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.

John Jay added to Tocqueville’s description a fuller list of the ties that bound Americans together in Federalist 2: “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” Common schools read the King James Bible daily. Militia service was compulsory civic formation. Sunday laws, oath requirements, and opening prayers in legislatures reinforced a highly visible civic religion.

A concern with preserving the homogeneous culture Jay described explains why most of the 13 original states enshrined religious tests for officeholding, though the Constitution barred such tests federally. It was also why the Naturalization Act of 1795 required that an applicant be of good moral character, “attached to the principles of the constitution of the United States, and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the same.” Thomas Jefferson warned that immigrants from monarchies would “bring with them the principles of the governments they leave”—the naturalization process existed to screen for exactly that.

You could adopt the American way of life. You could accept that certain offices were closed to you and still participate in politics. You could leave. What you could not do was pretend that this cultural consensus didn’t exist or that the nation didn’t need it—and then work to dismantle it.

The four dissenting justices in Trump v. Barbara saw the importance of upholding this cultural architecture. In his dissent, Justice Thomas quoted Frederick Douglass describing what bound Americans together: “speaking the same language and being of the same religion, worshipping the same God, owing our redemption to the same Savior, and learning our duties from the same Bible.” This is John Jay’s thesis restated 80 years later by a man born into slavery who understood the demands of American citizenship.

Justice Gorsuch framed the entire dispute as feudal birthright versus “a distinctly American settler’s view of citizenship.” Justice Alito called American citizenship “precious” and warned that the majority opinion allowed a person born to a birth tourist, raised abroad, and “inculcated with hatred of this country” to be a citizen who “can enter and leave the country as he pleases” and “cannot be deprived of his status.”

The majority, by contrast, rejected what was left of the founding cultural framework, completing what the Supreme Court had started in the 20th century.

Between 1947 and 1967, the Court incorporated the First Amendment against the states in cases dealing with school prayer (Engel v. Vitale), Bible reading (Abington v. Schempp), religious tests for office (Torcaso v. Watkins), and loyalty oaths (Keyishian v. Board of Regents). Whatever one thinks of those decisions individually, the cumulative effect was the elimination of most of the mechanisms the founders used to transmit shared civic identity.

Meanwhile, the population the founders built that architecture for was changed beyond recognition—and mostly against the people’s will. America’s foreign-born population grew from roughly 10 million in 1965 to over 50 million today. The religious landscape that Tocqueville described as “the foremost of the political institutions” has fractured; the share of Americans identifying as Protestant fell from 69% in 1948 to roughly a third today.

America’s original levers for producing shared civic identity are gone. So what fills the gap?

The New Civic Religion

In place of the founders’ cultural framework is a sprawling institutional apparatus that is funded by roughly a billion dollars through the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and dozens of smaller foundations. It operates through iCivics (145,000 teachers, nine million students), New Pluralists ($30 million in funding), PACE (more than 80 funders coordinating on civic messaging), InterfaithAmerica, Define American, and hundreds of grantee organizations.

They call what they’re building “shared democratic norms.” But of the dozens of “norms” this ecosystem promotes, only a few are representative of the American tradition: losers accept election results, power transfers peacefully, and federalism is respected. The rest inculcate a left-wing worldview.

A review of material published in the Journal of Democracy, the publication of the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, attests to this fact.

Francis Fukuyama argues that cultural communities making group-rights claims—that is, demanding exemptions from common family law, establishing independent religious schools, excluding outsiders from public events—“do not deserve equal protection in a modern liberal democracy.” His examples are Muslim immigrant communities in Europe, but the principle he establishes applies to any traditional religious community that claims moral authority apart from the liberal consensus.

Kanchan Chandra proposes “reformulating our understanding of democracy itself to render it a minoritarian system.” Larry Diamond defines the boundary: any organization that “seeks to monopolize a functional or political space in society, claiming that it represents the only legitimate path, contradicts the pluralistic and market-oriented nature of civil society.” Religious communities claiming moral authority need not apply.

This effort goes beyond politics into identity itself. Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment urges philanthropists to fund “narratives that let people exist in their full complex identities”—a call to identity engineering via DEI. Jennifer Butler of the Faith in Democracy Initiative calls conservative religious infrastructure the main vehicle of “the authoritarian right” and demands competing philanthropic investment in progressive faith leaders. Alfred Stepan’s “twin tolerations” framework requires religious communities to accept democratic outcomes even when they violate their deepest moral teachings, but it imposes no equivalent constraint on secular actors. “Religious institutions should not have constitutionally privileged prerogatives that allow them to mandate public policy to democratically elected governments,” Stepan writes. They may participate only if they accept liberal-democratic supremacy over religious moral authority.

Against George Washington’s admonition of the importance of religion in supporting republican self-government, former Clinton Administration official Bill Galston contends, “Today, ‘we the people’ is understood to mean all citizens, regardless of religion, manners and customs, and length of citizenship. The people is an ensemble of individuals who enjoy a common civic status.” Galston then quotes John Jay’s formula from Federalist 2, declaring it superseded.

Against John Adams’s contention that there exists “eternal and immutable truths,” Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution contends that “the great breakthrough that lies behind modern science and reason, collective reason, is fallibilism,” which is validated by “networks and professionals and institutions, places like the NIH and the newsroom.” Knowledge is determined by consensus; truth is produced by credentialed networks.

Against Alexander Hamilton’s teaching that since the “safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment,” to admit foreigners indiscriminately “would be nothing less, than to admit the Grecian Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty,” George Soros told Bloomberg in 2015, “Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.” The founding-era goal of cultural cohesion must be explicitly dismantled.

The modern creed prescribes which cultures deserve protection, which identities are legitimate, which version of masculinity is acceptable, and which forms of political participation count as democracy. We didn’t eliminate civic religion. We replaced our country’s traditional self-understanding with the views of left-wing philanthropists.

Forming Citizens

The majority in Barbara cited Edward Coke’s “dual and reciprocal tie” between sovereign and subject—protection in exchange for allegiance—to establish birthright citizenship. But they kept the protection half and discarded the allegiance half. Yet the justices who joined that ruling are the same ones who have spent years warning that democracy cannot survive without civic formation.

Chief Justice Roberts called it the area where the rule of law is “most endangered.” Amy Coney Barrett said the Constitution “commits us to tolerance.” Brett Kavanaugh called civic education “the number one thing.” They cannot simultaneously believe democracy requires shared commitments and rule that citizenship requires none—unless they believe someone else will do the forming.

And someone else already is.

Ford, Carnegie, and Open Society began that project more than 20 years ago—and they have been delivering the new civics catechism ever since. Galston’s “populism is the enemy of democracy” is already a civic norm. Chandra’s minoritarian system is already the design goal. Kleinfeld’s DEI identity engineering is already the method.

John Jay’s descriptions of American culture in Federalist 2 need to become prescriptive. Not every element of it can be as true of America now as it was in the 18th century. But English language primacy and civic education laws rooted in the obligations of self-governance are constitutionally available—and Florida, Texas, Arizona, and New Hampshire are already testing them. The point is to force the Court to answer the glaring question it left unanswered in Barbara: Who holds the authority to form citizens?