Various aspects of American culture troubled him: teenagers openly showing disrespect for their elders, a public school system that he thought was a training ground for unbelief, the fact that many Americans retired without pensions, and so on. The most troubling aspect of American culture, though, by some way, was its deep-seated racism.

Herman Bavinck travelled to North America twice: first as a wide-eyed young theologian in 1892, and later, in a more mature phase of life, in 1908. The purpose of his 1892 trip was to serve as an emissary for the Calvinist movement that had been making great waves in the Netherlands from the late 1870s onwards – a movement that would later become known as neo-Calvinism. Although he found his American audiences were largely unreceptive to his Calvinism (“The American is too aware of himself, he is too much conscious of his power, his will is too strong to be a Calvinist”) he mostly withheld from passing negative judgment on them. Rather, he held tightly to an idealistic philosophy of travel. His notes on this journey begin with,

Travel is an art that one must learn.

Moving oneself easily, opening one’s eyes, preferring observation [to judgment].

Observing, perceiving, and valuing.

At this point in his life, he was committed to the idea that travel was wasted on those who disdained the foreign on account of its otherness. Far better, he thought, to train one’s eye to appreciate the delight of the foreign. For that reason, then, he largely held back from criticising American culture for whatever made it unyielding to his Calvinistic charms. Surprisingly to his Dutch audience, he would rather tell them that while Americans were not likely to embrace Calvinism, Christianity would nonetheless survive in the New World because their beloved Calvinism “was not the only truth”.

By the time he returned to America in 1908, to give the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary (published as Philosophy of Revelation), Bavinck had largely given up on that view of the artfully appreciative globetrotter. He certainly remained diplomatic: on this trip, he and his wife, the gifted Johanna Bavinck-Schippers, were received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt (although in private it seems he found the President personally underwhelming). His own public statements to an American audience wrote warmly of their positive impressions of the land and its people.

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