Compare And Contrast Douglass And David Myrdal

Politics and religion, so often aligned with opposing arguments across American history, coalesced into the concept of political religion twice across the nineteenth century–once in the measured address of a future president to a boy’s debate society, and again in the fiery Fourth of July speech of a former slave. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass may have entertained different definitions of political religion, but both used the concept to advocate for significant change, with the understanding that American values and democracy were on the line. To Douglass, “republican religion” manifests in the list of values presented by Gunner Myrdal’s American Creed, a code of liberty, justice, and equality on which American society claims to run

Among the values of the Creed, Myrdal specifically notes “the essential dignity of the individual human being,” “the fundamental equality of all men,” and “certain inalienable rights to freedom [and] justice” (4). These are the values to which both Lincoln and Douglass aspire in their definitions of political religion, despite their joint recognition that the United States had a long way to go in order to truly achieve them. Myrdal contends that the American Constitutional principles that remain in place in the modern era “are liberal and some, indeed, are radical,” but also recognizes that the nation often fails to live up to them; he claims that America has “[kept] to liberalism as a national creed even if not as its actual way of life” (7, 12). This has resulted in a so-called “cult of the Constitution,” something Douglass addresess as both fanatical and misplaced in his invocation of republican religion (12). Douglass mentions the role of ambiguous terminology in establishing this cult in his speech as well, something Myrdal cements through his description of liberty as “a vague ideal” that is thus “easie[r] to reach” than its better defined compatriots

Lincoln begins the Gettysburg Address by describing the United States as “concieved in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” a clear appeal to the Creed that also places the rights of all Americans at the forefront of the conversation (536). The speech is brief, but stresses the “unfinished work” of those who died in battle and encourages listeners to dedicate themselves to the same cause of unity and freedom so that “the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” (536). The Second Inaugural Address is much more overt in its appeal to community; Lincoln mentions that both Northerners and Southerners “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” a religious similarity that carries great political implications (687). He goes on to advocate that each and every citizen “do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations,” another echo of the Creed in the invocation of justice and a blatant call for unity and trust (687). Lincoln’s definition of political religion doesn’t exactly align with Myrdal’s American Creed, but it does utilize traditional Creed values to call for community in a time of division,