Suitland
The D.C. Metro rail system has a station called "Suitland" (in Maryland). I didn't actually get off there, but I did enjoy my time in that land of suits that is the national capitol area. This time my leisure activities included visiting the new World War II memorial (immediately after it opened) and the Lincoln Memorial, where I read the Second Inaugural Address. (I also visited the Lincoln Memorial when I was about eight, but I hadn't been back since.)
Lincoln had an amazing sort of eloquence and was also (like Shakespeare) responsible for many phrases I hadn't thought to associate with him -- for example, "to care for him who shall have borne the battle". The Second Inaugural Address also has a great deal of (rhetorically effective, moving) religious language, to which critics of Michael Newdow and church-state separation have recently been pointing. To me this suggests that politicians in America have always used as much religious rhetoric as they do now, but their choice of words hardly bears obviously on what Congressional policies courts will uphold. (Many people feel that, as the D.C. District Court unfortunately quoted Justice Holmes this week, "a page of history is worth a volume of logic" -- so that religious rhetoric in the American political tradition comes to serve as a justification for religious agendas in Congressional enactments. But there's so much conservative politics in that approach. A different sort of politically motivated reasoning would suggest that our understanding improves with time so that we can leave behind traditions that contemporary logic has undermined. Or it might say that Lincoln was as tolerant and pluralist as he could be in his time and that "it is rather for us, the living" to be even more so as we see the opportunities.)
Sarah let me look at Loewen's Lies Across America, an important book, and I immediately looked up the Lincoln Memorial. I was surprised to see that it was one of the few memorials Loewen finds almost totally accurate and appropriate. My mother says it was always her favorite monument in D.C.
What did Lincoln say that was so religious?
Both [Union and Confederacy] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
One of the many remarkable things about this passage is that Lincoln mentions that both sides "invoke [God's] aid", so that "the prayers of both could not be answered". Did other, later war presidents admit, when invoking God's aid, that their enemies were doing the same?
