Transcript 05 Gomez (Lincoln 1) (4/19)

American Civil Religion
“The dogmas of the quiet past are
inadequate to the stormy present.”
(Sociology 159)
Abraham Lincoln
• 1809-1865
• Equality, exemplary, sin inside the
nation
• Main themes:
– Equality the defining characteristic
of American thought
– National identity prioritized over
state identity
– US points beyond itself to
something higher
– The law and American political
institutions make political freedom
and equality possible
• Union politically inseparable from
freedom
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• Lincoln deploys the language of civil religion to define and defend
American national identity, based in his understanding of a divinely
mandated equality as the foundational value of just democratic
rule.
– His definition of the polity as being based in equality sets clear limits
on the boundaries within which legitimate political action may take
place, implicitly casting practices and institutions that violate the
principle of equality, such as slavery, as being outside the polity and
thus un-American.
• Moreover, Lincoln’s depiction of a national identity with a distinct
world historical charge constitutes an important part in legitimating
the use of force against the seceding states, in his civil religious
framework their fracturing of the Union becomes a hostile act
against not only the federal government of the United States, but
against the very possibility of democratic government and even the
will of God himself.
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Shared Burden of Sin
• Renders all individuals equal in their sinfulness
before a perfect God
• Depicts the United States as always in moral
and spiritual unity, despite its political
division.
• Legitimates the use of coercion against
Americans in the name of positive liberty
– The war as punishment from God (67-69)
• Humility & forgiveness
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The “Priestly” Mode
• Relatively “celebrative, affirmative, culture-building”,
– depicts a personal God who “created, guided and led [the] nation
toward its destiny.
– This God mandated a mission” and “demanded loyalty that went
beyond the loyalty extended to the state”
• Emphasizes the exceptional status of the American polity and its
possibilities for a transformational form of politics.
– Attempt to to explain the will of God to his constituents so that they
might think, act, and believe in a way appropriate to Americans.
– Emphasizes the efficacy of human effort, and the ability of humans,
with God’s help, to move the nation along its teleological path toward
equality.
– Though the mode of thinking is religious, its terms are political, with
issues of citizenship, republican virtue, and, most importantly, equality
as its primary concerns. (70-71)
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The “Prophetic” Mode
• “a tendency toward the judgmental”, being critical rather than
affirmative
– describes God’s relationship with the United States as being
essentially dialectical, as God “both shapes [the] nation and judges it,
because he is transcendent in both circumstances
– integrates the United States into a larger cosmic order and places it
firmly under the judgment of God
– Slavery does not retard national progress toward telos of equality, but
is an offense against God by a people covenanted to equality
• God, who directly intervenes in American history in order to favor
or punish his “almost chosen people”
– Strongly presdestinarian, even deterministic, depicting humans as
impotent before the overwhelming power of God, powerless to either
advance or hinder the workings of the divine will, which is to be
obeyed more than it is to be understood. (70-71)
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Priestly Mode
• A priest, in affirming the values and beliefs of his
congregation, also works to exclude or condemn those not
a part of his community of belief.
– Thus, the central tasks of priestly civil speech and thought are
the interpretation and codification of an inherited tradition, and
the dissemination of the subsequent conclusions among the
laity. Lincoln’s “priestly” speech functions in exactly this way.
• Lincoln moves the primary aim of the war over time from
the preservation of the union to the extermination of
slavery, which exists as an affront to the Providence that
has given America the historical telos of institutionalizing a
universal form of human political equality (80-81)
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First Inaugural
• A question of interpretation
– Lincoln notes that “All profess to be content in the Union, if all
constitutional rights be maintained,” and challenges his
opponents to think “of a single instance in which a plainly
written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied.”
• “May Congress prohibit slavery in the territories? The
Constitution does not expressly say. Must Congress protect
slavery in the territories? The Constitution does not
expressly say.”
– Likewise, the Constitution is silent on “the only substantial
dispute” facing the country; that “One section of the country
believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the
other believes that it is wrong, and ought not be extended.” (96)
• Analyzing & interpreting the cannon in order to define the community
of belief (96)
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• “Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent
arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority
principle, anarchy, or despotism in some form, is all that is left.”
– the rule of a democratic majority, “held in restraint by constitutional
checks and limitation, and always changing easily” is the only form of
government compatible with human equality.
• The secessionists are not, as they claim, fighting to continue the
legacy of the Founders, but to demolish it.
– “You can have no conflict, without yourselves being the aggressors.
You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government,
while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and
defend’ it.”
– God in ritual function of guarantor of oaths
– One of only two mentions of God in 1st Inaugural (99-101)
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• In the other, making one of a very few explicit
references to Christianity in his public career and
displays a remarkable confidence that he knows
the mind of God:
– “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm
reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this
favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best
way, all our present difficulty.”
• Commonalities between North and South that
could preserve the Union (101-102)
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• After Antietam (September 17, 1862), Lincoln’s civil
religious language changes
– More than 23,000 casualties in a single day
• He believes that his pact with God has revealed God’s will
to end slavery
– “I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself,
and [hesitating a little]—to my Maker. The rebel army is now
driven out, and I am going to fulfill that promise.”
– Winthrop in “A Model of Christian Charity”: covenant, reward, &
obedience
• The aim of the war no longer primarily to reunite the
Union, but to end slavery
– Making meaning of slaughter & chaos (105-110)
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Dec. 1 1863 Address to Congress
• “It has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a return of peace,
we can but press on, guided by the best light he gives us, trusting
that in His own good time, and wise way, all will yet be well.”
• Partial knowledge of God’s will
• Southern secession thus represents not only a rebellion against federal
authority, but against the will of God
• “One section of our country believes that slavery is right, and ought
to be extended, while the other believes that it is wrong, and ought
not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. [...] , “Our
strife pertains to ourselves—to the passing generations of men, and
it can, without convulsion, be hushed forever with the passing of
one generation.”
• The sin is not contained within the Confederate states, but because
the nation is for him a single moral unit it is shared across the polity as
a whole. (112-113)
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• “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.”
– A moment of spiritual revolution and redefinition, as the Union is to be
founded again purified in the embrace of equality.
• “We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this.
We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to
save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility.
In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable
alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or
meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this
could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if
followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”
– Winthrop, a covenanted people
– Saving the soul of the nation; changing what America means
– Human agency: the moral responsibility of American political actors before all
generations of humanity and even before God himself (113-116)
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Gettysburg
• July 1-3, 1863
– 23,000 Union and 28,000 Confederate casualties
– about one quarter of the Northern and one third of the Southern
forces fielded
• July 3: Pickett’s Charge
– Confederate advance of 12,500 men across three-quarter mile of open
space, facing concerted artillery and rifle fire
• More than half killed, wounded or captured.
• Making sense of the carnage: a national narrative
– The project of Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg is one of interpreting and
revising the American polity’s self-understanding, in fitting with the
priestly concern for the codification of belief. In it, he looks not only to
embed the carnage of the war within a greater narrative, making it
comprehensible and thus meaningful, but also to decisively reject
slavery as being outside the bounds of orthodox American life. (119120)
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The Gettysburg Address
• “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth upon this continent a new Nation, conceived in
Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal.”
– Biblical dating
– use of the plural possessive pronoun “our” in reference to
the fathers is suggestive, as the Israelites used the same
language to refer to their forebears, and especially to the
prophets .
– depicts Americans as being a single people descended
from common ancestors, who are in turn themselves
dedicated to something higher. (121-122)
• I.e. the proposition that all men are created equal
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• Presented not as a new tenet of American belief, but as being in
continuity with original ideals of American politics. The shared
heritage of the American people is to pursue the charge of their
fathers
– Affirming orthodox American belief
• a single Nation, not various States
– Nation born in the Declaration, which predates the Constitution or any
other arrangement between states
• The pursuit of political equality for Lincoln is the essence of the
American polity, and serves as the common heritage and identity of
the American people.
– Americans are for Lincoln united by shared belief, and the nation is a
lineage defined by that belief in the place of blood, or rather, that faith
is its blood. The fathers are the fathers only insofar as the children
embrace the central idea that all men are created equal (122-23)
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• “Now we are engaged in a great civil war,
testing whether that Nation or any Nation so
conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”
– A test or ordeal
– A definitive test case that will reveal finally
whether democratic order can resist localist
anarchy, and whether republican equality can
overcome the aristocratic domination found in
slavery.
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• “We are met,” he says, “on a great battle-field of that war. We are
met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those
who here gave their lives so that the nation might live. It is
altogether fitting and proper that we do this.”
– Conception, birth, death, redemption
– Gave their lives
• “But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who
struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add
or subtract.”
– The ground is sanctified by the martyrdom of soldiers
• “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,
but it can never forget what they did here.”
– Humility (123-127)
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• It is for us, the living, rather to be rededicated to
the unfinished work that they have so far so
nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before us,
that from these honored dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they here gave
the last full measure of devotion;
– that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not
have died in vain—that this nation shall, under God,
have a new birth of freedom—and that government of
the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.
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• A renewal of dedication and surpassing “the fathers,” completing the work
that they began
• Human agency
– Conception, birth, death, sacrifice, rebirth
– This rebirth enables the living to draw increased devotion even as the dead
gave the last of theirs; the living must go beyond what was given by the fallen,
as the task remaining is one which only they can complete
• Under God
– Equality before God
• “Perish from the earth”
• By the time of his speech at Gettysburg Lincoln has come to define and
affirm the nation by its dedication to the ideal of equality, by definition
depicting the defenders of slavery as being alien to the American polity
and opposed to its world-historical mission (127-129)
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