Part 2 of a series:

• Dear Australian and American Friends
• Dear Australian Friends, here’s what I think you need to know about my American Friends
• Dear American Friends, here’s what I think you need to know about my Australian Friends
• American and Australian Friends; How has this all played out?

I grew up in the UK in the 80s and went to university in 1992. As part of my thrillingly exciting degree in Accounting and Financial Analysis I was fortunate enough to win a scholarship to study in the USA so in August 1993 I got an a plane and travelled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During my time there I learned 2 incredibly important things:

1. Jesus really do rise from the dead and that means that everything changes
2. Americans are very different to the rest of us and to who we think they actually are

Let’s face it, for the majority of us most of what we know about the USA comes from films and TV (stylised depictions of life), mainstream news media (which increasingly has significant ideological biases and thrives on presenting conflict) or social media (do I even need to explain that one?!). Simply put the America that we think we know is not the real America. If my life were presented to you through a curated “real-life documentary”, a couple of slanted news reports and my twitter feed then you’d get a pretty skewed sense of who I was. I remember arriving at O’Hare airport pretty convinced that I was going to be shot within the next 24 hours. It took me a good couple of days to lose those jitters as I slowly realised that not every single US citizen was packing heat and looking for any excuse to fire off a few rounds. Turns out when you actually live amongst people you get to know them better.

So here’s my observations from 1 year of living amongst Americans (albeit 30 years ago and a particular flavo(u)r of Yank – the Midwest) and then ongoing friendship with a number of Americans (albeit most the most conservative type; genuine Christian believers and usually Republican voters – but then that’s the crowd that we’re talking about here). I’ll set out what I think are some key learnings and then in a final post show you how I think they’ve worked out in the current issues that we’re dealing with.

1. They love Jesus. We ought never to lose sight of this one. Much of our disagreement is about how we should go about loving Jesus, not whether we do. Sure, at times we might ask the “do they really?” question but let’s not do our American friends the disservice of assuming they don’t. They’re just working out how to love Jesus in a very different context to ours.
2. The USA is very, very different to us. We think we know the US because of what we see in our varied media. So we assume that we’re familiar with how they function. But, like I observed, that’s a very curated presentation.
3. Americans are very different from each other. We get the curated mono-culture, they have incredible breadth across a country that’s very roughly the same size as us but has many many more people. When you’re talking to an American you need to know what sort of American. West coast liberal? East coast urbanite? Midwest? Southern gentlemen and women? Elegy-writing Hillbilly? There’s lots of differences…
4. The USA is incredibly polarised. I don’t think I can stress this enough. I noticed this very quickly when I arrived over 30 years ago. Even then it was obvious that there were 2 sides to everything and lots of people picked a side and then dug in. And that was then, when the political system seemed tamer and more reasonable. I got involved in student politics both in the UK and the US. In the UK it was dominated by the radical left with the odd attempt by conservatives to speak out and against. But there was one prevailing mindset. In the US it was game on and everything was contested. The political system is a great exemplar of this. You basically have two options; Democrat or Republican. That’s it. Pick your side, one or the other. When the governance of your country is structured this way then do you wonder why everything can seem like it is? Or perhaps it’s the other way around? Either way, it’s different to how we have things here in Australia. We’ve got a basic left/right divide but there’s plenty of variety within in. Want to go harder left? Become a Green (or Victorian Labor!). On the right/populist side there’s all manner of rising and falling options to dabble in. We like the choice and we have space for nuance – at least compared to the States/
5. Being Polarised pushes arguments to Extremes and Absolutes. In a fight between polar opposites things can become all or nothing. All really can mean all. It inevitably pushes views and positions to what we might perceive as extremes with no middle ground. A shift one way is matched by a lurch in the other direction. Consider: do we really think Trump just came out of nowhere? Trump is the yang to the ying of a massive rise of wokeism/cultural marxism/call it what you want. As a large number of Americans grew increasingly disenchanted by what was happening in their government (and Obama was without a doubt the most radical left-leaning President in US history by a long shot) there was a natural need for a counter-voice, an opposite pole. But right-leaning voters were presented with what has become known as RINOs – Republicans in Name Only. In a cultural system that naturally moved towards two heavy opposing poles there was no counter-balance. Enter Trump. He didn’t need to be incredibly conservative, he just needed to be against the other stuff. And Trump does “against” really, really well. Or put it a different way: for a lot of the Christians that we’re talking about their initial vote for Trump wasn’t so much a vote for him as a vote against the alternative. Some US friends of mine explain this as part of our helpful discussion here. Some voted for him while holding their nose. But in an environment of polar opposites the new pig smells better than the old sty.
6. Some of the Extremes have been AWFUL. We’ve got our problems here in Australia, certainly. But the States went nuts over the past decade plus. Think what our American brethren have seen happen around them – so many of the same issues we’ve experienced but to a much greater degree and in a more polarised and polarising environment. Redefinition of marriage, all the gender transition stuff, the extremes of the BLM movement and all the unchallenged chaos that brought to many cities. It’s worth reminding ourselves that these are issues that strike to very heart of our anthropology; how we understand our created nature as binary-sexed humans all made in the image of God. So not only were all these radical things pursued with great aggression, they were matters of fundamental importance for Christian believers. They strike to the very heart of our understanding of God’s good creation. Can you see how in the US milieu that we’re looking at it would be felt so very very deeply? But there’s more:
7. Americans REALLY believe in Freedom. Their whole sense of self is built upon it. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t just rest upon an assertion of the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, but it declares it to be “God-given”. It’s a theological statement, not just a political one. So our American Christian brethren are fairly well committed to it. Back at the University of Illinois I attended the home Football games, each of which began with a small patriotic presentation (usually involving some branch of uniformed service) and then the national anthem. Have you every stopped to think about the Star Spangled Banner? It’s an Ode to the fight for freedom – a fight that may very well cost lives. Every time it’s sung our American friends remind themselves that the perilous fight is worth it. Our brethren have felt like that precious freedom has been increasingly curtailed in recent years. It has felt curtailed in the ever-encroachment of what they see as woke impositions upon their freedom of speech (telling them they cannot speak out about the extremes around them and punishing them when they do). Then they experienced a fresh round of restriction during the COVID years. Oh say can you see that the banner still waves, and waves more clearly than ever?
8. Americans don’t know as much about us as we know about them. Let’s face it, most of the traffic (cultural and otherwise) is one-way here. US TV isn’t flooded with Australian series. US teens (the odd Ugg boot notwithstanding) aren’t looking to us for the latest trends (although I do see some ugly UGLY fake mullets). Because we live downstream of the US in so many things it can breed a false sense of familiarity. We think we know them because we get so much from them – they’re the dominant cultural force in our world. Their twitter debates are our twitter debates, their politics become our politics (do you see any Americans raging about Albanese’s latest thing?). We feel like we know them and it gives us a right to speak to and about them. We get into conversations with people who we think we understand but who don’t actually understand us well at all. I’m sure that will end fine…
9. Americans don’t have as developed a view of Biblical Theology and Eschatology as we do. I’ve left this one to last because I think it’s incredibly important, indeed key to understanding so of the serious disagreements that have been expressed recently. Most of the previous factors are mainly political/cultural with a theological expression. This is the other way around. We’re blessed in Australia with some really fine theological thinkers and sometimes we take for granted how we read the Bible. But it’s worth remembering that we’re probably one of the most (theologically) highly-educated group of Christians anywhere. That doesn’t mean that others know nothing, or that they don’t think, it’s just that I’ve been in a lot of the world and I don’t think I’ve come across any group quite like Australian conservative evangelicals. We have a number of wonderful theological colleges and one of the incredibly valuable things they have given us over the decades is a significantly developed Biblical Theology. Goldsworthy and others (and I realise there are lots of others) taught us to look for how the gospel meta-story progresses across the entire Bible and can be expressed in so many different themes and topics. You can do a Biblical Theology of land and trace the gospel as a movement from Creation to Promised Land to ravaged land, to restoration of land (albeit woefully underwhelming) to a Kingdom that is not of this world to the consumation of the New Creation. You’d need to add how the resurrection weaves it’s way through it all and so much more. Or you might start with a river and water and look at springs in the desert, rivers that mark exit and entry points, the remarkable location of a lake of salt right in the middle of everything, the promise of fresh water, the deep sea from which monsters rise, the glorious fresh deluge coming from the temple in a vision, the One who stands in the temple and proclaims himself the source of living water but who also thirsts when he dies and a final river in a great city that brings life to everything. You could look at the ancient kings and Israel’s desire for a king, turn to the promises of a king and the false and disappointing versions of that king, you would be surprised by the anti-King who turns out to be the King who has an extraordinary throne and who will return one day to install an eternal Kingdom. My experience with my American friends is that they wouldn’t deny any of this, it’s just that they don’t instinctively think in this way as much as we do. I have to say, this is my primary way of approaching the Scriptures – as one beautiful meta-narrative with all these intertwining complementary themes that weave together in a glorious tapestry to present one cohesive picture. We tend to look for continuity and development, often our US brethren are more prone to note the distinction between Old and New. Let me provide one example of how this can be expressed. Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, states boldly that “grace does not overcome nature” by which he means that creation (“nature”) has a God-given order to it that cannot be overturned. It’s what we might call a deontological position – the ethic comes from the very nature of the thing. The gospel is then another layer than is rightly applied in addition to this. It brings many wonderful good things (just as the Creation itself is good) but it cannot change the good Created order. I trust Wolfe would recognise this argument as his own. One of Wolfe’s arguments, of course, is that part of the good “nature” is a distinction between the different races. But the avid Biblical Theologian doesn’t see grace and nature interacting in this way. Grace does not overcome nature, it fulfils it. God’s good Creation is not static. It has a trajectory right from the beginning; from it’s first moment it is heading relentlessly forward towards the New Creation and the guiding principle along this path is the gospel. This gospel is not “overcoming” the nature, it is simply what that nature was always intended to move towards. The ethic here is teleological; moving towards a goal/target/end. This is more than Aquinas’s “grace perfecting nature“:Viewed this way the “gracious” telos of “nature”‘s diversity of peoples is the united throng of all peoples, nations, tribes and tongues around the throne of the Lord Jesus Christ. For Wolfe, the “natural” (good created) end of the distinct peoples of the world is their continued (good natural created) distinction and this is “Christian”. For the Biblical Theologian the unity of those peoples is their inevitable intended goal in Christ.

That’s it for now. Next will be “Dear American Friends, here’s what I think you need to know about my Australian Friends”. Yes, it will look a bit like this one, only the opposite.