Lincoln's God

March 15, 2023
A portrait of Lincoln's faith life, with a changing America as the backdrop. Zeitz, a contributing writer at Politico and author of Lincoln's Boys, provides a broad overview of the rapidly changing faith journey of Lincoln individually and of the antebellum U.S. as a whole. The author explains that Lincoln was raised in a strictly Calvinist home, the son of hard-shell Baptists, who "distrusted seminary-trained theologians and believed that God could speak through ordinary laypeople at least as well as college-educated elites. They had little use for ecclesiastical authority." It was a theology quite opposed to the evangelical and reforming church movements sweeping across America at the top. Lincoln rejected much of his parents' theological beliefs, and he forged his own path while never quite shaking the concept of God as a distant judge. Zeitz spends most of the text describing how evangelical Christianity was transformed in a matter of decades into the dominant faith expression in America. "What started in the backwoods as a challenge to organized Christianity," he notes, "became, in effect, the new Christian establishment. Evangelical Christianity wove itself inextricably into...civic and private life." Lincoln, meanwhile, remained largely immune to this spiritual tide. He was, at best, a deist who respected yet dismissed traditional Christian beliefs. The Civil War--and, within that larger story, the personal suffering caused by the death of his son, Willie--changed everything, however, and in his final years, Lincoln became, if not a conventional Christian, definitely a man of deep and searching faith. Lincoln saw himself as an instrument of God, charged with waging a war meant to punish the entirety of the nation for the sin of slavery. Whose side God was on, if either, was known to God alone. Throughout, Zeitz is a competent guide to this specific piece of American religious history. A worthwhile addition to the corpus of Lincoln studies.

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April 3, 2023
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.

April 15, 2023
Another biography of Lincoln? No: historian, Politico editor, and author Zeitz (Building the Great Society, 2018) here examines the impact of the Civil War on Lincoln's and Northerners' spiritual worldviews and how that affected the nation. Zeitz sets the stage by defining the early American religious state, which moved from Calvinism to Arminianism as new Protestant denominations proliferated while the country grew. The fledgling Republican Party came of age alongside these new sects, as Northern views on slavery evolved from merely antislavery to abolitionist. Lincoln was a religious outlier, never joining a church and only attending services sporadically; he had an intellectual acknowledgement of God and read the Bible extensively, shrewdly quoting it in persuasive speeches. Pressures of the war and the shattering loss of his son, Willie, in 1862 transformed Lincoln's beliefs, which echoed the increasing blend of sacred and secular rhetoric heard in churches and partisan campaigns. Zeitz's timely, thoroughly documented account compellingly portrays how the war crumbled Jefferson's wall separating church and state and presaged lingering changes in American discourse.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.