Can a nation remain strong if its citizens are divided in their loyalties? What happens when the interests of one nation conflict with the interests of the other? Shouldn’t true citizenship require complete allegiance to one’s adopted nation, without divided interests or identities, as exemplified by Ruth in the Bible?
Ruth was not a “hyphenated” Israelite. Although she was a Moabite, she renounced her people, place, nation, culture, and religion, to adopt a new people, place, nation, culture, and religion.
Speaking to her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi, Ruth vowed, “Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you” (Ruth 1:15-17).
That is “immigration” done right. Ruth was a Moabite, but there was no question where her loyalties stood.
What’s more, the children Ruth had with her Israelite husband Boaz did not identify as “Moabite-Israelites.” They were Israelites, and Israelites only. Obed, Jesse, and King David would have had no concept of what it was to be a Moabite. They had no longing for a foreign land or a foreign people. Their interests and loyalties were completely with Israel, even when their nation found itself at war with Moab (2 Sam. 8:2; 1 Chr. 18:2).
Hyphenated citizens, on the other hand, lay the foundation for hyphenated rulers to forge a hyphenated nation. Divided interests lead to a divided country, unified only in their inevitable downfall.
That was the warning of Theodore Roosevelt in his 1915 Address to the Knights of Columbus, in New York City.
The 26th President of the United States said: “The one absolute certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities… each at heart feeling more sympathy with [the people] of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic…”
He continued: “The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
“There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else,” he said.
Truly, a nation divided by hyphens cannot stand.
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