The Almost-Chosen President

Abraham Lincoln is America’s greatest and most important president. Although a contrarian might like to assert George Washington, himself a great president, the honest reality is that our America is Lincoln’s America and not Washington’s; the modern, industrial, powerful, urban, and egalitarian America is the “new nation” forged through Lincoln’s presidency. But Lincoln’s importance as a transformative president is also in an area where our contemporary secular prejudices don’t want to acknowledge: faith. Lincoln’s evolving religious beliefs eroded the imaginary “wall of separation” conceived of by Thomas Jefferson and brought forth a political theology for the United States that we still live in the shadows of as much as that new nation founded during the bloodshed and tribulation of the Civil War.

The secular Lincoln myth stems from a narrow and prejudicial presentation of Lincoln’s religious beliefs. Born to a devout predestinarian Calvinistic-Baptist father, by the time Lincoln reached early adulthood and traveled to Springfield, Illinois to make himself a new man he was fleeing from his religious inheritance. Lincoln made a quick friend in a man by the name of William Herndon. Like the young Lincoln, Herndon was a skeptic, a man out of touch with the nascent evangelicalism that was sweeping the country in the 1830s and 1840s. Herndon remembered Lincoln 20 years before the pain and suffering of the Civil War affected the president; the secular Lincoln is entirely constructed on Herndon’s antiquated memory which permits no change in Lincoln’s religious beliefs.

Yes, the young Lincoln was a skeptic of organized and dogmatic Christianity. He sought to break free of the fatalism of his father, Thomas, the “Hardshell Baptist” of Calvinist belief. The young Lincoln scoffed at the dogmas of Christianity, preferring a vague and abstract apathetic deism. There was a God who created the universe and the laws of nature, but that’s about it. Today, with renewed hostility toward cultural Christianity and faithful believers, elite historians like to promote this Lincoln and ignore everything else simply out of their venomous hatred of Christianity and Christians.

Yet, as Joshua Zeitz has written, this is a terrible presentation of Lincoln that ignores all the evidence of how Lincoln’s religious faith changed, how he grew to depend on Evangelicals for their support opposing slavery, abolition, and the preservation of the Union during the Civil War, and how Lincoln leaned on the Bible to console himself in the great suffering of the war and to console the nation that was broken by so much death. Zeitz ironically notes that while Lincoln remained undogmatic, he could very plausibly be considered “the nation’s first evangelical president.” Even historians who still want to keep Lincoln distanced from a sort of half-conversion to evangelical Protestantism, like Joshua Reynolds, the evidence of a religious change in Lincoln’s outlook is overwhelming; Reynolds therefore concedes that “reading th[e] Bible…had a positive effect, visible in [Lincoln’s] speeches from then on, which had far more references to God than had his earlier ones.” In fact, Lincoln makes over 200 references to the Bible in his literary corpus, more than any president prior to him—with most of these references coming while he was in office and dealing with the crisis of the Civil War.

Something changed. What was it?

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“I must trust in that Supreme being who has never forsaken this favored land, through the instrumentality of this great and intelligent people.” As Lincoln got older and approached the Presidency, there was a marked shift in his political rhetoric. The former Whig once relied on the standard, conservative, and economic arguments common to the nationalist Whig ideology of his day: slavery should not expand because of existing laws passed by Congress and slavery is bad for economic innovation and progress as it stunts the need for embracing innovative change. Now Lincoln was arguing, “Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.”

It is first important to recognize the cultural shift going on in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Although America was first settled by mostly religious pilgrims seeking to create a New Israel on America’s shore—the famous Puritan “Errand in the Wilderness”—the initial religious fervor that drove the Pilgrims, Puritans, and other religious dissenters (like the Quakers) to North America had petered out by the revolutionary era. Although colonists were still saturated in the language of Christianity and its ideals, the colonial period was the least churched era of American history. A few decades later, come the 1830s, the Second Great Awakening was erupting across the United States. This was the “evangelical” revival with its emphasis on free-will salvation, personal conversion, and social reform. The evangelicalism of the mid-1800s was reformist and progressive, and its major proponents included the new dissenting movements of the time: Methodists, Baptists, and “New Light” Presbyterians. Evangelicalism was moral in its orientation; it was a moral movement undergirded by a moralist theology of transformation.

Lincoln grew up, as we know, in the shadow of his father’s Calvinistic Baptist adherence. Predestinarian fatalism was the theology of Thomas Lincoln. Despite this pious fatalism, the Hardshell Baptism of the Lincoln family in Kentucky was also abolitionist in politics—something very radical indeed considering Kentucky’s status as a slave state. Even though the young Abe attempted to escape his father’s domineering hand and fatalistic theology, he couldn’t remove himself from the emerging evangelicalism of the Methodist circuit riders and the camp revivalism of free-will preachers imploring Americans to repent of their sins, accept Christ as their savior, and work to improve their personal lives and the lives of others. Lincoln was living in an age of reform: religious, social, and political. Even as he tried to remain free of these influences all around him, he couldn’t.

The cynic, therefore, might say that Lincoln changed for political expediency. He saw the direction the wind was blowing. Evangelicals throughout the northern states were becoming the backbone of the newly formed Republican Party. He adopted religious rhetoric and made scriptural arguments against slavery because it was in his political interest to do so.

This line of reasoning is nothing more than fanciful coping and is ironic given that these propagandists would also say “I believe the data.” When presented the evidence of Lincoln’s religious and political transformation, the cynic dismisses it and offers a non-evidentiary response: Lincoln didn’t really believe what he said. This, of course, contradicts the testimony of those who knew Lincoln, who saw him read the Bible daily and who heard him state that the Psalms was his favorite book of the Bible as the Civil War nurse Rebecca Pomroy recalled from her conversations with him.

Somewhere in the 1850s, Lincoln took a decidedly more religious stance against slavery. This moral opposition to slavery brought Lincoln nearer to scripture and an understanding of a moral God who presides over the affairs of men—directing and willing the events of history to a more moral outcome. This caused Lincoln’s break with his earlier Whiggish conservatism which rested on legalistic arguments and mere humanistic appeals. As the historian Gordon Leider writes in tracking Lincoln’s changing rhetoric on the eve of the Civil War, “To Lincoln the Bible was becoming less of a book of great quotations and more of a personal driving force.” At the very least, part of Lincoln’s transformation was in his moving away from the legalism and economism of the Whig opposition to slavery and his embrace of the moral argument against slavery which was being developed in the 1850s and pushed by evangelical reformers.

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Although Lincoln’s providential theology remained uninterested of the dogmas of Christianity, his belief in a God who governed the affairs of the world and who was not simply a distant hands-off creator was another important part of Lincoln’s religious change. This was brought forth by the hardships of the Civil War which forced Lincoln’s heart and mind to contemplate God in a way he had not before. As the United States ripped itself apart in a fratricidal struggle, the agony and suffering of this war led Mr. Lincoln to turn to the Bible for comfort amid grief. In doing so, he returned to the universal theology of Christianity: A God who cares and is not an absentee landlord.

Part of Lincoln’s religious transformation, then, was in how he approached the Bible as a source of consolation. This, of course, ought to make sense. So much of the Bible, especially the Psalms of the Old Testament, are expressions of anguish in hope of consolation; so much of lyricism of the Psalms reflect the cry of the human heart. The Psalmist cries out because he knows God does, in fact, care.

The Civil War was the great catalyst that drew Lincoln nearer to God in seeking comfort amid suffering. But Lincoln was already traveling on that road from the decade prior. His father died without Lincoln beside him. There was no moment of reconciliation, and this seemed to gnaw away at Abe. Edward Baker Lincoln, Abe’s second son, died at the age of 3 in February 1850. Familial loss caused Lincoln to start “reading the Bible with newfound respect,” as one historian comments, as the future president was seeking “a cure for ‘the blues.’”

Evidently, Lincoln did find solace amid suffering in reading scripture. This prepared him for the fiery trial of the Civil War and provided him an existing familiarity and source to turn to amid agony and despair. The deadliest war in American history hit many families who lost loved ones: brothers, sons, husbands, and fathers. In that firestorm of cannons, bullets, and bloodshed, Lincoln would often visit the makeshift hospitals around Washington D.C. and comfort the grieving. He, too, was seeking solidarity with the suffering.

In seeking solidarity with the wounded, Lincoln befriended Rebecca Pomroy, a nurse, who would later recall a conversation with the president in which he confessed that the Psalms were “the best.” Lincoln’s reading of the Psalms as a source of comfort and healing when the fields of America were strewn with the dead and dying and the cities of America were burning to ash because of the fire of war and pillage should not be scandalous. Thus, it is not surprising that Lincoln drew upon the comforting message of the Psalms in his proclamations of mourning and, most famously, in his Second Inaugural Address:

Fellow countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends is as well known to the public as to myself and it is I trust reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it – all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war – seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen perpetuate and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered – that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

The concluding sentence is the most famous, “With malice toward none with charity for all.” But if we read on in its entirety we find the call to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” a direct reference to Psalm 147 (“He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds”). Earlier in the speech, Lincoln also quotes Psalm 19, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Diana Schaub notes in her book His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation that the Second Inaugural, with its references and quotations from the Bible, “sketch a way of thinking about offense and judgement.” Very true. However, Lincoln’s conclusion moves away from offense and judgement to healing. It is unsurprising, then, that Lincoln draws upon the service of Psalm 147 to bind up wounds and also alludes to James 1:27 in acknowledging a God who cares for the “widow” and “orphan” (“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world”). Lincoln’s Civil War experience had been moving him in this direction for years.

This God who cares and calls forth reconciliation and healing is also a God who is intimately involved in the affairs of this world. A caring and loving God cannot be remote. Thus, as Lincoln rested upon the Bible to find personal comfort and to offer comfort to a grieving nation he also reluctantly concluded that he must be an instrument of God’s providential governance in history.

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To be chosen for such a task is a daunting realization for any man, especially a man who previously doubted the action of Providence in his life and the life of the world. Lincoln’s earlier deism was now a providential theism steeped in the cultural milieu, language, and ideas of Christianity: an active God who is a moral agent of judgement. In this respect, Lincoln kept one hand clasped with the providential moralism of Thomas Jefferson while extending out his other hand with the moral reformism of Protestant evangelicalism, coupled with the embrace of a theology of comfort amid suffering uniquely being offered in the theology of the Second Great Awakening. Lincoln had convinced himself he was chosen. Joshua Zeitz describes this realization with a certain irony—since, as we know, this idea of divine chosenness (predestination) was something Lincoln had tried to escape in his earlier years, “As the fighting bore on, Lincoln came to view himself as God’s ‘instrument’ on earth, meant to prosecute total war against the South until one side of the other lost. He reverted, ironically and profoundly, to the fatalism of his father’s religion—to a belief that the scope for human agency was limited.”

Here, however, I must disagree with Zeit’s implication of limited human agency.

Throughout Lincoln’s other writings as he embraced an almost evangelical faith, he routinely calls upon human action to achieve moral ends. Whether it is the moral action to oppose slavery, the moral call to comfort the wounded, or the moral call for reconciliation, Mr. Lincoln very clearly understood his chosenness for the purpose of moral reform and regeneration. He knew he had changed for the better in becoming God’s instrument on earth, and now he wanted Americans as a whole to change for the better by riding themselves of the evil of slavery and then extending the hand of reconciliation to traitors so as “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

Even as Lincoln seemingly reverted to the stern fatalistic Calvinism of his father, he ironically moved closer to Calvin’s moral theology which is so often forgotten over the debates concerning free will and predestination. There is no evidence Lincoln read Calvin, but he certainly came close to Calvin’s theology of love and reconciliation as it relates to extending the hand of love and reconciliation to others despite their human faults precisely because God is good and loving.

In his commentaries on the Gospel of John, Calvin notes that God “invites all men without exception” to faith; reconciliation and redemption is, in fact, offered to all (not that all will obtain it). In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin also emphatically states the purpose of God’s love and our love for God is so that we can love other men, “Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to Him, that this may be an unchanging principle: Whatever the character of the man, we must yet love him because we love God.” Calvin also writes in his Golden Booklet of the Christian Life, “If we cover and obliterate man’s faults and consider the beauty and dignity of God’s image in him, then we shall be induced to love and embrace him.”

Perhaps the greater irony is that in reverting to his father’s Calvinism – the Calvinism that mid-nineteenth century American evangelicalism was reacting against (namely predestination’s implication of the impossibility of free will) – Lincoln really did come close to a Calvinism he had not been exposed to: we are instruments of God’s love on earth to all men and women, even the sinners, even to those who will not change, and that love we show others demonstrates to them the loving providence of God. Lincoln’s call for healing and reconciliation, his call for love of the slave as a brother in the fellowship of humanity, was because he embraced a belief in a moral God which necessitated moral action.

With God, there is the possibility and hope for healing and reconciliation. This is the profound religious revelation Lincoln had come to understand and subsequently tried to communicate during the Civil War. That is what made him a chosen instrument. Without a moral God who is involved in the affairs of men, there is no possibility for reconciliation and healing. Lincoln’s more youthful deism during his skeptical years never compelled him to offer moral arguments against slavery or to seek comfort in God during bouts of depression and suffering grief. Sure, God exists and maybe wants us to be good but he doesn’t care about you or me (and if he doesn’t care about you and me then the need to be good is ultimately uncompelling). Whatever the technicalities of Lincoln’s later theology, he had come to embrace a Christian understanding of God even if he remained undogmatic about the issues of Christology and the nature of salvation.

Lincoln’s death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth metamorphosized the president into a martyr. Immediately after Lincoln’s death, Christian hagiography quickly appeared in print. After this initial wave of hagiographic martyrdom simmered, the apologists of the Lost Cause in the Confederacy, who propelled themselves to the forefront of American journalism and publishing, began chiseling away at Lincoln’s moral God and reinvented Lincoln as a hater of Christ. Herndon, too, spoke of the Lincoln he knew—the skeptical apathetical deist of the 1830s! When Lincoln was finally chiseled in marble in Washington D.C., only the memory of him as the president who saved the Union and freed the slaves remained. That’s a good way to remember him, but it is incomplete.

Abraham Lincoln’s real legacy is in how, as president, he governed with a moral heart and offered comfort, healing, and reconciliation to all. “With malice toward none with charity for all” is a good phrase to remember. But it is incomplete without the rest: “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” That more common memory of him saving the Union and freeing the slaves is an extension of that moral heart. Lincoln’s heart was awakened by something deep within the Bible. We would do well to have our hearts awakened by the same reality Lincoln encountered: a moral God who calls us to love and extend the hand of reconciliatory friendship even to our enemies. Hatred brought division. Love, and only love, brings reunion. Lincoln understood that reality during the hardship and suffering of the Civil War. That is worth remembering alongside all the other accomplishments he had as president.

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