“America Has No Culture” (And Other Things People Say Before the Fireworks Start)

Spend a few minutes scrolling through social media and you may see the familiar comparison: a photograph of a centuries-old European street beside a picture of an American strip mall. One has stone buildings and winding lanes; the other has a parking lot and a drive-through. The verdict arrives quickly: “America has no culture.”

I hear versions of that claim in coffee-shop conversations, too. Sometimes it is meant as a joke. Sometimes it is a serious criticism of American consumerism, politics, or public life. And sometimes it seems to rest on one simple idea: if a country doesn’t have enough castles, royal ceremonies, or ancient ruins, it must not have much culture.

But culture is not just old buildings. It is what people inherit, create, celebrate, teach their children, and pass to the next generation. It lives in music and food, in language and stories, in holidays and local customs, in faith communities and family rituals, and in the ways neighbors gather when someone needs help.

By that definition, America plainly has a culture. It has many cultures, shaped by Indigenous nations, regional communities, enslaved Africans and their descendants, immigrants, and generations of people who have borrowed from one another, argued with one another, and made something new. That history is complicated. It is also worth understanding honestly.

Culture Is More Than a Pretty Photograph

Europe has remarkable architecture and deep historical traditions. So do parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. We should be able to admire those things without turning culture into a contest in which one country must be declared empty for another to be interesting.

A historic cathedral is an expression of culture. So is a neighborhood church supper. A centuries-old festival matters; so can a county fair that brings generations of a town together. A royal ceremony tells a story about a country’s past. So does a family recipe, a high-school marching band, a powwow, a community fish fry, or a Friday-night football game.

These examples are not interchangeable, and their histories are not all equally old or equally joyful. The point is simpler: culture is not limited to monuments. It is also made of ordinary practices that people repeat because they mean something to them.

America’s relative youth as a nation does not make its culture nonexistent. It makes the story different. The United States did not begin with a single language, one inherited tradition, or one uniform way of life. It developed across regions and communities, and its cultural history includes both creative exchange and painful conflict.

You Can Hear America in Its Music

Consider American music. Jazz, blues, gospel, country, rock and roll, and hip-hop did not appear out of nowhere. They emerged from particular communities, experiences, and musical conversations. African American musicians and traditions have been especially influential in shaping the sound of the country, from spirituals and blues to jazz, rock, soul, and hip-hop. The Library of Congress documents how musical traditions from different communities met, changed, and helped form what listeners recognize as American music.

That history is not a story of one group creating everything alone. It is a story of people carrying traditions forward, adapting them, and sometimes creating something no one had heard before. The same pattern appears in American food, language, literature, film, fashion, and sport.

Blue jeans went from practical workwear to a worldwide staple. Basketball grew from an American invention into a global game. Hollywood, television, and American popular music have influenced what people watch, quote, wear, and listen to far beyond the country’s borders. Regional food traditions—from Southern cooking and barbecue to New York pizza and the many forms of Tex-Mex—show how place and history shape everyday life.

None of this means America invented every popular thing or deserves sole credit for every cultural influence. Cultural exchange goes in many directions. But it is hard to argue that a country has no culture when its music, stories, sports, and everyday styles have become recognizable around the world.

A Nation Is More Than Its Worst Chapters

There is an important qualification here: cultural pride should never require historical amnesia. America’s story includes slavery, the dispossession and forced removal of Indigenous peoples, discrimination, and repeated failures to live up to its stated ideals. These are not footnotes to wave away. They affected real people, families, communities, and generations.

Those realities belong in an honest account of American culture, too. So do the lives and work of people who resisted injustice, preserved their communities, built institutions, created art, served their neighbors, and pressed the country to extend its promises more fairly. The history is not made more truthful by pretending everything was noble; neither is it made more truthful by pretending nothing of value was built.

We can recognize a nation’s achievements without excusing its failures. We can examine its failures without denying its people their creativity, courage, and capacity for good. Those are not contradictions. They are part of taking history seriously.

The Culture You May Not Notice

Think about an ordinary week. Someone brings a casserole to a grieving neighbor. Families gather around a table for Thanksgiving. Volunteers organize a food drive. A town turns out for a high-school game. People decorate a main street for a local parade, show up at a county fair, gather for a church service, or teach children a recipe that has been in the family for decades.

Not every American does these things, and none of them belongs exclusively to the United States. That is not the claim. The point is that culture often feels invisible when it is familiar. We notice traditions more easily when we travel somewhere else, because there the customs are new to us. At home, we may dismiss our own habits as ordinary life.

And there is no single American experience. A Native nation, a fishing town in Maine, a Black church in the South, a Korean American congregation, a Puerto Rican family in New York, a ranching community in the West, and a Midwestern farming town may have very different traditions. Their differences are part of the country’s cultural landscape—not proof that it has none.

Faith, Freedom, and Responsibility

For many Americans, faith has helped shape community life: congregations gather for worship, care for people in need, teach children, sing together, mark weddings and funerals, and serve their neighbors. Churches are not the only places where Americans build community, and faith has never been experienced in the same way by everyone. But religious traditions are undeniably part of the country’s story.

For Christians, gratitude for the good we have received can sit alongside a sober awareness of our responsibilities. Scripture calls believers to love their neighbors (Mark 12:31), seek justice and show mercy (Micah 6:8), and pray for those in authority (1 Timothy 2:1–2). Those teachings do not require us to treat a nation as perfect or confuse loyalty to country with loyalty to God. They call us to live faithfully where we are, serving others and seeking what is good.

Love of country is at its healthiest when it is more than a slogan. It can mean caring for the people who live beside us, learning our history honestly, protecting the freedom and dignity of others, and passing along the best of our traditions while working to correct what is wrong. Pride that cannot admit a mistake is fragile. Criticism that cannot recognize anything worth preserving is incomplete.

You Don’t Have to Love Everything to Recognize Something

You may dislike American consumerism. You may be frustrated with our politics, distrust some of our institutions, or admire another country’s approach to public life. Those are all subjects worth discussing. You do not have to pretend America is perfect to appreciate its music, local traditions, generosity, ingenuity, or the many communities that make up its life.

The useful question is not whether America is better than every other country. It is what we mean when we say a country has culture—and whether we are willing to look beyond the most obvious images. If culture means only ancient stone buildings, then we have defined the subject too narrowly. If it includes the stories, customs, art, faith, food, music, and shared practices through which people make meaning, the evidence is all around us.

America’s culture is old in some places and young in others, beautiful in some ways and troubling in others, shared in some respects and fiercely diverse in many more. It is not a finished product. It is something people inherit, question, repair, create, and pass on.

So the next time someone says, “America has no culture,” try asking what they mean by culture. Then look around before accepting the answer. The story is bigger than a parking lot, a viral video, or a single political argument. It is written in the music we make, the communities we build, the traditions we keep, the wrongs we confront, and the responsibilities we accept.

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Join the Conversation: What American tradition, song, meal, local custom, or act of community means something to you? And what do you think we should preserve—or do better—for the next generation? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Further reading: The Library of Congress, “The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America” — loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america.