Lydia McGrew at the Right Reason blog reports her discomfort about the Battle Hymn of the Republic and compares it to Dixieland:

…in the abstract I’d certainly rather be on the side whose ideals are expressed by the words of “Dixieland” than on the side whose ideals are expressed by the words of “The Battle Hymn.” Think about it: What “Dixieland” says is that the singer loves his home region, that one of the reasons he loves it is because old times are not forgotten there, and that he intends to live and die there. What “The Battle Hymn” says is that God is really going to pound the people on the other side and that He is going to do so by means of a bunch of troops whose very army campfires are like holy altars. Yikes!

But the goodness doesn’t stop there. She goes on to draw a comparison to the Iraq war:

I’d rather not get involved in reading God’s righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps of invading troops — whether they’re invading a foreign country or parts of their own. Acting as the terrible swift sword of the Lord and helping Him to trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored is a scary business, one we should be very reluctant to engage in.

Maybe conservatism in America isn’t quite dead yet!

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