By Jeff Walton, Juicy Ecumenism.
Three conversations over a recent weekend have me ruminating about immigration, the Church, and American confidence.
On Saturday while grilling on his back porch, a friend of mine noted with disapproval how those of British nationality are now a minority in London (in actuality 41 percent of Londoners were born outside of the UK according to the UK Office for National Statistics, but close enough). He believes that native-born British aren’t permitted to object and that their capital is demographically no longer theirs.
This friend shares many of my core Christian convictions and was educated at a military service academy and an Ivy League graduate school. He is intellectually curious and attends a suburban megachurch. He also regularly engages with the podcast offerings of the New Right that have displaced legacy media. While he isn’t an Anglican, I’ve encountered similar talking points in the online fringes of my own church tradition, including discussion of “Heritage Americans.”
I don’t share my friend’s distress (possibly because I’m from Colorado which has a low percentage of native-born residents, and live outside Washington, D.C. where seemingly nearly everyone is from elsewhere). It’s preferable, in my view, to live in a place where many want to move to rather than a place many are relocating from. The capital of any large empire inevitably attracts diaspora populations from its far-flung territories, and the British Empire was no exception.