What do you think?
Rate this book
A Fiery Gospel: The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War
Since its composition in Washington's Willard Hotel in 1861, Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been used to make America and its wars sacred. Few Americans reflect on its violent and redemptive imagery, drawn freely from prophetic passages of the Old and New Testaments, and fewer still think about the implications of that apocalyptic language for how Americans interpret who they are and what they owe the world.
In A Fiery Gospel, Richard M. Gamble describes how this camp-meeting tune, paired with Howe's evocative lyrics, became one of the most effective instruments of religious nationalism. He takes the reader back to the song's origins during the Civil War, and reveals how those political and military circumstances launched the song's incredible career in American public life. Gamble deftly considers the idea behind the song—humming the tune, reading the music for us—all while reveling in the multiplicity of meanings of and uses to which Howe's lyrics have been put. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been versatile enough to match the needs of Civil Rights activists and conservative nationalists, war hawks and peaceniks, as well as Europeans and Americans. This varied career shows readers much about the shifting shape of American righteousness. Yet it is, argues Gamble, the creator of the song herself—her Abolitionist household, Unitarian theology, and Romantic and nationalist sensibilities—that is the true conductor of this most American of war songs.
A Fiery Gospel depicts most vividly the surprising genealogy of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and its sure and certain position as a cultural piece in the uncertain amalgam that was and is American civil religion.
In A Fiery Gospel, Richard M. Gamble describes how this camp-meeting tune, paired with Howe's evocative lyrics, became one of the most effective instruments of religious nationalism. He takes the reader back to the song's origins during the Civil War, and reveals how those political and military circumstances launched the song's incredible career in American public life. Gamble deftly considers the idea behind the song—humming the tune, reading the music for us—all while reveling in the multiplicity of meanings of and uses to which Howe's lyrics have been put. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been versatile enough to match the needs of Civil Rights activists and conservative nationalists, war hawks and peaceniks, as well as Europeans and Americans. This varied career shows readers much about the shifting shape of American righteousness. Yet it is, argues Gamble, the creator of the song herself—her Abolitionist household, Unitarian theology, and Romantic and nationalist sensibilities—that is the true conductor of this most American of war songs.
A Fiery Gospel depicts most vividly the surprising genealogy of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and its sure and certain position as a cultural piece in the uncertain amalgam that was and is American civil religion.
- GenresHistoryAmerican History
357 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 15, 2019
5 people are currently reading
68 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 6, 2021
I grew to maturity listening to the rousing Peter Wilhousky arrangement of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. In fact, I still remember picking out the LP on which it was recorded from a bin in a record shop. More than sixty years later, it is hard to imagine that in 1959, the song (as a single) would rise to the top of the Billboard charts and would win a Grammy Award for best vocal performance. (Even Billboard thought it odd that “a symphony orchestra and religious choir has clicked in the rock and roll-oriented pop singles field.”)
There are several explanations for the enduring popularity of the Battle Hymn. First, there’s that rousing tune, one that existed before the lyrics. (Tune-first hymns and popular songs are much less common than those that are written lyric-first, although interestingly, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “The Star Spangled Banner” are other exceptions.) Gamble virtually ignores the music; but I would suggest that without that tune, the lyrics of Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) would likely have followed the rest of her poetic oeuvre into a well-deserved obscurity.
Then there’s the peculiar language in which Howe wrote the Battle Hymn. Howe was a Unitarian with mushy transcendentalist beliefs, but she suffused the Battle Hymn with such a plethora of fiery biblical references, ransacked from Genesis to Revelation, that even the oddest and (as one critic would have it) “perfectly insane” lines sounded weirdly familiar to a majority of nineteenth-century Americans who had been grounded in the Bible.
Finally, though Howe wrote the Battle Hymn in 1861, she had the good fortune not to mention the Civil War explicitly. Richard Gamble well demonstrates how Howe’s strange and ecstatic language turned out to be versatile enough to meet the needs, first, of ceremonial nationalism during Howe’s lifetime and then later by other causes from around the political spectrum. By the time the Battle Hymn was performed at the funeral of Ronald Reagan in 2004, it had been “blended seamlessly into the liturgy of the nation’s political theology”(236), by tradition if for no other reason.
Personally, I found the origin of the Battle Hymn’s text most interesting, less so the cultural use to which it was put later on. But Gamble’s fascination is with the latter—as is that of an earlier book, John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that Marches On (Oxford University Press, 2013), which Gamble surprisingly ignores.
There are several explanations for the enduring popularity of the Battle Hymn. First, there’s that rousing tune, one that existed before the lyrics. (Tune-first hymns and popular songs are much less common than those that are written lyric-first, although interestingly, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “The Star Spangled Banner” are other exceptions.) Gamble virtually ignores the music; but I would suggest that without that tune, the lyrics of Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) would likely have followed the rest of her poetic oeuvre into a well-deserved obscurity.
Then there’s the peculiar language in which Howe wrote the Battle Hymn. Howe was a Unitarian with mushy transcendentalist beliefs, but she suffused the Battle Hymn with such a plethora of fiery biblical references, ransacked from Genesis to Revelation, that even the oddest and (as one critic would have it) “perfectly insane” lines sounded weirdly familiar to a majority of nineteenth-century Americans who had been grounded in the Bible.
Finally, though Howe wrote the Battle Hymn in 1861, she had the good fortune not to mention the Civil War explicitly. Richard Gamble well demonstrates how Howe’s strange and ecstatic language turned out to be versatile enough to meet the needs, first, of ceremonial nationalism during Howe’s lifetime and then later by other causes from around the political spectrum. By the time the Battle Hymn was performed at the funeral of Ronald Reagan in 2004, it had been “blended seamlessly into the liturgy of the nation’s political theology”(236), by tradition if for no other reason.
Personally, I found the origin of the Battle Hymn’s text most interesting, less so the cultural use to which it was put later on. But Gamble’s fascination is with the latter—as is that of an earlier book, John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that Marches On (Oxford University Press, 2013), which Gamble surprisingly ignores.
September 13, 2020
Richard Gamble is out with another entry in his catalogue of books on American civil religion. "A Fiery Gospel" traces the story of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, from Julia Ward Howe's Unitarian roots in elite Boston society to John Brown's raid and the beginning of the Civil War all the way through 9/11. The Battle Hymn and its acceptance trace a growing prioritization of Americanism over pure doctrine in most Christian denominations in the USA. The song also became one of allyship, the United Kingdom in particular found the song to be an American anthem they could march under as well, in World War I, II, and Iraq. At the same time it was an international anthem the song was re-imported to America and nationalized across Protestant denominations and then adopted by Catholics and Mormons to fit in to Americanism in the 1950s and later. But the song simultaneously was subversive and back to its Civil War roots when it was adopted in the 1960s by the Civil Rights Movement as an anthem for America's unfinished business in securing actual equality for African Americans after the Civil War. No song in American history metamorphises to so many occasions (sometimes even in contradiction of the views of Julia Ward Howe herself).
June 14, 2021
One of the things I appreciate about Richard Gamble is his consistent charity for his subjects. He never for a moment forgets that history is made of human beings.
In A Fiery Gospel, Gamble seeks to identify the role of "The Battle Hymn" in the formation of American religious nationalism, and so to facilitate the disentanglement of American civil religion from... actual religion. The two things cannot occupy the same space, much as they seem to do so in American life and tradition. Important work.
In A Fiery Gospel, Gamble seeks to identify the role of "The Battle Hymn" in the formation of American religious nationalism, and so to facilitate the disentanglement of American civil religion from... actual religion. The two things cannot occupy the same space, much as they seem to do so in American life and tradition. Important work.
June 22, 2019
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, according to the author, has been used by Americans to “understand the nation’s meaning, define their enemies, justify their wars, and reaffirm God’s special plan for the United States in world history.” The poem falls under the rubric of “civil religion”—the appropriation of religion by politics for its own purposes.” You’ll learn quite a lot about Julia Ward Howe, the Hymn’s author, her views, life, etc. The book is probably too long, but since I love the song, I enjoyed the read and learning how it all came about, and how it’s been used since.
August 25, 2019
Some background on Julia Ward Howe followed by a very thorough account of the Battle Hymn of the Republic's very long and storied history. Though Howe's theology and doctrine are discussed throughout, there is little theological analysis of the poem text itself. The author draws very few conclusions, but a straightforward presentation of the facts results in a damning indictment of the poem: it is emotionally overwrought, literarily confused, and theologically rotten. We would do well to heed the words of J. Gresham Machen: "One thing is clear—a fiery war song like that has no place in the worship of a Christian congregation".
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews