THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, September 26, 2004

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

It is not mentioned in the Ten Commandments, but we Unitarian Universalists are often guilty of a great sin. It is the sin of name-dropping. We are inclined to mention famous Unitarians or Universalists, from Thomas Jefferson to Susan B. Anthony. See? I just committed that sin. Last year, I gave a series of sermons on people who were Unitarian or Universalist, but whose affiliation wasn’t widely known, like the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or the composer Bela Bartok. See? Sinned again.

Anyway, usually this sin is forgivable. What is not a forgivable sin is when we embrace the names of people simply because we think they should have been Unitarian or Universalist, when there is no concrete evidence to include them in our tradition. Names like Mark Twain or John Dewey fall into that category. Sometimes – too many times – Abraham Lincoln is mentioned as a Unitarian or Universalist. He was not.

Many groups have claimed him, and all are mistaken. We aren’t the only ones. One biographer of Lincoln, William J. Wolf, wrote that, “many members of the Christian community have been shameless in claiming Lincoln as a secret member of their denomination, or about to become such” just before he died. Methodists and Presbyterians, Spiritualists and Freemasons, even Catholics have from time to time claimed Lincoln as one of their own. We are in a large group of the mistaken.

I address one of the great mysteries of American history: the religion of Abraham Lincoln. There has been more written about this great icon of American lore than any other single figure of our country’s history. Hundreds of books. Some of them have been devoted specifically to Lincoln’s religious beliefs.

Since Lincoln himself wrote almost nothing about his religious convictions, that leaves room for endless speculations based on mostly here-say – mostly reports following his death of conversations people had with him about religion. Now this is good for the industry of history writing, for the ambiguity of the question lends itself to seemingly endless interpretation. Last year alone, for example, there were two major books published that were devoted almost entirely to the subject of Lincoln’s religion.

The bare outline of Lincoln’s life is known by all. Born to rural poverty in Kentucky, he spent most of his childhood years in Indiana. He was largely self-taught, with only a few years of formal education. At age 20, he moved to Illinois, first to New Salem, then to Springfield, where he studied law and became a successful lawyer. He married Mary Todd and ran successfully for Congress. He was an underdog candidate for President as a Republican, and won at perhaps the most dramatic moment in history – as the country was facing civil war. As President, he single-handedly terminated the most evil aspect of American society – the system of slavery – by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. He led the nation during the bloodiest war it has ever experienced, and history credits him for saving the Union. Perhaps more than any single person before or since, Abraham Lincoln made possible the country we know today. He died a martyr’s death, and has been revered ever since as among our greatest leaders, if not the greatest.

The biographical evidence of Lincoln’s personal religious beliefs is astoundingly contradictory. Within a few years of his death, a half-dozen biographies of Lincoln were published. Though it was widely accepted that Lincoln was not an orthodox Christian in his younger days, several people reported conversations with Lincoln claiming he confessed his later conversion to Christianity. One said it happened at Gettysburg. Another said it happened after the death of his second child. Yet another, upon his reading a book called “The Christian’s Defense,” authored by the minister of the Presbyterian Church he attended in Springfield, Illinois. As time went on, some of these testimonies of Lincoln’s confessions were later retracted or modified, though others were not. Quite a number of biographers reached the conclusion summarized by these words of John Wesley Hill in his 1920 book, Abraham Lincoln: Man of God:

“Abraham Lincoln was a man of God. Recalling his frequent references to Jesus Christ, it would seem altogether fitting to indicate that he set a high standard of Christian manhood; that he drew his inspiration and his superlative wisdom in state affairs directly from the source of all wisdom; that in the darkest hours through which he and his cause were called to pass, he was sustained by an unfailing faith; and that when he proclaimed to the world that he was actuated ‘with malice toward none and charity toward all,’ he was exemplifying the spirit of the Christian religion in which he believed.”

On the other hand, there were other biographies that sought to establish his rejection of orthodox Christian doctrine. Most notable of these was by William Herndon, a long-time friend and fellow lawyer in Springfield who claimed that while Lincoln was in no way hostile toward the Christian churches, he personally rejected the central doctrines, including the divinity of Jesus, the infallibility of the Bible, the doctrine of redemption, and the doctrine of hell. Herndon and others who knew him well described him as an “infidel,” meaning one who rejects the main tenets of Christianity, and did so to the time of his death. Herndon went so far as to claim that while in Springfield, Lincoln wrote a book defending the infidel view, but was advised to burn it by those who knew he had a promising political career ahead of him.

There was certainly enough public evidence of Lincoln’s unorthodox views of religion that at the time of his death, there were many who wanted to see his reputation be established in history as a devoted Christian. And there were others who wanted to set the record straight, that even though Lincoln so frequently used religious and biblical citations in his public speeches, it would be wrong for history to portray him as a defender of traditional Christianity.

The debate has never ended, and probably never will. All are agreed, though, that Lincoln never joined a church. In fact, he is the only President in history never to have joined a church.

No one in this debate over Lincoln’s religion can question that he had a deeply religious soul that guided his life. He was perhaps the most biblically literate of any President, but also one of the most skeptical of orthodoxy. He held a deep belief in God, but his idea of God was quite different from many traditional ideas. The only question is that on a religious continuum that runs from non-Christian free-thinker on one end, to doctrinaire Christian believer on the other, where did Lincoln’s religious ideas fall?

Some questions are easily answered. Even most who place Lincoln in the Christian camp admit that his religious views were quite unorthodox to the Christian views of his time. His parents raised him in a conservative and Calvinistic church known as the “Primitive Baptists.” He never accepted the creeds they preached. He regularly attended a Presbyterian church with his wife, who was a member, both in Springfield and in Washington, though he directly declined to join himself.

The reason he gave for not joining, when asked, was that he could not affirm the creeds of the churches. Several of his life-long religious convictions were at odds with traditional creeds.

For one thing, he could not accept the doctrine of hell and damnation. In this view, he was a universalist at heart. Even those who knew him and, after his death, wanted him to be seen as a devout Christian, admitted that he never accepted the idea of eternal damnation for the lost. In true universalist style, he believed that God wanted everyone to be saved, and to the extent that some were lost to eternal punishment, God would have failed in his wish. God, after all, cannot fail.

He also could not accept the central Christian creed of the divinity of Christ. In both his personal writing and his public speeches, Jesus is very rarely mentioned, and even then, rarely mentioned as a “Savior.” The God he believed in was the God of the Old Testament, more than the New, and he in fact preferred to use euphemisms for God, such as “Providence,” or “Almighty,” or “Our Maker.”

Thirdly, though he studied the Bible carefully, perhaps more carefully than any other President, he could not accept that the Bible was the divinely inspired word of God. He held with reverence the wisdom of the Bible, and found in it meaningful ideas and insights into life and ethics, but he could not approach it as the mystical “Word of God.”

Let me pause here for an observation. So Lincoln did not believe in the doctrine of eternal punishment. Doesn’t that make him a universalist? And he did not accept the divinity of Jesus. Doesn’t that make him a unitarian, rather than a trinitarian?

Well, yes and no. We need to understand the difference between a “universalist” (with a lower case “u”) and a “Universalist” (with an upper case “U”). Without the capital letter, the word identifies all those who share a belief that there is no eternal damnation. With a capital letter, Universalist identifies a person who has joined a tradition of people who share and promote that belief. Lincoln was a “universalist” in the first sense, but not the second.

Similarly with the word “unitarian.” Without the capital letter, the word identifies anyone who accepts the unity of God rather than the Trinity. Lincoln was a “unitarian” in that sense. When the word is capitalized, it identifies those who belong to a movement and tradition that affirms the oneness of the divine. Lincoln did not belong to such a movement.

Lincoln was familiar with both religious groups, and had contact with them. Though he admired them, he declined to join either. He was familiar with the work of Unitarian ministers William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, and kept copies of their sermons. In fact, a piece of trivia is worth noting here. Lincoln had marked up a copy of a sermon by Parker, underlining a phrase he found there that spoke of “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It was a phrase that would later appear in the Gettysburg address.

But none of this makes Lincoln a Unitarian. In a 1920 biography of Lincoln, William E. Barton wrote this:

“The fact that he took portions of his thinking from Parker and Channing, does not necessitate that he was a Unitarian; nor does the fact that he did not believe in eternal punishment compel his classification with Universalists. Parker and Channing chanced to be authors whose writings came into his possession at a time when they served to divine particular aspects of his own faith.”

Let me return to comments on his specific attitude toward traditional creeds. He believed that God guided events in the world, though for him God stood quite aloof from the world and in many ways inaccessible to individuals. We humans cannot know the mind of God.

Lincoln had a spiritualist element to his world view. He believed in dreams as signs that informed about the future. Though Lincoln was generally drawn to rationalist thinking coming from Enlightenment philosophy, he also held a strong superstitious element that some biographers ascribe to the tradition of the rural backwoods of the Midwest.

He believed in respect for religious diversity. Though he grew up in a culture where the various denominations were battling each other for the allegiance of the people, and rivalry between religious groups was strong and sometimes vicious, Lincoln never in his life spoke a disrespectful word about any religious group. Similarly, he never attempted to impose his religious ideas on others.

Finally, for him religion was primarily ethical, guiding our moral lives, rather than a set of theological speculations about the godhead or the world to come. As an ethical endeavor, he eventually was able to tie religion to the cause of emancipation of the slaves.

There is one unusual area of Lincoln’s religion that needs to be mentioned, something he called the “Doctrine of Necessity.” For the most part, Lincoln easily discarded the trappings of his childhood religion of hellfire and salvation. But there was one element of doctrinaire Calvinism that stayed with him throughout his life. It was a vague version of Calvin’s doctrine of “predestination.” Lincoln called it, as I say, the “Doctrine of Necessity.”

All our actions, he believed, are determined by forces and motives outside of our control. One may also think of this as “fatalism,” that we cannot control what happens to us, or how it affects us. He did not believe in free will, but rather that we are destined to act according to what shapes us. This philosophy closely resembles the moral philosophy of Englishman Jeremy Benthem. As a lawyer, he did not believe in punishment for punishment’s sake, because there is no point to punish people who are destined to act as they do according to what they know. Punishment does no good. What changes bad behavior is not punishment, but education. Through education, people can develop better motives and avoid crime.

This philosophy is also another reason for rejecting the Christian doctrine of eternal damnation. There is no justice in God condemning people eternally for sins they couldn’t help committing. What God can do – or what we can do on God’s behalf – is to teach people why it is better to act morally than immorally, and eventually people will be motivated toward moral behavior.

These are some of the areas in which his personal religion was at odds with the traditional religious views of his day. He wasn’t at all “anti-church,” nor especially “anti-religion.” He was, however, “anti-creedal,” and regretted the frequent bickering among denominations.

Most accounts of Lincoln’s opinions on religion are second or third hand, reported after he died from people who claimed to have had a conversation about religion with him. Many of those accounts are apocryphal, and it is clear that they were embellished to support the views of the person reporting the story. However, there is one such report that three different sources seemed to agree upon.

One story came from a conversation with Congressman Henry C. Deming, another from Phineas T. Gurley, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C. that he attended with his wife, and the third was an account from Henry Rankin, whose parents were close friends with Lincoln in Springfield, and who knew Lincoln then when he was a young boy.

In all three stories, Lincoln was asked why he never joined a church. In each case, from these three separate conversations, he was reported to have given the same reply. He said that he could not subscribe to the complex creeds of any church he found, and then said that if he ever found a church whose only creed was the two great commandments of Jesus, “to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself,” then, he said, he would join such a church with heart and soul.

For him, religion was a private manner, but if asked, he would answer questions about it. Yet unlike many politicians in his time and ours, he did not use religion as a political strategy, using God to win elections.

There is an interesting story in this regard about his run for Congress in 1846 in Springfield, Illinois. His opponent was a Methodist circuit-riding minister by the name of Peter Cartwright. Cartwright’s followers were spreading the word that Lincoln was an “infidel,” and Lincoln found himself in the distasteful place of having to defend himself.

Lincoln decided to distribute a handbill in response. It would have been easy for Lincoln to recognize that if he wanted to succeed as a politician, he would need to find a church to join. But that would have felt dishonest to him. He was, after all, Honest Abe to the core. That part, history got right. So he sent around a handbill with the following response.

“That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular. . . .”

But that doesn’t end the story. Lincoln decided to attend a religious rally led by his opponent for Congress. After all Cartwright, his opponent, was an active evangelist. The “rest of the story,” as they say, was told by the great Lincoln biographer, Carl Sandburg, this way:

“In due time Cartwright said, ‘All who desire to lead a new life, to give their hearts to God, and go to heaven, will stand,’ and a sprinkling of men, women and children stood up. Then the preacher exhorted, ‘All who do not wish to go to hell will stand.’ All stood up – except Lincoln. Then said Cartwright in his gravest voice, ‘I observe that many responded to the first invitation to give their hearts to God and go to heaven. And I further observe that all of you save one indicated that you did not desire to go to hell. The sole exception is Mr. Lincoln, who did not respond to either invitation. May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where are you going?’

“And Lincoln slowly rose and slowly spoke. ‘I came here as a respectful listener. I did not know that I was to be singled out by Brother Cartwright. I believe in treating religious matters with due solemnity. I admit that the questions propounded by Brother Cartwright are of great importance. I did not feel called upon to answer as the rest did. Brother Cartwright asks me directly where I am going. I desire to reply with equal directness: I am going to Congress.’”

He went.

Many accounts of Lincoln’s life include a certain melancholy, or sad, elements to his nature. Death visited Lincoln’s life frequently. His mother died when he was a child. His sister died at a young age. Some report that the first woman he was engaged to died before they were married. And most of all, two of his own children died at a young age, one while he was in the White House.

These experiences had an impact on his religion, as well, and probably contributed to his belief in fatalism, or the “doctrine of necessity” – that we are not in control of the events that happen to us. This intimate experience of death, and the doctrine of fatalism, also affected his approach to the Civil War itself.

It might also be worth noting that Lincoln’s unorthodox religious views were not reached because of a rebellion against tradition. Some people with free-thinking convictions, based on reason and critical mind, experience dissent from orthodoxy as freeing them from bonds of conformity. This was not the case for Lincoln. It is more the case that he wished he could believe as others did – it would be an easier life if he could – but he could bring himself to do so. Here again were the echoes of the “doctrine of necessity.” He had no choice in the matter of what to believe. If he did, he would choose otherwise. His lack of traditional faith was both unsettling and unavoidable. Joshua Speed, a former roommate in Springfield in his early years, put it this way:

“When I knew (Lincoln) early in life, he was a skeptic. He had tried hard to be a believer, but his reason could not grasp and solve the great problem of redemption, as taught.”

Let me turn finally to that most critical part of his life: the decision to free the slaves and the war that issued from it.

Lincoln was a late convert to abolitionism. While running for Congress, and even for President, he did not oppose the institution of slavery. He accepted the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited the admission of new states as slave states, and when that policy was challenged he strongly opposed changing it. His opposition to slavery in the newly accepted states was primarily for economic and political reasons.

When the war came, while he began his first term, the initiating issues were economic and political as well. Slavery was seen as an economic issue, as well as a states rights issue.

But as the war grew stronger and bloodier, Lincoln felt the emotional wounds all around him, and he became persuaded that God was guiding the nation see slavery as a moral issue, far deeper than simply political and economic. It was an agonizing process that brought Lincoln to the view that something about the moral soul of this nation was at risk. This thinking led him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. A nation that is founded on the principle of freedom cannot survive an institution of slavery. This conviction touched deeply into his religious foundation.

History has established two speeches as pivotal in expressing his leadership in the war: The Second Inaugural Address, and the Gettysburg Address. These documents do, indeed, show not only his personal and political leadership of the nation, but also his spiritual leadership as well.

Abraham Lincoln was the epitome of a “war-time President,” modeling, I think, a style very different from what we are familiar.

First of all, he approached the war with a profound sense of humility. Though in his heart be believed his cause was just, he was personally torn apart by the possibility that he may be wrong, or at least that his just cause didn’t warrant the deadly war he was leading to achieve it. The war took a toll on his soul. He made his decisions based on what he thought the best to do, but was not thoroughly convinced that what was best was also unquestionably right.

Second he didn’t demonize the enemy as a way to unify the nation, but rather he kept focused on the cause of saving the Union more than eliminating the enemy.

Third, he never invoked God as on his side, but rather acknowledged that God is above the bitter fights of human beings.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is perhaps the most explicitly religious of any Presidential address in our history. Some refer to it as the “Inaugural Sermon.” Yet his message was not one of a righteous crusade, but rather of humble recognition of the country’s role in historical destiny.

The context is crucial to understanding this document. It was March 4, 1865, and the Civil War, which had been raging for years now, had brought the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Americans, North and South. The country was becoming weary, and Lincoln felt he needed to remind them of the justness of this cause.

It was his sense of humility – perhaps especially his sense of humility before God – that guided him to acknowledge that God does not take sides. The Inaugural Address includes these words:

“Both (North and South) 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 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.”

The poet Stephen Vincent Benet wrote a long epic poem about the Civil War entitled John Brown’s Body. In that poem, he put the following words into Lincoln’s mouth:

They come to me and talk

about God’s will

In righteous deputations

and platoons,

Day after day, laymen and ministers. .

But all of them are sure they

know God’s will.

I am the only man

who does not know it.

This is the humility of Lincoln as a war-time President. He felt the agony of not knowing for certain that his deadly decisions were ultimately right. Lincoln did not assume that God is on the side of the North, yet he prayed that the cause of freeing the slaves is consistent with divine will.

“Fondly do we hope, and 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.”

He finishes this brief speech with those famous words of reconciliation, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. . . ” These are not the words of a crusader against a satanic enemy, but of a deeply committed leader in a cause he considered just against a enemy that he considered worthy of compassion.

The final sentence continues,

“Let us strive to finish the work that 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 a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

With these words, Lincoln seemed to see the destiny of this nation linked to the destiny of all nations.

We can see why it isn’t easy to categorize the religion of Lincoln. His religious faith was personal, but he was able to harness that faith to keep the American spirit both strong and humble. There was no arrogance in Lincoln’s religion, no sense of always being right. Religion was not competitive, with winners and losers, right and wrong. He did not presume to speak for God, because God was beyond mere human ideas. God transcended national identity.

Most of all, perhaps, was the inclusive respect for all that was demonstrated in Lincoln’s religion. Just as he did not condemn various religious denominations for creeds he could not affirm, he also couldn’t blame the South for ideas, however misguided, they were destined to defend. His religion, without creed or judgment, was one of forgiveness and reconciliation, a quality desperately needed in leadership during any time of national division.

Abraham Lincoln’s religion gave him the qualities this country needed to save itself from destruction. His most recent biographer, Allen Guelzo, put it this way:

“His confidence in the direction of providence kept his determinism from collapsing into helplessness in the darkest hours of the war, and it was his determinism that prevented his bourgeois optimism from soaring into arrogance in victory. (As his long time friend William Herndon wrote), ‘This purifying process gave Mr. Lincoln charity, liberality, kindness, tenderness, toleration, a sublime faith, if you please, in the purposes and ends of his Maker.’”

The religion of Abraham Lincoln? It is these words: “charity, liberality, kindness, tenderness, toleration.” This is the simple and sublime faith of a great man.

© Bruce Clear 2004