God and Mr. Lincoln

Today marks the 160th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death. Almost immediately after the terrible event of his assassination, the martyred president was elevated to the heights of American civil religion. Despite their earlier opposition to the conduct of the war, Radical Republicans sought to appropriate his legacy to justify their extreme plans for Reconstruction. They wanted to draft him as a kind of secular saint to symbolize their revolutionary cause. As one historian put it, they turned him into the “Christ of the passion play of democracy.”

While Lincoln’s own plans for Reconstruction are not entirely clear, what is certain is that he would have rejected this religious triumphalism. In his short religious biography of the 16th president as the “theologian of American anguish,” Quaker author Elton Trueblood argued that “the major key to Lincoln’s greatness is his spiritual depth.” Lincoln did articulate a kind of theology of liberty, but it was always tempered by a humility born of suffering—both his own and the nation’s. He knew that the “new birth of freedom” came with an immense cost.

To understand Lincoln’s religious development, it is important to begin with the strange religious context of the 19th century. America has always been home to bizarre religious movements, but the Second Great Awakening sparked even more sectarian oddities. From revivalism in mainstream denominations to the emergence of less orthodox movements such as millenarianism and Mormonism, the Early Republic’s frontier was on fire with religious fervor.

A young Abraham Lincoln would quietly reject this spiritual climate. Although raised in a Baptist home, he preferred the religious skepticism of a Thomas Paine to the enthusiasm of the camp meeting. His law partner and biographer William Herndon even wrote that Lincoln penned a pamphlet defending “infidelity,” which he and his friends later suppressed for the sake of his political ambitions. As a young man, Lincoln strove above all to be a partisan of rationality. He had little patience for ostentatious ceremony or the intense passion of the traveling preachers he encountered. Instead, Lincoln praised “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.”

Read more in Religion & Liberty.