On God, History, and Glenn Beck.

"[The Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom] was meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” - Thomas Jefferson

“America today begins to turn to God.” This was conservative talk show host Glenn Beck’s opening gambit at his controversial ‘Restoring Honor’ rally on Saturday. The rally, Beck claimed, had “nothing to do with politics.” Rather, he announced to the hundreds of thousands assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the rally had “everything to do with God [and] turning our faces back to the values and the principles that made our country great.”

I thought this odd. Beck has long been in the business of claiming that America was founded a Christian nation. “I have done years now of reading the Founders, the diaries, their letters,” Beck recently reflected, “…and I will tell you that God was instrumental [in the foundation of the republic.]” He’s wrong, of course. Countless liberal defenses of the proposed Islamic community centre in Lower Manhattan have shown that, so I won’t bother here.

What’s more surprising about Beck’s comments is his failure to realize that America has already “turned to God.” America might have been founded as a secular nation based upon the principle that religion and government should never mix, but God has been hitting back. Indeed, it would not be a stretch to argue that God has been the most influential protagonist in American history.

Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Beck, gesturing to the white marble shrine, declared: “we look to a giant for answers.” Lincoln’s answers – engraved on the walls of his memorial – would probably have pleased Beck. It was Lincoln, at Gettysburg, who first described America as “one nation under God.” It was Lincoln who conceived of the nation united by Christianity: “[The North and South] both read the same bible and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.” And it was Lincoln who, during the nation’s darkest hour, followed what he interpreted as God’s will. In September 1862, immediately before the Battle of Antietam, a Confederate courier used General Robert E. Lee’s battle plans to wrap three cigars and mislaid them. By chance, Union soldiers happened upon the cigars – and the plans. With such detailed information about Lee’s tactics, Union general George McClellan won a famous victory. The victory – and, more importantly, the chance discovery that facilitated it – convinced Lincoln to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, paving the way for the destruction of slavery. Lincoln, according to Gideon Welles, “had submitted the disposal of the subject  to a Higher Power.” That higher power, willing that Lee’s plans be mislaid and discovered, directed Lincoln towards emancipation. Thus, the supposed will of God shaped the path of American history during the nation’s bleakest moments.

How about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in whose footsteps Beck was literally standing on Saturday?* Like Lincoln, Beck conceived of America as a Christian nation. In King’s last speech, given in 1968, he imagined a “mental flight” through history. He began in Egypt and the “Promised Land.” He stopped “to watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.” Then he arrived at the present: “I just want to do God’s will,” he cried. The future, he finally reassured his audience, was safe in God’s hands: “I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” King’s conception of world history, of the Civil Rights Movement to which he had been so central, and of the future of America, was inseparable from Christianity.

More obviously, the New Right, which emerged to dominate politics in the late twentieth-century, was deeply rooted in an evangelical, millennial Christianity. Activists and preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham drove religion right to the heart of American politics and national life. Issues such as abortion, gay rights, school teaching, and censorship have become supercharged with religious zeal. Politicians grasped at this awakening. “Our forbears came not for gold,” Ronald Reagan proclaimed in 1982, “but mainly in search of God…Our Pledge of Allegiance states that we are ‘one nation under God’, and our currency bears the motto ‘In God We Trust’…the morality and values such faith implies are deeply embedded in our national character.” And he was right. The rise of the religious right further entwined America with Christianity.

Today, the statistics speak for themselves.  According to a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, 71% of Americans believe in God. 56% say that religion is very important in their lives. 39% attend religious services at least once a week. Compare this with the UK, where – according to a 2005 Eurobarometer poll – only 38% believe in God. America is, in relative terms, a phenomenally religious, thoroughly Christian, country. Sociologists commonly hold up the United States as a notable exception to the ‘secularisation thesis’.

Glenn Beck thinks that America needs to turn back God. A cynic might say he’s confusing his causalities. If America really is in the mire and the great project laid out by Jefferson, Adams, Madison, et al is in legitimate danger, surely the problem is not a lack of religion, but an excess. If Beck is a true ‘Tea Partier’ and believes in returning America to the principles upon which it was founded, he needs to rethink his ideas on religion.

America was founded as a slave-holding republic, but it has changed. America was founded as a non-religious republic, but it has changed. Of course, the history books celebrate the former transformation, but are more reserved about the second.

Yes, memorialise Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King for their contributions to the construction of a fairer, more racially inclusive nation; but don’t neglect their role in driving religion into the heart of American political and social life. You can't pick and choose your history. I can’t help but think that a clearer understanding of the history of religion in America would benefit the debate over the Islamic Community Centre and the broader discussion of the proper place of religion in American life.

On C L R James, Art, and a Useful 56.

"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"

I’m reading C L R James’s Beyond A Boundary. It’s magic. If you have even the most fleeting of interests in cricket or, for that matter, world history, you should tuck into James. Without exception, every single one of the chapters I’ve read so far (and I’m nearly done!) has something illuminating to say about both the game of cricket and the history of mankind. James’ chapters on W.G. Grace – “he brought and made a secure place for pre-industrial England in the iron and steel of the Victorian Age” – are perhaps the pages in which he most cleverly intertwines the inseparable (he believes) narratives of cricket and English social history. Before I started reading I honestly could make neither head nor tail of James’ famous research question – “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” – but, by a process of submersion more than anything else, I’m beginning to understand. Understand it maybe, but I can’t explain it. You’ll just have to read it if you want to glean more.

In one of James’ chapters – “What is art?” – he makes perhaps his boldest claim. “Cricket,” he declares, “is an art. Not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community.” Now, of course, to compare sport to art is a tired cliché. James’ argument is enthralling, though. The “manifold motions” of great players, he writes, are of such beauty that “there are few picture galleries in the world which effectively reproduce a fraction of them.” Unlike a picture in a gallery however, batting strokes and bowling actions and leaping catches exist only fleetingly as an image and thereafter “become a permanent possession of the spectator which he can renew at will.”*

Whilst reading James’ prose there was but one player in my mind. It was not Lara, Ponting, or Tendular. Nor was it Wasim Akram, Shane Warne, or Andrew Flintoff. Working my way through James’ arguments, I realised that the only player I have ever watched who turns ‘cricket the sport’ into ‘cricket the art’ is the great Pakistani batsman, Mohammad Yousuf.

Having lost the national captaincy in acrimonious circumstances in Australia this winter, temporarily retired from international cricket, and thus missing at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge, Yousuf returned to play England at the Oval last week. His first innings 56 was a piece of art in James’ most trumped-up sense. Yousuf did not dominate the bowling – indeed it took him fifteen balls to get off the mark and both James Anderson and Steven Finn had him playing and missing early. He could have been run out twice. Azhar Ali, the young pretender at the other end, looked in far better knick. Yet, there is something different about Yousuf that no-one seems to be able to put their finger on. Simon Hughes, in a video-analysis segment on Channel 5, illustrated how the wily veteran stays still in his stance, moves his feet well, and plays the ball as late as possible. But that’s not it. In a recent article, Hughes credits Yousuf’s "unbreakable" concentration. That’s not it either. The problem is perhaps that Simon Hughes is a sport critic whilst C L R James was an art critic. The way Yousuf plays and the way he holds himself at the crease marks him out as something more than a sportsman. He is so easy, so natural and effortless. For unquantifiable intangible reasons, it doesn’t matter whether he’s easing his way to a double-century – as he did at Lord’s in 2006 – or grinding out a gutsy half-century having not played for six months, when Yousuf walks out to bat he looks like an artist. I’ve never watched another cricketer – nay, another sportsman – for whom that can be said.

On Thursday Yousuf will be returning to the scene of his magnificent double-century in 2006. I’ll be making every effort to watch him bat; to watch the crossing of the thin line between sport and visual art.

* James, who also made the observation that the strokes of great batsmen “are not caught and permanently fixed for us to make repeated visits to them”, failed to foresee youtube.