Image: Regent Street during a recent Royal Wedding. Credit: Raghavvidya/Flickr, CC 2.0.
In the early 1990s I stayed at the Divine Tracy hotel in Philadelphia. It was owned and run by the remnants of a remarkable non-segregated church led by Father Divine, also known as God. He believed in a non-racial America, but he was regarded as black by most of America; although committed to celibacy, he married; he lived in luxury but had no income, though he believed in self-reliance and hated welfare. His church campaigned for English to become the official language of the USA, to marginalize encroaching Spanish. He was also very much in favour of the hydrogen bomb and wanted to spread his notion of America as the kingdom of heaven to the whole world. In 1950 he made a start by suggesting that Australia and New Zealand adopt the US constitution and become part of the USA.
I recalled the story of Father Divine when confronted by the idea of the Anglosphere in British politics, the subject of Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce’s excellent book. They follow much of the intellectual left in seeing in Brexit as ‘Shadows of Empire’ – though theirs is a refined version that focusses not so much on Empire itself, as on the new concept of the Anglosphere.
