Glory Halleluja

 

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.