What does it take to be an American? Legally speaking, there are clear standards for citizenship. For some people, however, mere citizenship is not enough. These people believe that there is a sort of pure American culture, and only those people who belong to that culture can be called true Americans. U.S. Representative Steve King is among their number.

King explained his ideas about the American identity on Wednesday, with a speech in the U.S. House of Representatives. King said,

“We’re unique here in the United States of America. Madam Speaker, we’re a unique people. And, yes, we are the progeny of Western Europe, and we are the progeny that came from primarily Western European stock. And at the time that we received the best that Western Europe had to offer, we also received a fundamental Christian faith as the core of our moral values.

This is a Judeo-Christian Nation, Madam Speaker. The core of our moral values is embodied within the culture. Whatever church people go to or whether they go to church, wherever they worship or whether they worship, we still have the American people who, as a culture, understand Christian values and Christian principles, the Judeo-Christian values that are timeless.”

In Congressman King’s vision, a true American is descended from people who lived in Europe, and not just anywhere in Europe, but Western Europe in particular. Is his an accurate vision?

As a matter of law, the United States is not a Judeo-Christian nation. We have a secular government that is supposed to remain separate from religious affairs. As a matter of culture, the United States is not a Judeo-Christian nation. Increasingly, the United States is a place of many cultural traditions. Those traditions include Judaism and Christianity, but they also include native traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese traditions, Wicca. The fastest-growing way of life in the United States is to live without any religion at all. Steve King doesn’t seem to understand the diversity of the nation. He has yet to grasp that the United States is defined by the freedom it gives people to follow paths of their own choosing, rather than any particular path.

As a matter of history, the United States, in both popular culture and in matters of law, has been influenced by cultures from around the world. The Constitution was inspired by native Iroquois government as much as it was developed in reaction to European systems. To the extent that our nation’s Constitution was developed with European ideas in mind, it was as much with the determination that the United States would not be like the nations of Europe. The United States has people of every ethnicity on Earth, and our culture has been influenced in some way by every other culture known to exist on our planet.

It isn’t accurate to say that Americans are the progeny of Western Europe, and that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation. Jewish and Christian people of Western European ancestry are a minority within the United States.

Congressman Steve King’s vision only includes a small portion of what the United States of America has been and is becoming. No matter what our individual ethnicities and cultural traditions are, we all need to have a truly representative government made up of people who are able and willing to work with the diversity of identities that make up the American people. Congressman King’s speech this week indicates that he refuses to serve as part of such a representative government.