the civil rights of outsiders. No religious community was above American law. Faith could inform one’s conscience and public arguments, but it could not become a weapon of coercion.
That restraint is not weakness. It is civilization.
The American constitutional arrangement protects the free exercise of religion while barring government establishment of religion. The First Amendment therefore safeguards the right of people to practice a faith—or no faith—while preserving a civil order governed by neutral law rather than clerical command. That framework is precisely why deeply religious people with sharply different beliefs can live together without turning theological conflict into political domination or violence.
My concern is coercive ideology
I am unequivocally opposed to violent Islamist extremism, religious coercion, and every political program—whether advanced in the name of Islam or any other creed—that demands submission, suppresses dissent, denies equality before the law, threatens apostates or religious minorities, or treats women as legally subordinate.
There is real evidence that authoritarian regimes and extremist movements invoking particular interpretations of Islam have imposed severe restrictions on women, girls, dissenters, and religious minorities. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has documented such abuses in contexts including Iran, Afghanistan under Taliban rule, Pakistan, and areas affected by extremist violence. Those practices deserve direct moral condemnation.
I reject, however, the idea that a free country can fairly or accurately condemn every Muslim as a threat, or treat all Muslims as responsible for the actions of extremists, authoritarian governments, or particular religious-political movements abroad. Islam is practiced by a vast and diverse population of individuals and communities, including Americans who reject violence, support constitutional government, and live ordinary, productive lives as neighbors, colleagues, citizens, and family members.
The proper line is not between “Muslim” and “non-Muslim.” It is between citizens and movements that honor equal rights, peaceful pluralism, and constitutional law—and those that reject them.
What must never be negotiable
America should be welcoming to people of every religion and ancestry who enter into its civic compact. But welcome is not surrender, and tolerance does not require moral confusion.
The following principles should be non-negotiable:
- The Constitution and civil law govern everyone equally; no religious code may override them.
- Women and men possess equal legal rights, equal civic standing, and equal protection under the law.
- No person may be threatened, punished, or intimidated for changing religion, leaving a religion, criticizing a religion, or declining any religion.
- Violence, threats, forced marriage, child exploitation, honor-based abuse, and coercive control must be treated as crimes—not excused as “culture” or faith.
- Religious freedom belongs to every person, including Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, converts, and those who dissent from their inherited tradition.
- Immigration and citizenship should reinforce a shared American identity founded on language, civic responsibility, lawfulness, liberty, and allegiance to the constitutional order.
- The United States should resist any attempt—religious, ethnic, racial, or ideological—to create separate legal authority or protected enclaves beyond the reach of equal law.
These are not anti-religious principles. They are the conditions that make genuine religious liberty possible.
Tolerance without self-erasure
I do not believe that America must apologize for insisting that newcomers—and longtime citizens alike—embrace the principles that have allowed diverse people to live together in relative peace. A society that loses confidence in its own constitutional inheritance can become unable to defend anyone’s liberty, including the liberty of minorities.
But neither should fear become an excuse for collective blame. America’s strength has never been the fantasy that everyone thinks alike. Its strength is that people may disagree vigorously about faith, politics, morality, and identity while accepting that every individual has rights under one law.
That is the assimilation I support: peaceful, reciprocal, constitutional, and unashamed of the values it protects. America should welcome those who seek freedom and want to build within that order. It should firmly oppose anyone—of any background or religion—who seeks to replace freedom with intimidation, equality with subordination, or civic peace with coercion.
That is not “suicidal empathy.” It is ordered liberty: compassion bounded by truth, tolerance bounded by law, and pluralism sustained by a confident commitment to the American constitutional compact.