While he’s said very little about the Plan, or who the other speakers will be, Beck has “discovered” a medal of merit George Washington awarded and, characteristically lacking in humility, has decided to reestablish the practice of the founding father. When he announced Palin’s participation, he had this to say:

In 1780 George Washington developed a badge of merit. It is what our Purple Heart is modeled after…At the time the world only gave medals and badges and everything else to officers, but he was looking to create in his words an honorable and Christian army. It was the first time that anybody had ever done that, looking at the farmer and saying you don't have to be an officer and do something honorable. It was not about the Purple Heart, surprisingly. The Purple Heart was modeled after the badge of merit after they were found in 1933. And that's when we started awarding purple hearts. But it was not for honor. It was just for being wounded.

Leaving aside the implication that, in Beck's view, the abstract idea of "honor" carries more weight than “just being wounded,” the promotion of the rally violates the conventional wisdom of staying on message.”

Nearly seven years later, in 1873, the Reverend James Reed of Springfield delivered a lecture on Abraham Lincoln's religion, "The Later Life and Religious Sentiments of Abraham Lincoln." The lecture was in reaction to Ward Hill Lamon's 1872 biography, which gave much attention to Lincoln's "infidelity" as a young man on the basis of evidence collected by Herndon, and Reed sought to reclaim, at least for his later life, Lincoln's reputation as a Christian. Herndon was persuaded by his wife and others to reply to Reed, and on December 12, 1873, he delivered a public lecture titled "Lincoln's Religion." His most persuasive evidence that Lincoln was not a believer in Christian doctrines and that his religious views did not change while he lived in Springfield was a passage from his interview with Mary Todd Lincoln, in which he reported her as saying:

Mr. Lincoln had no hope and no faith in the usual acceptation of these words, and Lincoln's maxim and philosophy were: "What is to be will be, and no cares (prayers) of ours can ar- [End Page 17] rest the decree." Mr. Lincoln never joined any church. He was a religious man always, as I think. He first thought—to say think—about this subject was when Willie died—never before; he read the Bible a good deal about 1864. He felt religious, more than ever before, about the time he went to Gettysburg. Mr. Lincoln was not a technical Christian.