Recently on Slate, end-of-history-as-liberal-capitalist-democracy guru Francis Fukuyama (is it just me or is it weird he is writing in Slate?) argued that it is tolerant, free-thinking, cosmopolitan Europe, not the philistine United States, that has more to fear from native Islamists. He notes that the American facility for assimilating immigrants allows our culture to avoid the abject ghettoization that many of Europe’s Muslims suffer. In Europe—so his argument goes—to be French or Danish is not just a matter of residency or national allegiance or a set of political and civic principles, it is ethno-religious “blood-and-soil” loyalties that make their societies cohere. On the other hand:

American identity, by contrast, has from the beginning been more creedal and political than based on religion or ethnicity. Newly naturalized Guatemalans or Koreans in America can proudly say they are Americans. Pat Buchanan may not like it, but that is precisely what rescues us from the trap the Europeans are in.

There is certainly something to this argument. The idea of the American polity has always been nominally premised on equivalent citizenship regardless of creed or race. There is also a long and storied tradition of successful assimilation of immigrant cultures (European and Asian ones anyway). But a quick glance at history and even current politics tells a different story. The swaths of Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists who fill the great expanse of red states ache for more of their millenarian brand of faith to be injected into politics. The constitutional formalism of the establishment clause belies the populist—and admittedly democratic—urge for talk about God and traditional religious values from our elected leaders (in this maybe we’re not so different from the Palestinians who just voted in Hamas). Ask yourself, could a president be elected in this country without routine and conspicuous displays of gushing piety? Fukuyama would do himself a favor if he examined what’s going on outside of Manhattan and the Beltway to see that, despite our noble and idealistic constitutional institutions designed to keep faith out of government, many Americans want the opposite.