Lincoln and Religion

Conclusion: The Enigma—Was Lincoln a Christian?

66 Conclusion: The Enigma— Was Lincoln a Christian? At Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, on May 4, 1865, Methodist bishop Matthew Simpson delivered a noted eulogy. Admitting that he could not speak “definitely” about Lincoln’s faith, he nonetheless observed that Lincoln had “believed in Christ.” Lincoln’s brother-in-law Ninian Edwards later agreed, and in 1873 James A. Smith, minister of Springfield’s First Presbyterian Church, concurred. Newcomers to the world of Lincoln studies are often surprised at the extraordinary degree of attention devoted to his religious position . Indeed, aside from his views on race and slavery, there is no other field of study that has generated as much attention as Lincoln’s religion. Virtually every organized religious group and anti-religious group has claimed Lincoln as “one of them.” The Baptists have so done because Lincoln’s parents belonged to the church, and during this time Lincoln helped with church activities in the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church in Indiana when he was a teenager. The Episcopalian claim on Lincoln is based on the facts that he surely attended Rev. Charles Dresser’s services in Springfield when he was courting Mary Todd and during their early life together and that the two were married in an Episcopal ceremony. The Presbyterians note that the Lincolns purchased a pew in James A. Smith’s Presbyterian church in Springfield, and they continued to hold that pew until their departure in 1861. After Lincoln and Mary had moved to Washington, they attended Second Presbyterian Church. This Conclusion | 67 church has long maintained a plaque on the pew where Lincoln sat during the services, and it remains the only pew that has not been replaced since 1865. In a less demonstrative statement, the Quakers have pointed out that Lincoln’s ancestors in Pennsylvania were most probably Quaker. After the president’s assassination, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise declared that Lincoln had told him he believed he was Jewish. The Society for Freethinkers also claimed him for that denomination. Even a Pietist church group stated that Lincoln was intending to join after the war was over, reporting that he was secretly baptized in their faith. The conflicting claims on Lincoln’s loyalty lead back to the central questions: what faith did Lincoln hold, and was he a Christian? Understanding Lincoln’s position on this core issue of his life remains one of the many imponderables of the sixteenth president. Hence, any answer to the question retains a baffling complexity. Although Lincoln never joined any church, he attended services in Baptist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches, and these experiences contributed to his cumulative position on the Christian faith. But he was not a bona fide member of any of these denominations. Still, even though he did not join a church, Lincoln absorbed the ethical dimension of Christianity. Ethical teachings, of course, can never be limited to the world of religion. One does not have to search far to find examples of Christians violating their ethical code. And, at the same time, many nonbelievers can behave ethically. Although the dispute about what Lincoln actually believed shows no sign of resolution, there is virtually no disagreement that he lived his life through a structure rooted in a Christian ethical framework. After Lincoln’s assassination, his early biographers claimed he was a Christian, but the indefatigable and mercurial William Herndon spent a great deal of time and effort trying to prove that Lincoln thought exactly like he did, as a nonconventional religious thinker, perhaps an atheist or at least an agnostic, or (at best) a vague sort of mixture of Unitarian/Universalist (as Herndon himself later became). Herndon’s invaluable collection of statements from people who had known Lincoln from his New Salem days supplied plenty of ammunition to support the idea that Lincoln was a religious skeptic. 68 | Conclusion One New Salem acquaintance said Lincoln was an atheist, while another repeated numerous times that Lincoln was a “Southern Baptist ,” citing Lincoln’s parents’ affiliation with the Baptist church. James H. Mahoney, the New Salem freethinker, claimed that two of Robert Burns’s poems—“Address to the Unco Guid, or Rigidly Righteous ” and “Holy Willie’s Prayer”—that offered a satirical comment on the Presbyterian Church of Scotland expressed Lincoln’s views on religion during the time Mahoney had known him in New Salem. Yet those who knew Lincoln during his years in Washington discerned the...