Letter from America

Lately I spent eight days in Washington DC, helping a church with a feted past think about its future. One evening I went for a whisky with a couple of friends. We dropped into a bar opposite the White House. It was packed with administration staffers.

A young woman approached our table and started removing the beer mat from under my glass. My friend put his hand on the mat and said to her, ‘I think he’s using that.’ Undaunted, she turned to me and said, ‘I’m collecting these cartoons of former presidents, I hope you don’t mind me taking this one.’ I said, ‘I thought I might hold on to it.’ Affronted, and picking up my accent, she replied, ‘Well your stupid country is impossible if you want to get a visa.’ I said, ‘I think you’ll find it’s not straightforward for a foreign national to get into this country right now, either.’ It still took her a few more moments to realise she wasn’t going to get her beer mat. She stormed off.

I recalled this incident to several people at the church. Each said, ‘Yes, that’s what it’s like. I feel what I’ve worked all my life for [the military, civil service, environmental protection] has just been not just taken away but derided. Now people feel they can help themselves – to a beer mat, or Greenland.’

It made me wonder if the same could happen in London. Most of the people the Bible describes – Moses, Daniel, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul – were living under a hostile regime. The church I’m visiting – and the Church of England – has long assumed it was there to make an honest, fair, healthy system and society a little bit better, and point beyond it to the everlasting. But in Washington, we’re in a very different season. It could happen in London too. And the time to prepare for it is now.

Revd Dr Sam Wells