I’ve been an American for less than three hours as I sit down to write. I drove with my American wife to a nondescript low-rise office building on the outskirts of Baltimore where, along with people from 24 other countries, I swore the naturalization oath of allegiance. 

We were each given our certificates, plus a little national flag, and congratulations from the staff of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. We sang the national anthem and took photographs. It was charming.

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It was also more stirring for me than I had expected it to be. I have been eligible to become an American for more than 30 years but had not done so until now. How could something I waited three decades to do, apparently without concern, have brought a tear to my eye?

The answer is that the cause of my delay was also the reason it felt so good and right to take the oath. I wanted to take this step only once I came to feel genuinely American. I did not do it the minute I was allowed, for convenience or perhaps for the heavyweight diplomatic support that citizenship confers.

The oath became worth taking at the moment when each word would be true as I recited it. That could not have been so when I first became technically eligible, nor in 2000, 2010, or 2020. Long after moving to the United States and being blessed with five American children — I sometimes referred to them as my “anchor babies” — I still felt myself thoroughly English.

How could I say I “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I [had] heretofore been a subject or citizen” while I still saw myself as a subject of the British Crown? I admired America even in boyhood and prized its ideals once I reached my teens, but for a long time, I did not feel that I owed this country my first loyalty. It did not command my “true faith and allegiance.” Patriotism is a deep thing, not something that can flit like a butterfly from one nation to the next.

The transfer of my loyalty to America and away from England, which I still love, was very gradual. It came partly because of a strong pull from America and partly because of a sad push from Britain. I was increasingly drawn to the U.S. and felt more a part of it with a natural inclination for its defense, but I also (especially recently) became disenchanted by and alienated from the condition and trajectory of Britain.

I still love the place and wish it the best. But I have watched it governed badly by one political party after the other for nearly two generations, and I’ve seen it sacrifice freedoms, such as of speech and of the press, as though they didn’t matter. Increasingly frequently, it gave me cause for shame. It is now a country in which people are imprisoned for giving opinions of which the government disapproves. This is shocking in a nation where the same freedoms that Americans cherish as their birthright were first conceived of and written into the constitution of a nation.

The ideas that form the foundations of America first germinated and took root in England. They were perfected by the first Americans and written into the Bill of Rights and Constitution, which even more than the Declaration of Independence codifies what America means.

The ideas written on the foundation stones of this nation and on the hearts of its first generation were thought of and written, as my friend and colleague Daniel Hannan notes, in the language in which you are reading this article. These ideas are treated now as universal, as though they grow without cultivation in every human heart. But they don’t. They emerged in a particular civilization. It is true that all people can come to them, but they were brought to the world by the English and they were honed by American descendants.

It is important for Americans to remember this today. For it gives the lie to the long-standing orthodoxy that America is simply a “propositional nation.” That is, it has no ethnic roots and is formed simply by a shared acceptance and commitment to the ideas that undergird it. 

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Certainly, as I have said, all people can accept and commit to those ideas. But it is vitally important to the continued flourishing of America that people whom this nation allows to become citizens genuinely commit to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America … bear true faith and allegiance to the same … and … take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” 

They must assimilate. It is not true that America sprang as if by spontaneous combustion from a set of ideas only. It sprang not from all “people” but from “a people.” Their ideas took life 250 years ago, and could only have taken life back then, in the country I finally left today, and flowered in the country I have just joined.