Lincoln's God
How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation
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Lincoln’s spiritual journey from spiritual skeptic to America's first evangelical Christian presidentbeliever—a conversion that changed both the Civil War and the practice of religion itself.
Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm’s length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But as he came to appreciate the growing political and military importance of the Christian community, and when death touched the Lincoln household in an awful, intimate way, the erstwhile skeptic effectively evolved into a believer and harnessed the power of evangelical Protestantism to rally the nation to arms. The war, he told Americans, was divine retribution for the sin of slavery.
This is the story of that transformation and the ways in which religion helped millions of Northerners interpret the carnage and political upheaval of the 1850s and 1860s. Rather than focus on battles and personalities, Joshua Zeitz probes ways in which war and spiritual convictions became intertwined. Characters include the famous—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher—as well as ordinary soldiers and their families whose evolving understanding of mortality, heaven, and mission motivated them to fight. Long underestimated in accounts of the Civil War, religion—specifically evangelical Christianity—played an instrumental role on the battlefield and home front, and in the corridors of government.
More than any president before him—or any president after, until George W. Bush—Lincoln harnessed popular religious enthusiasm to build broad-based support for a political party and a cause. A master politician who was sincere about his religion, Lincoln held beliefs that were unconventional—and widely misunderstood then, as now. After his death and the end of an unforgiving war, Americans needed to memorialize Lincoln as a Christian martyr. The truth was, of course, considerably more complicated, as this original book explores.
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In this intriguing yet inconclusive account, historian Zeitz (Lincoln's Boys) reevaluates Abraham Lincoln's religious convictions. Tracing Lincoln's development from a young man "eager to escape his parents' stern religiosity," through his period as someone "who openly questioned the divinity of Christ," to his maturation into a seasoned lawyer and politician who knew how "to bite his tongue," Zeitz contends that Lincoln's increasing invocation of Christian language and imagery during the Civil War was not borne out of spiritual conviction so much as necessity: "the Bible was simply a useful reference point for his audience." Nevertheless, Lincoln's rhetoric pointed toward an unprecedented "alignment of church, state, and party" that happened during the conflict. While acknowledging that Lincoln's "brand of Christian faith was not evangelical by common definition," Zeitz claims that Lincoln's mobilization of the engines of evangelicalism on behalf of the Union arguably made him "the nation's first evangelical president." Though Lincoln fades far into the background at times and Zeitz's suggestion that the "muscular Christianity" of the Civil War helped pave the way for the emergence of the religious right in the 1970s isn't entirely convincing, he provides valuable context on the intermingling of faith and politics in American history. The result is a fresh and thorough take on an overlooked aspect of Lincoln's presidency.
