Great Society, great awakening

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union proposed to enlarge the American promise of prosperity by introducing a new tax structure for the very wealthy, tax credits for families outside of the wealthy stratum, increased access to retirement plans for more American workers, and a plan to subsidize community college tuition. While there will be resistance to the president’s proposals, the impulse behind them is an appeal to an idealized form of decency that Lyndon B. Johnson believed would make his idea of a Great Society an American reality.

Fifty years ago this month, Johnson introduced his vision to a Congress that, as Julian Zelizer has explained, changed the political landscape for millions of Americans who had almost no access to the American ideals of prosperity and opportunity. There are many ways to understand the origins of Johnson’s (and Obama’s) vision for a better American society, and religion does not necessarily have to be an obvious one. However, it also seems apparent that Johnson’s vision in the Great Society had religious connotations. 

In his biography of Johnson, Randall Woods writes that “a constellation of ideas” informed Johnson’s “vision of America.” But Woods notes that LBJ’s religion was “in this mix a final and most important element.” An example of Johnson’s religious convictions could be seen in a conversation he had with a group of civil rights leaders in spring 1964. Johnson told them: “From the time of the ancient Hebrew prophets and the dispersal of the money changers, men of God have taught us that social problems are moral problems on a huge scale. They have demonstrated that a religion which did not struggle to remove oppression from the world of men would not be able to create a world of spirit. They have preached that the church should be the first to awake to individual suffering and the church should be the bravest in opposing all social wrongs. . . . It is your job as men of God, to reawaken the conscience of your beloved, the United States of America.” In early 1965, Johnson himself had a great awakening.