Vance has been working hard to push Trump’s agenda. But he has his own ideas too.
And now JD Vance ignited controversy after making this single comment.
Historian Gordon Wood Revisits America as a “Credal Nation”—in Dialogue with a Familiar Debate
In a recent address at the American Enterprise Institute (reprinted in the Wall Street Journal), eminent historian Gordon Wood reaffirmed that the United States is fundamentally a credal nation, bound together by shared belief in its founding principles. Though he did not name Vice President JD Vance, Wood’s remarks clearly engage the same tension Vance highlighted in his 2024 convention speech: whether America is solely an idea or also a nation with a shared history and people.
The Passage That Sparked the Conversation
Vance, in his nomination speech, had argued:
“You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty… But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
He illustrated the point with the seven generations of his own family buried in an eastern Kentucky cemetery—people who fought, built, and died for the country across centuries, creating what he called “a homeland.”
Wood Pushes Back—Then Qualifies
Wood cautioned against any shift away from the credal understanding:
“There has been some talk recently that we aren’t and shouldn’t be a credal nation—that beliefs in a creed are too permissive, too weak a basis for citizenship and that we need to realize that citizens with ancestors who go back several generations have a stronger stake in the country than more-recent immigrants.
I reject this position as passionately as I can.”
Yet later in the same speech, Wood himself introduced an important caveat about immigration and assimilation:
“Because assimilation isn’t easy, no nation should allow the percentage of foreign-born residents to exceed about 15 percent of its population.”
If America were purely a proposition with no historical or cultural dimension, the pace and scale of immigration would theoretically matter far less.
Wood’s 15-percent threshold—echoing concerns raised by earlier American observers such as Charles Francis Adams in 1913—implicitly acknowledges that successful integration still depends on a relatively stable core population over time.
The exchange between Wood’s lecture and the broader debate Vance helped frame underscores a longstanding question in American civic life: how a nation rooted in universal ideals simultaneously sustains the particular ties—history, memory, and gradual assimilation—that make those ideals enduring in practice.
