A profound identity crisis has gripped the United States. A prri American Identity Survey released yesterday shows that U.S. citizens are less proud of their country, less religiously unified and less likely to believe the American dream still works.

• The poll of 5,469 adults living in all 50 states found that only 51 percent are extremely or very proud of being American, down from 82 percent in 2013.

A deep partisan divide in the nation is apparent in the poll results:

• Republicans are overwhelmingly extremely or very proud to be American (83 percent), compared with fewer than half of independents (43 percent) and fewer than one third of Democrats (31 percent).
• Most Republicans believe being born in America, believing in God and being Christian are important to being “truly American.”
• Only 42 percent of Democrats said being born in America was important to national identity, only 41 percent said believing in God was important, and only 29 percent said being Christian was important.

One reason people are losing faith in America is they don’t know where American virtues come from.

• A separate poll from the Pell Center published yesterday found that 85 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “The United States was built on the idea that everyone is born with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet only 15 percent agreed that “The United States was built on the character of the Anglo-Saxon people, their distinct love of liberty and their sense of glory, destiny and pride.”
• The fact that so few agreed with the second statement reveals a profound ignorance about American culture, heritage, history and virtue.

The idea that everyone is born with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was articulated by Anglo-Saxon philosopher John Locke.

• He argued that because the Bible teaches all men are made in God’s image, they logically possess rights to life, liberty and property as gifts from their Creator.
• Locke did not reach these conclusions in isolation. Raised in a Puritan family and shaped by Protestant thought, he critiqued the Roman Catholic Church’s approach to government by appealing to principles rooted in Mosaic law and natural law reasoning.

If modern Americans lose the Anglo-Saxon culture that embraced the biblical truth that all men are born with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they lose the principles and purpose for which their country exists.

• God spread the idea of unalienable rights across the globe by using “the Anglo-Saxon people, their distinct love of liberty and their sense of glory, destiny and pride.”

Learn more about America’s most important history in “Rediscovering Our Anglo-Saxon Heritage” in the special America 250 July issue of the Philadelphia Trumpet.