Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

St. Patrick Comes to America

March 18, 2007

My grandmother didn’t come in the first waves of Irish escaping the great famines. She came later and settled down in a mill town in Rhode Island joining the other immigrant factory workers from her own country, from Canada, and a few other places. She was assimilated faster than most, it seems, because she married a Vermonter with Canadian roots, not an Irishman. She never lived to see how her countrymen and women melted into the United States culture because she died young back in 1927.

Although the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the Northern Ireland Relief Committee, and other ethnic associations dust off their shillelaghs for a march down the main streets for the St. Patrick’s Day parades, there’s not much distinctive about Irish-Americans anymore.

Is that inevitable? Is it lamentable? Was the peculiarly Irish simply absorbed in the generic American culture? Was this a reciprocal process, that is to say, was the American culture sculpted at all by the Irish?

There are a few good documentaries about the Irish in America that I ought to take in before saying too much on this subject, but I don’t really want to list the contributions of Irish-Americans. Instead, I want to think a little about the interplay between mainstream and minority values. It could be any set of values, those of ethnic and racial groups or of movements, associations, or religions. Back in the Fall, I wrote about the Amish (see the column, “I Want to be Amish”). One could study the interaction between that group and mainstream American culture and see how the Amish have changed, how they have progressed or perhaps, in the view of Amish purists, been corrupted, or, how the rest of society has been altered by the Amish.

Our local chapter of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick is honoring U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D – RI) as “Man of the Year.” at their annual St. Patrick’s Day dinner. I’m sure St. Patrick will be smiling down on their gathering as they give this award to a politician who is (along with most Democrats) a champion of abortion on demand, even partial-birth abortion. I don’t know how far back in Senator Reed’s ancestry were the actual immigrants (maybe it was his grandparents or great-grandparents) but you can bet they did not espouse this most extreme position. My question is, I guess, how did we get from the Great-Grandfather Reed to Senator Reed and what the heck happened to the values in-between?

Senator Reed may protest that he personally is against abortion but that, because he must represent all citizens, he cannot impose his own beliefs on others. The presumption is that the values of his heritage must give way to those of the generic American culture. Somehow, because they carry the label “religious,” these beliefs also become idiosyncratic, they are pushed out of the public arena, disqualified from the public debate, stripped of the legitimacy granted secular beliefs, quarantined.

When may a person’s beliefs be imposed on others (I mean through a lawful process, not though mandate; beliefs are imposed all the time by legislatures and courts.)? When may a person’s or a group’s values, whether their origins be religious or not, apply also to the rest of society? When may some one or some group expect that the rest of society accept and even adopt its beliefs?

Some beliefs are never accepted by the general population and for good reason. The Spartans, foreshadowing our own day, I suppose, believed in infanticide – I still recall the history textbook’s pictures of them abandoning sickly babies on the mountainsides. Some present day sects, badly misinterpreting verses of the Book of Leviticus, don’t believe in blood transfusions. There are many examples of values and beliefs that should be kept private if kept at all.

Values that are based in beliefs peculiar to a certain group (and such a group may have a religious, cultural, or purely civic or humanitarian identity) will disappear in the confrontation with the general culture unless they find a basis beyond the purely sectarian. For example, the insistence that human life deserves the protection of the law at all stages may be inspired by the Scriptures or the teachings of various churches or the principles of a sub-culture, but unless it also finds a basis in human reason it can never make intellectual and moral demands on all of the population. The group’s value must find a footing beyond the group. The main “crossing over” point is human reason although I think there is other “common ground” upon which the mainstream culture and the sub-cultures meet. Think of songs that “cross over” from a small niche into the wider market. For example, some songs from the mountain or the “country-western” sub-cultures cross over into the Top 40 (is there a Top 40 anymore?); there is some part of them that resonates with the wider group and so they are recognized and adopted. Why do some sports move beyond a group-of-origin and become national or near-national pastimes? There is something in them with which everyone can identify and so, again, they are embraced. So it isn’t simply “human reason” that is the currency of exchange between the mainstream and the minority cultures. There’s more to it but the principle is the same: there must be common ground upon which the Irish and the non-Irish, the religionist and the non-religionist, stand.

Back to St. Patrick coming to America ...

Have the distinctive virtues of the Irish translated into the U.S. culture? Let the Celtophiles (I know that is not a word) figure it out. For me, it is important to see that mainstream culture is fair game for any sub-culture, that minority values are legitimate competitors with the mainstream’s even if that minority is a religion as long as that sub-culture meets the larger group on common ground. This is a very important principle to remember in the on-going debate about the place of religion in American politics and culture. Religious values have standing in the public debate as do cultural values. They may or may not prevail; they may or may not be compromised; one or the other culture may be altered, but they belong in the arena.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!