On America’s Core Culture

“America’s core culture has been and, at the moment, is still primarily the culture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded American society.  The central elements of that culture can be defined in a variety of ways but include the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English lanugage, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music.  Out of this culture the settlers developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property.” — Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?, p.41