My Letter to America

Don't worry, it's better than Bin Laden's

“Bluffs on the Guadalupe River, 17 Miles above Kerrville, Texas” by Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1921

I have spent the past week in America.

Texas, specifically. As I write, I am in the departure lounge at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, gladly bound for home. For readers who are unaware, my main job is working as an editor for The Davenant Institute, an organisation committed to retrieving the riches of classical Protestantism to renew and resource the contemporary church. Working remotely from the UK, this week was one of my few chances to spend time in person with colleagues as we exhibited for Davenant at the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. It’s been an invigorating week, but it’s good to be bound for Blighty.

As of this past September I have spent three years working for Davenant, as a Brit among Americans. It is easy for Brits to make digs at Americans (and vice versa too). As I was driven across vast expanses of Texan landscape this past week, past things like the enormous Tesla factory or Buckees gas stations with 100 gas pumps, I thought more than once of “The shadow of that hyddeous strength, sax myle and more it is of length” The Old World dies hard. I suspect that many of you regular readers are of the kind who are, like me, leery about the ills of modernity, and find many of them epitomised in the USA. 

With some of my Davenant Institute colleagues at ETS in San Antonio.

We should check our distaste, however. Distaste for America seems to be behind an interesting development on TikTok this week, in which a forgotten political tract by an Austere Religious Scholar, critical of the Land of the Free, has been rediscovered by disaffected Gen Zers.

And so, as I return from my latest trip to the New World, rather than gripe about how unnecesarily orange their Doritos are, or why none of them seem to recycle, or questioning why I was able to have brisket for breakfast today, I wanted to write up a few positive reflections on what Tom Wolfe called “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country”. 

Reflecting on my latest trip, and drawing upon numerous conversations I’ve had in person over the last few years, three notable things come to mind which I find truly praiseworthy about America—and I offer them here without caveats or qualifications.

Consider this is my own, somewhat scattershot, letter to America.