“Free to worship him without fear” - these words form on the lips of Episcopalians every time they say or sing the Song of Zechariah during Morning Prayer. For some of them that is every day.
Among the people who were immersed in this practice from childhood we may number a President. And these words had consequences beyond the privacy of morning devotions.
One day Franklin Roosevelt sat down at his desk and wrote out a speech he meant to give before Congress. (The State of the Union, January 6, 1941.) In it he named four freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.
(He went on to write: "That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.")
The four freedoms became the basis, the Reverend James Richardson tells me, of the Atlantic Charter, the basic agreement between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, on their common goals in the Second World War.
Prayer. Consequences. Free to worship him without fear - that is two of four. And so the simple daily practice of morning devotions can change the world. And change you.
The Four Freedoms (https://www.fdrlibrary.org/four-freedoms)
The Atlantic Charter (https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/atlantic-conf)
The Song of Zechariah (Luke 1:68-79)
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