Hymn Battles

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,

Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wilderness!

These lines from America the Beautiful were doubtless sung at many a Protestant service over the July 4 weekend, along with the verses of another warhorse, the Battle Hymn of the Republic ("Mine eyes have seen the glory . . ."). But at least one group of church officials has deemed these traditional words unfit for use in worship. Earlier this year a committee preparing a new hymnal for the United Methodist Church voted to delete the lines from the volume. Native Americans, they feared, might take offense at a verse extolling the white man's exploits in the wilderness. And the Battle Hymn, they contended, is too militaristic to fit the church's current pacifist stance. Banished for the same reason was the perennial Onward, Christian Soldiers!

A truncated America the Beautiful might be tolerable, but Methodists have risen up in wrath over censorship of the Battle Hymn and especially the beloved Onward. In recent weeks the hymnal committee's Nashville office has been besieged with 9,000 letters of protest. Chastened, the panel held an emergency meeting last week and reversed itself, though the unrepentant Rev. Beryl Ingram-Ward of Bellevue, Wash., still argued against the notion of "the warrior Christ."

The harried committee, facing a 1988 deadline, hopes to produce a revised hymnal that will offend no interest group among the liberal denomination's 9.2 million members. High on the agenda is eliminating any language that might be deemed sexist--not least because by the end of the century a projected 40% of Methodist clergy will be women. Thus God of Our Fathers is to become God of the Ages, and out go Harry Emerson Fosdick's rousing lines: "Grant us wisdom, Grant us courage,/ That we fail not man nor thee." In some cases, traditional texts have been retained, but footnotes suggest alternative phrases. So come Christmastime, Methodist carolers are free to sing God Rest You Merry, Christians All, if that is their preference.

Despite feminist lobbying, the panel will retain traditional male nouns, such as Lord and Father, for the Deity. "They decided not to mess with God," remarks one Methodist official. But in deference to the sensitivities of blacks, the Lord will no longer wash sinners "whiter than snow" in the hymn Have Thine Own Way, Lord. And reflecting the Methodist mood of social activism, efforts are being made to strike phrases that emphasize longing for the next world over involvement in this one.

The committee is unlikely, however, to alter the words of Charles Wesley, the 18th century patriarch of Methodist hymnody, even though some of his most durable lines lapse into military similes. Still to be determined is whether the new edition will retain the stern admonition of Charles' brother John, the founding ancestor of Methodism, which prefaces the current collection of hymns: "Sing them exactly as they are printed here, without altering or (a) mending them at all."