Battle Hymn of the Republic is not a Christian anthem.The mostly-peaceful abolitionists of Massachusetts were not Christians, they were intellectuals who believed in Transcendentalism, Rationalism and The Doctrine of Necessity. --Wanjiru Njoya
I remember, @WanjiruNjoya, when I read Rothbard writing that the civil war was a war between post-Christians and Christians.
— Stephen W. Carson (@RadicalLib) September 10, 2025
This agnostic Jew seeing so clearly what most modern Christians won’t acknowledge!!
You should know that Julia and Samuel how were not Christians as we think of Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and so forth. During the 1850s & 1860s, the Howes were in lock- step with most Unitarians of the northeastern states of that era and thereby embraced a very free-thinking, Transcendentalist, pretend-Christian theology. As was customary with Unitarians in Massachusetts during that era, the Howes’ belief in God in Jesus Christ (as we know it from the Christian Bible) was rather confused with Transcendentalism, Rationalism, and The Doctrine of Necessity. Such confused religious belief was commonplace among Massachusetts intellectual who had embraced the Republican Party.
from Poetry Archive,
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was written in 1861 when Mrs. Howe, in company with the Secretary of War, visited the military camps near Washington. When the review was over, the soldiers thronged about the camp singing, "John Brown's Body." Mrs. Howe, as she afterward related, was greatly stirred by the incident, but impressed by the inadequacy of the words to so fine a martial air. That night she awakened with the first stanza of the "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" complete in her mind and before morning the entire poem had taken shape.
