I won't get around to reading either of the two books reviewed by Eugene Fisher here, but these comments of Fisher's are good:

The problem is that Huntington doesn't believe that the American creed is, in the end, enough to hold us together. He feels that we must emphasize the "Anglo" by stopping the creeping "Hispanicization" of the American Southwest and South Florida. And he thinks that we must emphasize the "Protestant," which he will modify to "Christian" on one page but slide back to "dissident Protestant" on another.

Along with the U.S. Catholic bishops I see the need for immigration reform. But, as a Catholic, I cannot see Huntington's immigration attitudes as anything other than a sophisticated version of the old Nativist, No-Nothing politicians who saw my immigrant ancestors (and yours) as a menace to America's Protestant identity.

While it is true that the Founding Fathers (and mothers) were a mix of Protestants and enlightened deists, it is equally true, as Huntington admits, that the Anglo-Protestantism he extols was profoundly racist and intolerant of Catholicism. I would argue that after World War II America evolved away from those flaws and became something better.

[...]

Meanwhile, like most Catholics, Rabbi Rudin also embraces a pluralistic America. The rabbi has been my friend and a partner in Jewish-Catholic dialogue with the U.S. bishops for three decades. His book argues that the extreme end of the conservative fundamentalist/evangelical Protestant community has a well-planned drive to make America officially what they think it should be: a "Christian" nation. (The people Rabbi Rudin writes about here do not generally accept "Catholic" as a category of "Christian.")

This group, which he calls "Christocrats," do have something valuable to say to our society. As a Catholic, I would largely endorse their strong pro-life stance, for example, though I would break with them regarding the death penalty. Similarly, Catholics will in general agree with Rabbi Rudin that the biology classroom is not the place to discuss creationism and that public libraries should be free to lend out books about witches and wizards.

The Catholic agenda in America is, well, our own. Sometimes we agree with liberals and sometimes with conservatives.

American freedom and identity is our inheritance from our forebears. As a Catholic and a descendant of Daniel O'Connell, the great liberator of Ireland, I see that our American legacy came not just from Protestantism but also from Catholic Italy (via Catholic, Jewish, Muslim Spain) which invented the Renaissance and – ahem – taught the English everything they needed to know to invent America.

Fisher works in interfaith dialogue as an associate director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.