Letters From A Blind Spot
Periodically, in her popular Substack “Letters from an American,” Heather Cox Richardson has a “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” moment. A big moment. Actually, she seems to see it as the ultimate hymn of liberation.
Actually, a violent call to war in the name of Christ, and Nation. Glorious war. A hymn that was revived during the Cold War specifically in pursuit of the goal to wed Christianity and capitalism.
Her post-dated February 1, 2023, really stood out. Not just for its content, but the content of her posting the following day. Here are some quotes from the February 1 post:
“On February 1, 1862, in the early days of the Civil War, the Atlantic Monthly published Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” summing up the cause of freedom for which the United States troops would soon be fighting. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” it began.
‘He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.’”
“One day she and her husband toured the troops surrounding the city and, mingling with troops on the way home, sang a popular song: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; his soul is marching on.” A friend challenged Howe to write more uplifting words for the marching song. (emphasis added)
That night, Howe slept soundly. She woke before dawn and, lying in bed, began thinking about the tune she had heard the soldiers singing the day before. She recalled: “[A]s I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.... With a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen... I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.” (emphasis added)
Howe's hymn captured the tension of Washington, D.C., during the war as soldiers protected the government from invasion, strung in camps around the city to keep invaders from the U.S. Capitol.
“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.”
Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic went on define the Civil War as a holy war for human freedom: (emphasis added)
“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.”
The Battle Hymn became the anthem of the Union during the Civil War, and exactly three years after it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, on February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Joint Resolution of Congress passing the Thirteenth Amendment and sending it off to the states for ratification. The amendment provided that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." It gave Congress power to enforce that amendment. This was the first amendment that gave power to the federal government rather than taking it away. Three quarters of the states had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment by December 6, 1865.”
If someone like Dr. Cox Richardson cannot see the problem here while Christian Nationalism, in its most virulent form, has a real chance of destroying civilization…we have had it.
Look at the damn words. Onward Christian Soldiers with those soldiers explicitly US hero warriors. This Nation will be remembered as the one that put the terrible swift sword into the hand of the Prince of Peace.
The very next “Letters from an American” she posted, dated February 2, 2023, began with:
“Today the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted along party lines to remove Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from her seat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Republicans voting to remove her justified their action by pointing to language she used that they say was antisemitic. She has apologized for that language.
Today’s vote is a window into a larger story. It appears the Republican Party has split, and the far-right wing is making a play to become what amounts to a third party. Its members demanded the removal of Schiff and Swalwell from the intelligence committee and Omar from foreign affairs: Schiff and Swalwell apparently because they have gone after former president Donald Trump, and Omar because she is Muslim and a woman of color. (emphasis added)”
Later on:
”The power the far-right representatives are getting is making them a force distinct from the rest of the Republican Party. They demanded, and got, extraordinary representation on committees apart from the normal party apparatus, power over the Speaker and the introduction of bills, and now have normalized violent rhetoric within the party.
Their rise is a logical outcome of the history of the Republican Party. Back in the 1980s, those Republicans determined to get rid of government regulation of business and social programs did two things.
First, they insisted that any government regulation of business or provision of a basic social safety net was “socialism” because, they claimed, the tax dollars that such government action cost would come from those with money—who they implied would be white people—and thus would redistribute wealth from hardworking white men to those who benefited from such programs. This idea has nothing to do with the modern definition of socialism, which means government ownership of the means of production. Instead, it is a holdover from the Reconstruction years in the United States, when white supremacists insisted that Black voting would mean a redistribution of wealth as formerly enslaved people voted for lawmakers who promised to fix roads, and build schools and hospitals. (emphasis added)
Second, Republicans in the 1980s made a deliberate decision to court voters with religion, racism, and sexism in order to hold onto power. Antitax crusader Grover Norquist brought business leaders, evangelicals, and social conservatives into a coalition to win elections in 1985. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” he said, “but these groups can provide the votes.” Over the decades their focus on religion, race, and sex ramped up until it took on a power of its own, stronger than the pro-business ideology of those who fed it.
Now, a generation later, that rhetoric has led to its logical conclusion: the Republicans have created a group of voters and their representatives who are openly white supremacists and who believe that any attempt to use the government to hold the economic playing field level is socialism. They are overwhelmingly evangelicals. They back former president Trump or someone like him and are eager to break the power of the current government even if it means defaulting on our debt. They threaten violence.
With the Republican Party just barely in control of the House, that group now wields enough power that it divides the House into three groups: the Democrats, the Republicans who want to cut taxes and gut regulation, and the Republicans who want to destroy the “socialist” government, want to keep white people in charge, support Trump or someone similar, are fervently Christian, and openly court violence. (emphasis added)
Today, the House voted to condemn socialism—another attempt to appease that far right—while Republicans then chided those Democrats who refused to vote in favor of that condemnation because they said they thought it was a setup to cut Social Security and Medicare as socialism. (They are not socialism.)”
So how concerned is HCR for Ms. Omar and her rights now that Republicans removed her from a key committee on foreign relations - because she was a Muslim?
"His Truth is marching on?"
“With a Terrible Swift Sword?"
"God is marching on?”
To reclaim the Middle East for Christ?
Does that include Somalia?
American Freedom has two essential components:
1. All aspects of the United States are divinely inspired and directed by the Christian God; and its uniquely strong “Faith in the Lord” gives it Dominion over all other nations. And all American citizens. In pursuit of “The Great Commission.”
2. Greed is good.
In a post dated July 3, 2022, and titled “Recent Events, Not-So-Recent Events, and the Future,” I discussed two major, heavily funded projects in American History that have helped concocted the myth (a Great Lie) of a Christian Nation.
The first was described in an article that first appeared on Alternet April 21, 2015, Kevin Kruse provided an adapted excerpt from his book of the same year, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015).
Here is a link to the Alternet article:
How Corporate America Invented Christian America - Alternet.org
It is a long article full of large amounts of historical information and analysis, but I encourage you to read it in its entirety.
He begins by describing the December 1940, annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Attending were more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation. Interesting but not surprising J. Edgar Hoover was one of the speakers.
However, the critical speaker of the day and most enthusiastically received speaker was Reverend James W. Fifield Jr. Handsome, tall, and somewhat gangly, the 41-year-old Congregationalist minister bore more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Stewart. Fifield delivered a passionate defense of the American system of free enterprise and a withering assault on its perceived enemies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.
Singling out the regulatory state for condemnation, he denounced “the multitude of federal agencies attached to the executive branch” and warned ominously of “the menace of autocracy approaching through bureaucracy.”
As Kruse explains:
“It all sounds familiar enough today, but Fifield’s audience of executives was stunned. Over the preceding decade, as America first descended into and then crawled its way out of the Great Depression, these titans of industry had been told, time and time again, that they were to blame for the nation’s downfall. (emphasis added)
Fifield, in contrast, insisted that they were the source of its salvation. (emphasis added)
They just needed to do one thing: Get religion. (emphasis added)
As men of God, ministers could voice the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without any suspicion that they were motivated solely by self-interest. They could push back against claims, made often by Roosevelt and his allies, that business had somehow sinned and the welfare state was doing God’s work. The assembled industrialists gave a rousing amen. “When he had finished,” a journalist noted, “rumors report that the N.A.M. applause could be heard in Hoboken.” (emphasis added)
It was a watershed moment—the beginning of a movement that would advance over the 1940s and early 1950s a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Fifield and like-minded ministers saw Christianity and capitalism as inextricably intertwined, and argued that spreading the gospel of one required spreading the gospel of the other. (emphasis added)
He and his colleagues devoted themselves to fighting the government forces they believed were threatening capitalism and, by extension, Christianity. And their activities helped build a foundation for a new vision of America in which businessmen would thrive—in a phrase they popularized—in a nation “under God.” In many ways, the marriage of corporate and Christian interests that has recently dominated the news—from the Hobby Lobby case to controversies over state-level versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—is not that new at all.”
Kruse goes on in great detail how NAM promised to “serve the purposes of business salvation” and rededicated itself to spreading the gospel of free enterprise, The promoted capitalism through a wide array of films, radio programs, advertisements, direct mail, a speakers bureau and a press service that provided ready-made editorials and news stories for 7,500 local newspapers.
Revered Fifield, who became known as the “The Apostle to Millionaires,” was pastor of the elite First Congregational Church in Los Angeles in 1935. He crafted an interpretation of the Bible that catered to his congregation. Notably, Fifield dismissed the many passages in the New Testament about wealth and poverty, and instead assured the elite that their worldly success was a sign of God’s blessings. (emphasis added)
There is so much detailed, fascinating, scary, and extremely important information in Kruse’s article that I will not go into here. However, I will provide his conclusion:
“Throughout the 1950s, a new trend of what the Senate chaplain called “under-God consciousness” transformed American political life. In 1953, the first-ever National Prayer Breakfast was convened on the theme of “Government Under God.” In 1954, the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance was amended to include the phrase “under God” for the first time, too. A similar slogan, “In God We Trust,” spread just as quickly. Congress added it to stamps in 1954 and then to paper money in 1955; in 1956, the phrase became the nation’s first official motto.
As this religious revival swept through American politics, many in the United States began to believe their government was formally and fundamentally religious. In many ways, they’ve believed it ever since.” (emphasis added).
Ronald Reagan was a major player in this movement.
Project Blitz:
Evangelical Christians in and out of government initiated a project originally called “Project Blitz*.” This plan, quite out in the open but rarely mentioned in the media, was a four-year project (2016-2020), to establish the United States officially as a “Christian Nation.” Led by members of Congress and leaders of the religious right, it is the foundation of their world view.
* You know – the term used for the Nazi war machine’s terrible swift sword so to speak, now means in the US a rush attack on the quarterback in a football game. As the Supreme Court has confirmed, God is a football fan, and you better pray to win. It’s very important to him.
From SourceWatch: “Project Blitz is a program by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation (CPCF), Wall Builders and National Legal Defense. In practice it is a 116-page guide to "support lawmakers who may be enacting specific legislation...encourage numerous key conservative legislators at the local, state and federal level and reclaim and properly frame the narrative and the language of religious liberty issues."[1] Project Blitz has been characterized as "Christian nationalists" conducting a "legislative assault...to reshape America,"[2] "Evangelical extremists" mounting a "covert campaign to re-create a Christian America that never existed,"[3] and the Christian nationalist version of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).”
In July of 2017, right-wing Evangelical leaders gathered in the White House, put their hands on Trump, and prayed. After all, this is the guy who had told them, “With me, you will have power.” He also issued an order to the Justice Department directing them during the 2020 presidential campaign to not take action against any individual or organization that violated the conditions of their tax-exempt status related to religion.
Actually, what is happening is not hard to understand for the nation that put a terrible swift sword into the hand of the Prince of Peace and made him into a violent superhero. Perhaps they forged it by melting down a plowshare, just as we do today with our national treasure.
Fred