With the war in Iran underway, the Times issued Friday a dispatch reporting that Secretary Pete Hegseth has been invoking “divine purpose” to “justify military might.” So we pulled up President Roosevelt’s call on D-Day for Americans to pray daily for our GIs. On June 7, the Times ran FDR’s prayer on its front page and issued its own editorial, “Let Us Pray.” It declared: “This nation was born in the only revolution in history made in the name of God.”What a contrast to the tone of the Times of today. Its account of Mr. Hegseth’s call to prayer strikes us as grudging, though the substance was strikingly similar. Mr. Hegseth, like FDR, asked Americans to pray for victory for our troops. “Every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ,” the Times quoted Hegseth as saying as the fight is gathering in Iran.The Times seems to us to be somewhat uncomfortable with Mr. Hegseth’s language. FDR, too, stressed the need for daily prayer for our GIs. “Because the road is long and the desire is great,” FDR said in language that was echoed by Mr. Hegseth, “I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.”It may well be that both Mr. Hegseth and FDR were following the example of George Washington. The internet wasn’t fully developed when the future first president was at Valley Forge. Yet the internet is full of accounts that quote a local Quaker, Isaac Potts, as reporting that, in the woods of Valley Forge, he’d encountered George Washington — alone, on his knees in the snowdrifts — praying for the Continental Army.Historians can’t confirm Potts’s account, but it fits with what they can confirm. In our Civil War, Lincoln also wanted prayer. He set aside the last Thursday in November “to be observed by all my fellow-citizens” as a day of “thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God.” He recommended fellow-citizens “do reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events.”The Times, too, derides Mr. Hegseth for referencing — and praising — the Crusades. Yet during the Korean war, General Eisenhower, soon to be elected president, spoke of how “victory can come only with the gift of God’s help.” Of our campaign in Korea, Eisenhower declared — “soberly,” he said, and as clearly as anyone could put the point — “This is a crusade.” His account of the allied liberation of the continent was titled “Crusade in Europe.”Criticism of Mr. Hegseth’s orison is of a piece with liberals’ reflexive hostility to public prayer. Yet the Supreme Court in 2014 held that the tradition of “ceremonial prayer is but a recognition” that “many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government.” The Nine found, too, that “participation in civic affairs can be consistent with a brief acknowledgment of” Americans’ “belief in a higher power.” In 1944, the Times editorialized: “We have come to the hour for which we were born. We go forth to meet the supreme test of our arms and of our souls, the test of the maturity of our faith in ourselves and in mankind, and it is fitting that in this hour we at home, citizens of all confessions and no confession, should follow the ways of our fathers and solemnly place the fate of our country, our cause and our sons, in the hands of God.” We say, Amen.
