The event hosted by the Hamilton Society – an organisation which provides discourse for London-based, American and British centre-right professionals also paid tribute to Benedict Arnold – an American-born British military officer who served during the American Revolutionary War.
Addressing those in attendance, The Revd Erin Clarke, Vicar at St Mary’s said:
A warm welcome to you all on this gorgeous evening. As you can hear from my accent, I’m an American, born in Denver, Colorado, raised in West Michigan. My dad’s side of the family are all from Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, and my mom’s are Midwesterners through and through.
Like you, I have found myself living on this side of the ocean, and like you, I find today a wonderful if bittersweet day, celebrating the 250th birthday of our dear nation but doing so from the other side of the Atlantic. Study, work and family commitments have drawn us all over here, for different lengths of time. It is often on our Independence Day that I most keenly feel the split in my identity.
Many of you may know that Benedict Arnold is buried here at St Mary’s. When I became priest here my family had a great laugh about that, having levelled a good many pointed jokes at me over the years about me being a ‘traitor’ for moving back to the ‘old country.’
Benedict Arnold was a fascinating and complex character, who did not feel entirely at home in the American Colonies as they were then; nor, after his defection to England, did he feel entirely at home in Britain. No one here really knew what to make of him, this odd spy who had come in from the cold. I sense in Arnold’s struggle to build a rooted life a precursor of the struggle many of us standing here tonight may feel, Americans living in London.
Oscar Wilde famously remarked that the Americans and the English are ‘two nations divided by a common language,’ and never does that feel more true than today, our Independence Day. It can feel, in these polarised times, that even we Americans have lost the ability to speak to our fellow countrymen and -women, much less anyone else who shares the English language. It can seem like we are speaking different languages, like our shared commitment to freedom is not enough to bind us together.
There has been a church on this site since Saxon times; since roughly the year 800. Not 1800, 800! This building was built in 1777, a year after the US Declaration of Independence. In a radical move, the residents of Battersea decided that it was time for a new church building. Perhaps they caught some of the revolutionary bug that was in the air both in the Americas and in France; they thought that instead of repairing the medieval stone church that was here, they would have the boldness of vision to start afresh. The building you see behind me was the result.
My hope and prayer for us, for our nation, for this day, is that we can hold on to two things as we look towards the next 250 years.
First of all, I hope that we can hold on to that shared commitment to freedom which is in the DNA of our nation. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the birthright of all those who are born and live within our borders. I believe that these values run deeper than any party political commitment, any fiscal policy or immigration policy; and if we have the courage to let them unite and define us as a nation, we will be doing our founding fathers proud.
And second of all, like those brave Battersea residents who had the vision, the gumption, and the commitment to build a new St Mary’s Church from the ground up, I hope and pray that we Americans can hold to our ability to dream: to see beyond what’s in front of us, beyond the status quo. To work alongside unlikely allies, to have the dedication as well as the humility to build in the direction of a tomorrow we cannot fully see, cannot even fully imagine.
If we can hold on to both of those things, with the help of God, we can look forward to the next 250 years with joy and confidence.
Happy Independence Day & may God bless America.
