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
His truth is marching on
Glory, glory, hallelujah …
Called (The
Battle) Hymn of the Republic, this patriotic American anthem takes its place
among a genre that includes Die Wacht am Rhein
in German and the French La Marseillaise. (The
Battle) Hymn of the Republic echoes Old Testament imagery repeated
in the book of Revelations where the judgment of a righteous and jealous God is
symbolized in a great and final wine harvest. A near-hopelessly mixed set of
metaphors ranging from that harvest to the “terrible swift sword” and the
tramp, tramp of the marching victors concludes the first stanza of the American
anthem.
In its
simplest interpretation, I suppose, the judgment day sees the mighty vintner
operating the winepress where all humanity has been stored as grapes (of wrath?)
and he squeezes from this mass the good (the wine) and leaves the evil (the
hulls and husks) to the fire. Where all the blood comes from in all this
violence in John’s dream appears to be window dressing.
John
Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, interprets this line
from (The Battle) Hymn of the Republic through the
hardships of the Great Depression. Probably stretching a metaphor far beyond
what was intended in John’s Revelation. A judgment was
forced on the tenant farmers and the poor by the 1930s drought and the
depression, with the double trampling squeezing the wine of life from the
American working classes. At the same time, the winepress of God may be
visualized as taking the harvest sickle to those who caused the misery of the
Great Depression.
“The angel swung his sickle on the
earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s
wrath. They were trampled in the
winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press,
rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.” - Revelation 14: 19-20, NIV
That the
bloody imagery of judgment in Revelation should become foundational to an
anthem to American exceptionalism cries for analysis. Penned in tribute to the Union
side in the civil war, (The Battle)
Hymn of the Republic, lends itself to ranks of soldiers marching into
battle on its cadence, the association of their cause with God’s judgment on
their hearts and lips:
“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.”
I’ve been
impressed—as have many others—with John Steinbeck’s portrayal of the American national
character between wars, amid crises that can’t be conquered militarily. It’s
not a stretch to say that in the upheaval of the Great Depression and the dust
and drought of the 1930s, the hubris of military superiority was no defense
against the devastations exacerbated by the arrogance and carelessness under
which the American people chose to do politics and business. Like winning a
lottery, winning a war can come with costs related more to sloppiness of national
character, to unjustified convictions of invincibility. The implication in
Steinbeck that the fate of the union is in the hands of the rich and powerful
who cannot but defend their status, is clear.
“If you who own the things people must have could
understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from
results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were
results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the
quality of owning freezes you forever into "I" and cuts you off
forever from the "we".— Chapter 14 (quoted in The Grapes of Wrath -
Wikipedia)
Going right
back to the formation of what we now know as The United States of America,
the thread of Christian faith has run through practically every aspect of its life.
(The Battle) Hymn of the Republic softens before it concludes:
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.
Running as a
candidate for the presidency requires that one must be—or pretend to be—a defender
of the Bible and its teaching. Unfortunately, religious faith—like any
ideology—can’t guarantee a unity of purpose, or even a polity of tolerance. It’s
possible to be as fundamentalist or as revisionist in faith as it is in
politics, a phenomenon illustrated in Western Christianity generally … in
spades.
American “culture
wars” are somewhat clarified by an apparent irony. The Christian gospel is
concerned with individual souls living under, but detached from, "the world." And
the irony is that in Western—ostensibly Christian—states, the struggle between
the two entities is very much a love/hate proposition. A “you cannot serve two
masters, but you must try” dilemma. Patriotism is not a Christian virtue
although it is definitely foundational to the success of the modern industrial
state, particularly one that’s come to see itself as the world’s guardian of
freedom and democracy … and failed at that role as often as it’s succeeded.
The “in the
beauty of the lilies” stanza (above), the grammar conveys the suggestion that
although Christ came to America as an immigrant (“[he] was born across the
sea), America is Christian homeland. The idea of the USA being a Christian
nation (but not quite like Iran is Muslim, of course) reappears time and again
in support of this or that position, to the point where the wall separating church
and state sometimes becomes remarkably porous.
In
conclusion, it can be justifiably said that an anthem is not a country’s
constitution, but a rallying cry poetically, musically designed to invite
hearty, harmonizing participation. It can logically be asserted that it’s a
vehicle for arousing feelings of patriotism and loyalty in times of national
threat; the hymn in the title serves to suggest again that the line
between discipleship to Christ and patriotism toward the state is tentative and
weak.
By now, (The
Battle) Hymn of the Republic and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
belong primarily to history, although the former is still sung repeatedly, the
latter often read. Neither should be ignored in any quest to discover the character
of our southern neighbours, or how they came
to be as they are.
But while we’re
on books and songs about the USA, I suggest playing American
Tune by Paul Simon a few times, and noting how in the singer’s dream
the Statue of Liberty goes sailing out to sea. Renditions of the three anthems
mentioned are easily found on YouTube.