Blood & Soil vs. Creed & Covenant: How Should We Define America?

Jeremy is joined by Eric Metaxas, Rick Green, and John G West to talk about what makes an American.

A growing number of young men on the online right — the so-called "heritage American" crowd — are posting their 23andMe results as proof of who's "really" American.

The conversation starts with Tablet Magazine founder Alana Newhouse's framework for the word "ethnos" — the idea that every people defines its own criteria for belonging, and that America's criteria have never been bloodline. Jeremy argues that young men gravitating toward ethnic nationalism aren't wrong that something is missing; they're responding to decades of progressives hollowing out the language of the founding — equality, liberty, unalienable rights — and refilling it with meanings the founders explicitly rejected, like equality of outcome.

From there, the discussion moves into the propositional nation debate itself: is America held together by an idea, or does an idea need a culture underneath it to survive? Rick Green draws on John Witherspoon's distinction between the "law of nature" (truths anyone can reason to) and the "light of nature" (truths that require revelation but prove consistent with reason) to argue that America's founding equality claim — "all men are created equal" — is fundamentally biblical, even for the deists among the founders. Thomas Paine, no Christian, still traced the idea of equality back to the Mosaic creation account.

The conversation also takes aim at a strain of Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism that treats biblical truth as tribal property — true only for Christians, or only for a particular ethnic group — rather than universal. John G West pushes back hard, calling that instinct a form of moral relativism dressed up in religious language, and shares a personal family history spanning Revolutionary-era Protestant dissenters and early-1900s Ukrainian immigrants as a case study in assimilation actually working.

The episode closes with a striking data point: the phrase "all men are created equal" has appeared in American newspapers and media outlets over 330,000 times since 1776 — evidence, West argues, against the claim that America was never really a nation of ideas. But ideas, they agree, don't survive in a vacuum. Without a culture that actively teaches and reinforces them, propositions calcify into slogans, and the vacuum gets filled by exactly the bloodline nationalism the heritage American movement represents.

If you've followed the online debates over Christian nationalism, "ethnostate" rhetoric, and what actually holds a nation together, this is a direct, sourced rebuttal from inside the conservative movement itself.

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Keywords: heritage American movement, propositional nation, creedal nation, American founding, Christian nationalism, ethnostate debate, Alana Newhouse Tablet Magazine, John Witherspoon law of nature, all men are created equal, American exceptionalism, 23andMe nationalism, moral relativism, Catholic integralism, American identity debate, founders equality, Reagan American memory, Justice Gorsuch propositional nation, dissident right, conservative movement 2026

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Full episode here