Easter was a big hit this year at the church I attend in downtown Washington, D.C., the First Congregational Church, located adjacent to the MLK Library. On top of the special music and first-ever full SRO capacity crowd at the well integrated, recently renovated church, the young, optimistic and articulate relatively new pastor there, the Rev. Amanda Hendler-Voss, delivered a barn burner sermon centered solidly on the troubling times in which we now live, doubly poignant for having been delivered virtually within shouting distance of the White House in the nation’s capital.

She equated the Easter story with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s historic “Four Freedoms” State of the Union speech to Congress that he delivered on January 6, 1941 just as the full horror of yet another “War to End All Wars” was unfolding. It came just after FDR was elected overwhelmingly to an historic third term.

The Four Freedoms as he articulated them are these: Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

It made such an impact that many cities across the U.S. erected monuments to those Four Freedoms, including on Roosevelt Island in New York City, and was even the basis for lyrics by Bing Crosby in the 1942 classic film, “Holiday Inn,” remade a decade later as “White Christmas.” They were the subject of collector’s item postage stamps and a series of iconic Norman Rockwell artworks that in 1943 each graced a full interior page of the Saturday Evening Post over a four-month period. The Four Freedoms became embedded in the charter document of the United Nations after the war, and were a central feature of the International Declaration of Human Rights spearheaded by FDR’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt that was drafted in 1948.

So it is safe to say that those articulated Four Freedoms veritably saturated the entire decade of the 1940s in the U.S., providing enormous morale for the war effort itself and for the peacetime efforts in the war’s aftermath. The most famous of Rockwell’s paintings was his illustration of Freedom from Want, which shows a large family around a Thanksgiving dining table with a huge bird about to be carved.

The Rev. Hendler-Voss applied FDR’s Four Freedoms to her Easter sermon by speaking about the impact such a powerful affirmation and aspiration for life aligns with concepts of hope, with rebirth and death as not having the final word for a nation’s morale and optimism in the face of great peril. The sermon is now posted on YouTube, and deserves a careful listen.

Talking after the service, the Rev. Hendler-Voss and I shared the notion of how difficult it always is to preach an Easter sermon to a progressive and reality-based congregation, especially given that Easter services may be just about the only time all year when so many folks show up at church.
But as the world reels from the nihilistic, narcissistic rants of a man who could become our president again in less than a year, and as the hatred that is allowed to issue forth on the Internet from anonymous sources assails our better natures, it may be that a revival of something as basic and simple as the Four Freedoms can help put such a large portion of our nation back on a better track.

The British rock band Pink Floyd came very close to mimicking the sentiment of the Four Freedoms in its early 1980s album, The Final Cut, dealing mostly with wartime memories. There is a song on it called “The Gunner’s Dream” in which a crashed gunner of a fighter plane contemplates his final moments and dreams of a world at peace, a world defined by simple pleasures, a world defined by the Four Freedoms.

The world has undergone a terrible descent into the kind of madness that tolerates a Trump in this time. It began with the onset of the “me” decade of the 1970s, being the consequence of a massive “anarcho-hedonistic” counteroffensive by the peddlers of hate and anti-democratic authoritarian rule.

Progressive churches had very little to say about what happened then, but hopefully a new voice is beginning to arise now.