For a while the televised sounds and sights of Friday’s service of remembrance at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London were cheering in a time of sorrow: Britain, while mourning for its many citizens dead in the attack on the World Trade Center, was also mourning in fraternity with the United States and its far greater loss. But then the surge of good feeling suddenly vanished. I heard a familiar melody and the occluded voices of hundreds in the congregation singing the first verse of the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic.' No, please, anything but that, I thought: even the 'Star-Spangled Banner' (which was also played) would be better than the 'Bad Old Hymn of the Republic' as I call it with unrepenting irreverence.

For this is an evil song. Yes, evil: Julia Ward Howe’s poem, set to the tune of 'John Brown’s Body' (and there’s another one!) became the North’s anthem against the South during the Civil War. The song not only preached a military crusade against the seceded states, but justified it morally as God’s (Jesus Christ’s) apocalyptic will, revealed to the poet and her evangelical Christian ilk:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:
11His truth is marching on.

Today, if voiced by Islam, we would plainly call this a Jihad and denounce and condemn it as uncivilized. Yet from the moment these hateful lines were first sung, when the Union Army went out to do its slaughter, and be slaughtered, the troops were authorized agents of the Lord’s work. Thenceforth, if they fell, as 7,000 would in a single hour at Cold Harbor, they fell as martyrs (and presumably were whisked to a heaven that must have looked an awful lot like Valhalla). If they in turn slew thousands, as they would during Pickett’s Charge on the third day at Gettysburg, those young Confederate soldiers they mowed down, as easily as cutting ripe wheat back home with a cradle scythe, were the Slaveocracy’s, i.e.,Satan’s minions, the quintessential Others, deserving of death and no Valhalla.

I again thought of the Londoners singing the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' (did they really know the significance of the words they were mouthing?) when I read an account of a conversation between two of our country’s leading Christian evangelists, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club show. With a nauseating predictability, both televangelists sat smugly across the desk from one another and interpreted the attack on the United States as a sign that the Christian God was displeased with the recent comportment of His covenanted nation (the United States and only the United States). And why was He put out with us? Not for the wretched excess of our materialism and conspicuous consumption; not for our democracy’s anti-democratic foreign policy; not for our amoral, oligarchic business culture, predatory at home and around the world; not for our own vast backyard full of poverty, inequality and disenfranchisement. No, these apparently weren’t bothering Him. But according to Falwell and Robertson the Lord was upset, and by those two gravest offenses against Him and against His Kingdom: homosexuality and abortion. Here were the ‘abominations’ that had provoked Tuesday’s attack on New York City and the Pentagon (perhaps the two ‘divines’ had always suspected New York but surely it came as a surprise to them that this latter place was a veritable Babylon of whoring, sodomy and wholesale abortion). Here then was the impetus for a cadre of terrorists’ flying airliners into buildings: get the ball rolling for the ‘Last Things’ (at last!). Ah, eschatology.

This socio-pathological lunacy was too much even for our president, who frowned mightily over Falwell’s and Robertson’s quaint explanation of the week’s events and warned them to postpone such glossalalia at least until the dust of the collapsed skyscrapers settled and the thousands of perished had been decently commemorated. But that didn’t stop George W. Bush from inviting Falwell to the Friday services at the National Cathedral, and of course Falwell attended. I only hope he was there to grieve, and so checked his righteousness at the door.

Why do we as the self-proclaimed freest nation so often need to be reminded that to be right is not to be righteous? The devolution of reason into a shallow, unearned moral confidence about God’s will, about ‘manifest destiny,’ about what’s best for the rest of the world is the hugest failing of contemporary United States politics and political thinking, which consistently ignore (or outrightly deny) the world’s complexity and the imperfectability of human action. In one of his several speeches following the terrorist attacks, President Bush announced that our response this time as opposed, say, to the ineffectuality of the Clinton administration’s ‘telewar’ by cruise missiles would be strong enough to"rid the world of evil." Grant him the license of rhetorical exaggeration, prompted by this horrendous occasion: still, one wants to ask, shouldn’t our president have said"this evil," the evil of these terrorists responsible for this"act of war" against the United States? Can we, the citizens of this deeply injured nation, not see that it is neither our task nor within our ability to"rid the world of evil"? To speak of the eradication of evil itself is to mouth like a litany the senescent notion of American exceptionalism; once more to set in motion the always-futile round of imposing our will on a world that doesn’t belong to us and then rationalizing our action in the name of the Christian God’s design, of a covenant, of a destiny.

11However sure his advisors and would-be advisors claimed they were, Abraham Lincoln never presumed to know God’s will; he was far from sure it was knowable. Insisting on the prime directive of human reason, always probing for the metaphysical core of any subject (politics, love, knowledge, religion), Lincoln thought long, hard and deep before commanding the North’s conduct of the Civil War. For Lincoln, thought was not so much the prelude to action but itself a kind of founding action, a first cause of public action, necessary to the sufficient condition of fighting the war. But this did not mean he was always able to know. Late in the summer of1862, during one of the darkest periods of the war, with a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation resting in a drawer of his desk, Lincoln set down a short private memorandum that has come to be known as Meditation on the Divine Will. Here are its first three sentences:

11 The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims 11to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and 11 one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same 11thing at the same time.

Characteristically, even when thinking of God thinking, Lincoln never allowed the repeal of the law of contradiction. And he continued his meditation with a second inference: that God may be keeping his own counsel, that is, not favoring the success of either the North or the South! Try to fathom it as he might, he remained agnostic on the will of God. What then should he do about the"great contest" that was approaching two years’ duration with two more beyond that, having every minute of his executive existence to do something?

Whatever Lincoln should have done as the Civil War president (and there are still those few who believe he did not do well), he certainly thought about it, uncertainly. When he confessed, as he said, that he had not controlled events, but they, him, he was not giving himself the credit he had earned. By the time of the Second Inaugural Address, with the South fast failing and Northern victory imminent, Lincoln could speak of"bind[ing] up the nation’s wounds," of continuing to act"[w]ith malice toward none; with charity for all." He believed we could see, at least dimly,"the right;" the"firmness" that the right accorded would allow the work to be finished. It was not,"God has granted us victory," but"I think I see some light" (and that glimmer ahead included a kinder, gentler plan of reconstruction than the one the Re-United States eventually got, and a movement toward Negro suffrage, which may have been one of the things that got Lincoln killed--a cunning and charismatic madman believed it was God’s will that he cut off the"serpent’s head").

Yet even in the Second Inaugural Lincoln was drawn toward the apocalyptic possibility of divine vengeance."Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this might scourge of war may speedily pass away." But. . . .and then come the hard biblical words that imply that the South has gotten what it deserved, annihilation, and that the God whose will he could not tell in the Meditation of 1862 has by March, 1865, proved to be on the Union side, against the slaveocracy and for the surging chorus of singers of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ Some sort of mysticism was the obverse of rationality in Lincoln’s character. But he was one of our clearest and most deeply thinking of presidents, and if Abraham Lincoln was infected with this irrational virus, so uniquely and perniciously"American," what can we expect of the etiolated Party of Lincoln today? As a citizen, I ask that, before making war on any group or any state, those with military power to wield think of Lincoln, and that at least a few, including George W. Bush’s closest advisors, try to think like him.