Mystery of the Battle Hymn

Click here to read previous Music Musings.

About once every seven years, USA Independence Day (July 4) falls on a Sunday and many churches again debate whether to include patriotic elements in worship: American flag, Pledge of Allegiance, a color guard, the National Anthem, readings from our founding documents, and patriotic choir music and congregational songs. It is such a year in 2010. Whatever secular, patriotic elements may find their way into worship this year, one of the most popular sacred elements to be included will undoubtedly be the congregational hymn, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," no. 717 in The United Methodist Hymnal.

Controversy has often accompanied the use of this hymn in worship, even its inclusion in the hymnal. Some southern Methodists opposed including it in the 1966 Methodist Hymnal, but it was included nonetheless. The 1989 Hymnal Revision Committee voted to delete the more militaristic stanzas two and three. Protests erupted across the church. The decision was reversed, and the stanzas were included. The author's original stanza three is customarily omitted from hymnals:

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."

Stanza five in our hymnal is of unknown origin.

And what is the mystery? Speaking of Christ, stanza four includes the phrase, "…as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." It is perhaps a parallel allusion of those who fight and die in war for freedom to salvation through the death of Christ on the cross. Some see it as an endorsement of or justification for war, and there have been a number of changes and adaptations of the line.

Famed arranger and conductor Roy Ringwald made this change in his 1944 arrangement for choir and orchestra: "…as he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free." That version was approved by the Hymnal Revision Committee and also by General Conference when it voted to accept the new hymnal in 1988. Inexplicably, and despite the vote of General Conference, that change was never included in our hymnal. It is one of the great hymnal mysteries that remains: Who made the decision to ignore the committee and General Conference, and why? And why was it not corrected in subsequent printings?

The hymn is fully in the public domain and lyrics may be legally adapted and changed. In my own selecting, leading, and singing of this hymn in worship, I have always sung, "…as he died to make us holy, now he lives to make us free," regardless of what those around me are singing.

(See Companion to The United Methodist Hymnal, by Carlton Young, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993, pp. 621-624, for additional information about this hymn.)