Lincoln and Religion

Opening: Lincoln’s Faith Perspective

1 Opening: Lincoln’s Faith Perspective In the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, 2009, historian Michael Burlingame penned a two-volume, 1,976-page biography titled Lincoln: A Life. This work can only be described as “magisterial.” Toward the end of volume 2, the author came up with a trenchant observation: “Lincoln’s personality was the North’s secret weapon in the Civil War, the key variable that settled the difference between victory and defeat.” This brief book will push Burlingame’s step a little further along the historical chessboard. I plan to argue that one key to Lincoln’s personality—especially during the presidential years—rested with his evolving faith perspective. And for this interpretation of Lincoln’s faith, I borrow, for the moment, the words of twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich, who described faith perspective as an area of “ultimate concern.” With Lincoln, one should use the phrase “ultimate concern” in the plural, for the president’s faith revolved around two ideological systems that overlapped in ways impossible to separate. As Lincoln observed during the address he delivered in Philadelphia ’s Independence Hall on February 22, 1861, his personal political views, confirming his Whig perspective, stemmed directly from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: “It was something in the Declaration of Independence giving liberty not only to the 2 | Opening people of this country, but hope to the world for all coming time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” In Lincoln’s view, the American Republic was the best system of government ever created, and as a Whig admirer of Henry Clay, he acknowledged the significance of personal responsibility and morality and individual striving among the people who lived in this Republic. Under the American system of laws, the minority held rights that had to be respected, but ultimately the will of the majority must prevail. The only alternative, Lincoln believed, was anarchy. And even in his search for a “faith perspective,” Lincoln grappled with traditional views of Jesus Christ that had emerged among the common people who settled in the Ohio Valley during his youth. Like so many of his generation, Lincoln read deeply in the King James Version of scripture—the book through which he tried to comprehend the mysterious working out of God’s plans for humankind. For Lincoln, God worked within the confines of history to enact his will. These cosmic neologistic systems, for surely they were so, contained a built-in tension. As historian Sydney E. Mead has noted, the religion of the Republic often contained an “inclusive” system, in theory at least, that was open to all. On the other hand, biblical Christianity in an American context had long been altered from its antecedents. From the colonial era forward, American Christianity was drawn into denominationalism, which introduced an exclusive dimension, thus placing a permanent tension at the heart of the American experimentation in self-government. But, it must be emphasized at the onset: as far as Lincoln was concerned, his own faith was not frozen in time. The outstanding feature of Lincoln’s life was his capacity for development . Neither a born genius nor a man of mediocre talents suddenly endowed with wisdom to guide the nation through the trials of a civil war, he developed gradually, absorbing from his environment that which was useful and good and growing in character and mind. The overlapping of these inseparable features is the keynote of Lincoln’s “faith perspective.” This brief study provides the first direct Lincoln’s Faith Perspective | 3 analysis of Lincoln’s religion for a full generation, and it moves the ongoing assessment into the twenty-first century. People new to the field of Lincoln studies are often astounded at the vehemence of historical disagreement. Historian David Herbert Donald once pointed out that the latest Lincoln interpretations often offered “more of the same.” The religion of no other chief executive of the American Republic has called forth such intense historical scrutiny. It is widely known that George Washington was an Episcopalian with one foot in the Deist camp. Woodrow Wilson was a Presbyterian; Herbert Hoover, a Quaker; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an Episcopalian; John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a Catholic; George H. W. Bush, an Episcopalian; George W. Bush, a conservative evangelical; and Barack Obama, a Congregationalist...