Civil religion at Gettysburg

A Pennsylvania newspaper made headlines last week when it ran a public retraction of its negative “review” of the Gettysburg Address, which President Lincoln gave at the dedication of the battlefield cemetery 150 years ago today. The Harrisburg Patriot and Union’s derisive notice—dismissing Lincoln’s ”silly remarks” that should “be no more repeated or thought of”—has become infamous as an instance of editorial blundering and myopia. 

But the editors’ dissent regarding Lincoln’s rhetorical greatness was the least significant part of this editorial. The paper’s publishers had been detained by the Lincoln administration for printing materials—in a racially charged hoax—that seemed calculated to incite anti-black violence. So the editors panned the speech as part of unsurprising longer argument about the president’s supposedly partisan motives for speaking in the first place, and for emphasizing the principle of “freedom” so strongly.

Then last week, just as this notorious dissent was being retracted, Richard Gamble decided to re-litigate the significance of the Gettysburg Address. Gamble charges Lincoln’s words with nationalism, German idealism and “democratism,” citing the fame and influence of the speech as evidence that those words hastened America’s transition from “a regime of law that allows individuals and local communities to live ordinary lives and to find their highest calling in causes other than the nation-state” to a “propositional nation” defined by abstract ideals and transcendent purposes, bound together by a pseudo-Christian civil religion.