Thanks to reader Betsy for tipping RWB to a book called Modern Times, by a British historian named Paul Johnson. She hasn’t yet read the book herself, but heard it recommended recently by an acquaintance as being “among the things that served as a compass out of the abyss of unanchored liberalism.”

A browse of the Amazon.com page for the book would give you a quick impression of the content.

The same author also has a piece in the current issue of First Things. You can only read it by buying the print edition at this point, although it should be available in the archive within a couple of months. It’s titled “The Almost-Chosen People,” and comes originally from a lecture delivered by Johnson in New York some years ago. It’s by no means out-of-date, however, and I’ll take the liberty of quoting some parts of it to give a flavor of the gentleman’s thinking:

When Abraham Lincoln called Americans “the almost-chosen people,” he used an apt phrase, as valid now as when he coined it a hundred and forty years ago. It perfectly expresses the close but at the same time slightly uneasy relationship between the American republic and the religious spirit. That the Americans are exceptional in their attitude to religion is obvious to all, and never more so than today. But visitors from old Europe are struck by the way in which high church attendance and often blatant religiousity coexist with the passionate pursuit of materialism.

…

The notion of a chosen but flawed people is directly related to America’s historical origins, for the first settlers were undoubtedly animated by a sense of divine mission.

…

Even those most strongly influenced by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment acknowledged the centrality of the religious spirit in giving birth to America. As John Adams put it in 1818, “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. [It] was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.” He saw religion, indeed, as the foundation of the American civic spirit: “One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and of nations, love your neighbor as yourself, and do to others as you would that others do to you, to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people. Children, servants, women and men are all professors in the science of public as well as private morality …. The duties and rights of the man and the citizen are thus taught from early infancy.”

The United States of America was not, therefore, a secular state; it might more accurately be described as a moral and ethical society without a state religion. Clearly, those who created it saw it as an entity, to use Lincoln’s later phrase, “under God.” The Declaration of Independence in its first paragraph invokes “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as the entitlement of the American people to choose separation, and it insists that men have the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” because they are so “endowed by their Creator.” The authors appeal, in their conclusion, to “the Supreme judge of the world” and express their confidence in “the Protection of the Divine Providence.”

…

As he [Lincoln] made clear in his first inaugural address, the dispute between North and South, and its resolution, would illustrate the way in which the democratic process was divinely inspired: “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? … If the Almighty Ruler of Nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.” He added that “intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land” could still solve “our present difficulty.”

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, he appealed both to world opinion and God for approval; or, as the text has it, “I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favour of Almighty God.”

(from the June/July 2006 issue of First Things)

In the context in which we dwell here, one can’t help but being reminded of Dylan’s image of the civil war in Chronicles: “Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected.”

Anyhow — is there any possible reference going on by Dylan to Paul Johnson’s work of history, with the titling of his forthcoming album as Modern Times? Who could tell? Before anyone laughs too much, remember that it is widely thought that the title of his 2001 album, “Love and Theft” (the quotation marks are part of the album title) was at least in part a reference to a book by the same name on the history of blackface minstrelsy — a subject that Dylan is known to be fascinated with.

Regarding Johnson’s Modern Times, it’s almost sure to remain an unknowable — but at the moment it sure is interesting.

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