On June 30, the Supreme Court affirmed in Trump v. Barbara that the 14th Amendment says that if you are born on American soil, you are an American citizen. Chief Justice Roberts, citing Calvin’s Case from 1608, called citizenship “the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community.”
The ruling settled the question of birthright citizenship in the courts—for now. But it opened a harder one: If citizenship is unconditional, what holds a nation of citizens together?
For most of American history, civic identity was a set of specific commitments, transmitted through institutions everyone belonged to and enforced by law. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this in 1831: “Without ideas held in common, there is no common action, and without common action, there may still be men, but there is no social body.” He viewed Protestantism as a political habit of mind that held the American republic together: every citizen is competent, no priestly caste is required, and individual conscience is the final authority. To Tocqueville, that was the epistemology that made America’s self-governance thinkable.
