Inclusiveness Does Not Trump Truth

I did not watch the installation of Michael Curry as Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church; I was in church at the time. (The timing of the service was something of a mixed bag.) As soon as I had time, however, I began reading the sermon that the new PB preached at Washington National Cathedral. I was not far into the sermon when I was stopped dead in my tracks by this passage:

Many centuries later, Julia Ward Howe, writing in the midst of America’s Civil War, spoke of this same movement, even amidst all the ambiguities and tragedies of history. This is what she wrote:

In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea,
with a glory in his bosom
that transfigures you and me,
as he died to make folk holy
let us live to set all free,
while God is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah,
God’s truth is marching on.

Of course, as even someone ignorant of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” might suspect, the above is not what Julia Ward Howe wrote. (The Wikipedia article on the text includes a facsimile of the original publication in The Atlantic Monthly—see below.) In particular, the stanza quoted was originally

In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea,
with a glory in his bosom
that transfigures you and me:
as he died to make men holy
let us die to make men free,
while God is marching on.

The important lines here are the antepenultimate and penultimate ones. (I have no idea what lilies have to do with anything or what glory in one’s bosom is.) The lines were written, as Curry notes, during the Civil War, when men—almost exclusively men—were dying, Howe and others hoped, to eliminate slavery. (The Emancipation Proclamation was still a year off.)

Howe poem as originally published

The “quotation” in the sermon is, quite simply, incorrect, and Curry’s assertion about what Julia Ward Howe wrote is a falsehood—not a good way to begin tenure as presiding bishop. I don’t think it was necessary to put words in Howe’s mouth to illustrate the “Jesus movement.” Knowing the context of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” we know that (1) “men” was often used to mean people, and (2) human males were actually dying for a cause.

Dying to make men free is a concept that might be scary in a sermon, and Wikipedia notes that, in many modern recordings, the penultimate line is rendered “let us live to make men free.” This makes the line more relevant in a 21st-century context, but it isn’t what Howe wrote. Curry substituted “folk” for “men,” which is an informality out of character with the rest of the poem. The use of “folk” and (on the next line) “all” make for much weaker poetry than do the original words.

No doubt, a concern for “inclusiveness” was responsible for the substitutions for “men.” I can appreciate the impulse for such changes, but there are times when they are inappropriate. Sometimes the substitutions just do not work. (The Hymnal 1982 changed “Rise up, O men of God!” to “Rise up, ye saints of God!” though the original title is cross-referenced in the index. Mercifully, “God rest you merry, gentlemen” was not similarly “fixed.”) At other times, changes rewrite history, and history deserves to remain, well, historic. I am reminded of the consistent rendering of “brothers” in the epistles as “brothers and sisters” in the New Revised Standard Version. This may make feminists feel good, but we deserve to know what was actually written. Whether Paul, by convention, referred to the saints collectively as brothers or whether he was a male chauvinist pig, I don’t know. That’s another conversation.

I do not, in principle, object to “inclusive” language, though achieving it is often a writer’s nightmare. As an objective, however, achieving inclusiveness is not as important as being truthful. Curry could easily have paraphrased Julia Ward Howe. He had no right to misquote her.