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| One of the spurious quotes often used by Evangelicals and the Religious Right to claim Lincoln. |
Note: I
know it’s been a week with a lot of retreads.
The difference is that today’s actually has requests! My look back at Abraham Lincoln’s complex but
not unfathomable religious life and identity continues to resonate with some
readers. One thing has changed since the
first version appeared—the Republicans have completed their total inversion
from the party that rose to power with the Great Emancipator. Now fully embracing, even reveling in the
Confederate flag and values, xenophobia, bloodthirsty war glorification, and
rejection of any semblance of sympathy or compassion, the new GOP hardly even
bothers to nod in Abe’s direction anymore.
Meanwhile religious liberals find much to admire but have a hard time
nailing the entrails of his beliefs to the barn door.
Back in 2009 the nation was in the grip of a wave of Lincoln mania in
conjunction with the bi-centennial of
his birth. There was an avalanche of new books and
articles examining every aspect of
the Great Emancipator’s life, work, and connections.
The Religious Right—those who were not also neo-Confederates anyway—was busy, as usual, trying to retroactively adopt him as an Evangelical Christian. On the other hand the small world of the Unitarian Universalist blog-o-sphere and
a spate of sermons, tried to lay
claims that Lincoln was, at least in spirit, a Unitarian or a Universalist.
Scott
Wells, a leading Universalist and
Christian blogger from a Southern background claimed to be immune to the cult of Lincoln worship. For
his family Lincoln represented oppression, destruction, and, for them, the nightmare of Reconstruction. He also
scolded U.U.s for trying to appropriate
Lincoln into our ever popular lists
of famous UUs.
The following is adapted from my response to Wells.
Hagiography aside, there are many reasons to put your understandable regional bias aside and
spend some time studying Abraham Lincoln. As flawed
and inconsistent as any man, he is
still rewarding for the subtlety and depth of his thought and
his life-long struggle to reconcile a true and deeply held idealism with both personal ambition and the need
to act in a brutal and unforgiving environment. Even Harry Truman, a Missouri Democrat whose unreconstructed
Confederate mother never forgave him for making Lincoln’s Birthday a national holiday, came to deeply admire
his ancient tribal enemy.
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| When Lincoln was asked about his as his religion. |
Lincoln’s relationships to religion are not a murky as some suppose.
Certainly any denomination that
would attempt to claim him as its own
is self-delusional. Here is some of
what we know.
1) At no time in Lincoln’s life did he ever claim to be a Christian as understood in
his time or to be saved.
2)
As far is known he was never baptized
and never became a member of any
church.
3)
Among his earliest published
writings were attacks on a political rival,
Peter Cartwright, a fire-and-brimstone Methodist circuit rider
who had accused Lincoln of infidelity
and had used his wide Methodist connections
to build a Democratic political operation. The articles, which appeared under a nom
de plume, mocked both the man’s religion and his
attempts to use his followers as a political base. Lincoln claimed never to have “denied the
truth of Scripture” but did
acknowledge that he was not a church member.
Lincoln defeated Cartwright
for a seat in Congress, but
Cartwright’s charges that he was an infidel—and
his own tart responses—would dog him for years.
4)
Like most self-educated
Americans who had literary aspirations
and who were not versed in the Latin and Greek of the Eastern college
educated elite, Lincoln had two primary
sources to draw from for both inspiration
and style—The King James Version of the Bible and the popular plays of William Shakespeare.
He knew both. But his writing was infused with the cadences
and majesty of the Bible. He could also, if the occasion
called for it, usually in response to some hypocrisy
from the mouth of a believer, quote verse with ease.
5)
He deeply admired Thomas
Jefferson and treasured the Declaration
of Independence as the essential founding
document. He borrowed from Jefferson, and from George Washington, the language of Deism in public discourse.
He frequently spoke of Providence, Creator, and other Deist constructions.
He did not avoid the word God as they usually did, but he did not
invoke an explicitly Christian God.
One can search in vain for much use
of the words Christ or Savior outside of the context of letters of condolence to the families
of fallen soldiers often echoing
back sentiments expressed by the bereaved.
He was all for giving whatever comfort
he could.
6) In Springfield he attended Mary’s
Presbyterian Church and was friendly
with its minister but never joined
the church or partook in the Spartan Presbyterian communion. That hasn’t stopped that congregation from
calling itself “Lincoln’s Church” to
this day.
7) He read the published sermons of both William
Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker
and appropriated or adapted words from each—especially
Parker—in his speeches. But in practice as President, despite a personally cordial relationship with Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner, he found Abolitionist Unitarians
to be pig-headed impediments to a practical prosecution of the war and a
move toward healing a post-war, re-united country. Despite
this the UU congregation in
Springfield proudly adopted his
name.
8) He believed deeply and viscerally
in Fate and implacable Destiny. This was part
and parcel of his widely reported melancholia.
Some scholars have attributed this to a sort of Calvinist hang-over.
Could be. But Lincoln’s sense of fate and destiny seem to rise from far more ancient impulses.
9) There is nothing to connect
Lincoln to institutional Universalism.
Steven Rowe at A Southern Universalist Church
History responded to Wells with an excerpt
from memoirs by Universalist minister quoting an appreciative
comment by Lincoln:
“I used
to think that it took the smartest kind of man to preach and defend
Universalism; I now think entirely different. It is the easiest faith to preach
that I have ever heard. There is more
proof in its favor, than in any other doctrine I have ever heard. I have a suit in court here to-morrow and if I
had as much proof in its favor as there is in Universalism, I would go home,
and leave my student to take charge of it, and I should feel perfectly certain
that he would gain it.”
Unfortunately there are no other witnesses to Lincoln attending the debate described or speaking this assessment of it. And I am
sure a diligent search of the
memoirs of ministers of other denominations can turn up appreciative Lincoln
quotes, some perhaps true, others the product
of devout wishful thinking. Yet
there is much to suggest that Lincoln privately embraced a kind universalism of spirit that accepted a common struggle for understanding a greater mystery that transcended mere denominationalism.
10) In the White House, with the gruesome
burdens of a war-time presidency
on his shoulders and the private grief over the loss of his beloved son Willie, Lincoln
followed Mary’s lead and seemed to take Spiritualism,
then at the height of its American popularity, with due seriousness. At the time many
Universalist ministers were also toying—to
considerable controversy—with Spiritualism. But again Lincoln never publicly endorsed Spiritualism, or
acknowledged it as his faith.
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| Lincoln's head replaced Washington's in this allegorical apotheosis print, part of the rapid sanctification of the martyred President after the war. |
In the post-war years both the
Abolitionist preachers with whom he sparred during the war and a generation of new Unitarian leaders bloodied on the battlefields of that war—Jenkin
Lloyd Jones being a prime example—participated in the myth making that turned the martyred President into a kind of a Saint. They went too far. And rubbing the defeated
South’s nose in it exacerbated
the regional disdain with which
continues to deepen.
But I think many modern Unitarians
and Universalists can find much with which to resonate in Lincoln’s personal
spiritual journey. It so resembles so many of our own.
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