What preachers have said in times of national crisis

America may no longer be a nation with the soul of a church, as G. K. Chesterton famously claimed, but there is something in this “one nation under God” that continues to infatuate theologians, historians, and cultural commentators. How and under what circumstances does this God influence the nation as a whole? Well, just about every one of the nearly 400,000 churches, mosques, and synagogues in America has a pulpit or an appointed place from which a leader may speak of the Lord.

Political scientist Melissa Matthes, who teaches at the United States Coast Guard Academy, is not the first to identify the sermon as the key measurement of the church’s cultural and political influence. Like Harry Stout, who in The New England Soul combed through more than 2,000 unpublished pulpit manuscripts ranging across 150 years of colonial life, Matthes has surveyed the sermons of “ordinary ministers from rather unremarkable congregations” in order to examine the state of America’s soul. She doesn’t pursue a homiletical or quantitative analysis or distinguish between the theological traditions that inform the sermons. Hers is a portrait-like cultural study fueled by the aggregated raw material of mainline Protestant sermons, with some evangelical and fundamentalist sermons “also considered.”

The prism through which she reads these sermons is not arbitrarily chosen. She well understands both the political and the religious power of mourning, how it strips away our pretenses and leaves us naked before ourselves and God. Matthes finds points of contact between the preached word and the national psyche in sermons preached on nine occasions of national tragedy: Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese citizens, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Los Angeles riots of 1992 following the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the Newtown school shooting, and the killing that fueled Black Lives Matter protests.