Examining the Religion and Spirituality of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln summed up his view.

Note--On Abraham Lincoln's Birthday we reconsider his religious life.

Abraham Lincoln spent a lifetime wrestling with the deepest religious and spiritual questions.  He kept his personal beliefs generally close to his vest.  Although not a conventional Christian, he knew the Bible intimately from thousands of hours of reading and study and could quote chapter and verse with ease.  He was a deeply moral man who agonized over the consequences of his decisions and actions and never let himself off the hook with facile excuses. 

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, then a leading Universalist and Christian blogger from a Southern background who has since left the denomination, claimed to be immune to the cult of Lincoln worship.  For his family Lincoln represented oppression, destruction, and 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.

At the dawn of modern Fundamentalism, this author tried to paint Lincoln as an Evangelical Christian despite all the evidence to the contrary.

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.

• At no time in Lincoln’s life did he ever claim to be a Christian as understood in his time or to be saved.
• As far is known he was never baptized and never became a member of any church.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

     ·   In Springfield he attended Mary’s Presbyterian Church and was friendly with its ministerbut 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.

Despite the claims by some, Lincoln was no Unitarian but did avidly read the sermons of Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and social reformer the Rev. Theodore Parker and famously paraphrased him in speeches.
 

·         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 his name.

 

Maybe Abe was a prophet after all.

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.

 

 

Lately I’ve been praying to Muhammad by Chelan Harkin—National Poetry Month 2023

                 Chelan Harkin.

Chelan Harkin is a 30-something and lives in Washington state with her two young children, Amari and Nahanni.  She has authored four books of poetry, Susceptible to Light, Let Us Dance! The Stumble and Whirl with The Beloved, Taste the Sky, and Bouquet of Stars. She contributes to online spiritual journals and her popularity has grown rapidly.

Harkin mixes mysticism and a social justice edge.  In  Lately I’ve been praying to Muhammad she sounds an awfully like a Universalist.

Lately I’ve been praying to Muhammad

Lately I’ve been praying to Muhammad,

Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Baha’u’llah, Zoroaster, Jesus—

why be choosy? 

I ask any source of true love

and great joy

to throw me as many bones

as they might.

Sometimes I prayer to Mozart, Bach or Galileo

to pour music or the stars

through me.

Often I pray to Tahirih,

a great Persian poet and feminist

of the 1800’s who would remove

her veil when addressing men

and was martyred

for speaking the irrepressible truth

in her heart

at age 38.

Her final words were,

“You can kill me as soon as you like,

but you will never stop

the emancipation of women.”

I often ask Hafiz for a dance

and we go for the most poetic whirls.

Sometimes I ask Rumi

that he pluck me an ancient,

everblooming rose

and I crush its scent

onto the page.

I have a crush on Khalil Gibran

and ask that he pass me

inspired love notes.

I pray to Harriet Tubman,

that queen of heroism,

for courage

and to Einstein

for great ideas.

Inspiration is not elitist.

There is no muse

that is off limits,

no genius you should not approach

and ask to be yours.

There are no copyright issues

with what you receive from prayer.

No one lays claim

to certain frequencies

of light.

Oh beseech whoever you might

that the master keys

that open all hearts

are put in your care

that your particularly necessary

style of expression

may open new portals of beauty

to the eyes of the world

Hobnob with all the great

dead poets,

thinkers,

lovers,

artists,

heroes of justice,

leaders of truth.

They still want a place

to pour their wonder

into the world

and you are a great vessel.

It’s an open bar in the sky.

Approach thirsty,

and ask!

 

—Chelan Harkin

 

The Early Outlier—A Forgotten Prophet of Pre-Revolutionary Boston

The Rev. Jonathan Mayhew--a religious and political radical and visionary of old Boston.

When the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew died in Boston on July 9, 1766 his moral, religious, and political legacy was far from accomplished.  Indeed years and decades would unfold before the depth of his influence became apparent in a new nation and in a new faith.  Mayhew, then only 46 years old, was the minister of Old West Church, and much beloved by his congregation and admired by the hot heads and radicals being rallied by Samuel Adams who would soon become the Sons of Liberty.  He was decidedly unpopular among the majority of his ministerial peers, conservative civic leaders, and with the Royal Governor of Massachusetts and his Council. 

Mayhew was born on Martha’s Vineyard on October 8, 1720, a fifth generation descendent of Thomas Mayhew, the Elder who first arrived in the New World with the Great Migration fleet of Puritan settlers in 1631.  Ten years later the original Mayhew secured a proprietary colony grant for Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, the Elizabeth Islands, and other small islands.  Installing himself as governor he began populating his grant with new immigrants and also established his own farm and whaling operations.  Thomas, his son, and grandson also were missionaries among the local Wampanoag and established such fair and friendly relations with the natives.  They made clear that religion and governance were separate.  The tribe was welcome to embrace Christianity, but Mayhew was at pains to assure them that their governance and lands were secure on their own.  Relations were so good that despite vastly outnumbering the settlers the local Wampanoag did not join the general uprising known as King Philips War that almost wiped out the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1675-76.

Although the small proprietary colony was absorbed by Massachusetts after 1688, the family, or much of it, remained on the island in relative isolation from the mainstream of Puritan society.  Devoutly religious, their local version of the Congregationalist New England Standing Order drifted from the harsh and rigid Calvinism of the mainland.

Young Jonathan, noted for his scholarly bent, left the island to pursue the Lord’s work as a student at the factory of divines, Harvard College.  Upon graduation Mayhew he found New England in a religious upheaval. 

Puritan firebrand Rev. Jonathan Edwards appalled Mayhew.

The Connecticut minister and Theologian Jonathan Edwards had helped inaugurate the first round of revival meetings in the 1730’s. In 1641 he scared the hell out of New England with his fiery sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God which quickly became the first big best seller in the Colonies in pamphlet form.  Mayhew rejected Edwards view declaring that “total depravity [is] both dishonourable to the character of God and a libel on human nature.”  He likewise rejected the five points of Calvinism including the doctrine of irresistible grace and the doctrine of the Trinity as taught by the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds.

At the same time Mayhew also rejected the Great Awakening—the first of a series of huge revival movements that have periodically swept Americans up into religious frenzies.  Mayhew had seen the principle mover of the Awakening, the English preacher and revivalist George Whitefield, an Anglican preacher who became a founding figure in Methodism, at camp meetings in what is now Maine.  He was repulsed by the mindless emotionalism he witnessed which he suspected would burn brightly but soon extinguish itself.  He found Whitefield’s followers, ‘of the more illiterate sort,” and the preaching “confused, conceited and enthusiastic.”  He was repelled by the “extravagance and fanaticism, and violent gestures and shrieks” of people in the throes of religious ecstasy.

Mayhew made his views publicly know.  He proposed a third path based on religious rationalism and a view of a loving, but firm God as Father as revealed in his careful reading and analysis of The Bible. 

Boston's Old West Church called Mayhew to its pulpit..  Its working class members responded to Mayhews radicalism.  The steeple shown was torn down by the British during the Seige of Boston in the American Revolution in part to prevent it from being used to signal Colonial troops in Cambridge and in part as punishment for being Mayhew's pulpit of rebellion.

hese view made it difficult for the young minister to find a parish.  But in 1747 West Church in Boston, one of the city’s nine Congregational Churches—and the least prosperous—called him to be their minister.  Only two of the other ministers in the city would even agree, as was customary, to be at the service of installation and ordination for the customary laying on of hands, symbolizing a welcome into the ministerial community.  One prominent minister is known to have scolded his barber when the man expressed interest in hearing Mayhew warning him not to go hear “that heretic.” 

Shortly after assuming the pulpit Mayhew crossed the ocean to pursue his doctorate of divinity at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, an intellectual hot bed of the Scottish Enlightenment.  Although the liberal ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were taking hold among a young and rising generation of Virginia Tidewater aristocrats, they were a novelty in New England where most ministers who pursued advanced degrees in the Mother Country did so at firmly Puritan institutions.

Despite the cold shoulder of his colleagues, Mayhew perused a ministry that presaged Unitarianism—a theological position that did not even yet have a name—by more than two decades.  His belief in a firm, fair, and loving God/king led him to believe that even the worst sinners, after a period of punishment and reflection, could be reconciled and dwell thereafter in Heaven with the saints and the angels.  This was a kind of universalism, making Mayhew probably the first North American preacher to combine the two ideas which became the two streams of modern Unitarian Universalism. 

But Mayhew, however far seeing and a religious pioneer, is best remembered for the political sermons that helped stir rebellion. 

His most famous and influential sermon was preached on the centennial of the execution of King Charles I, January 30, 1750.  Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers refuted the growing opinion that the king was a martyr.  It was a long, scholarly history of the monarchy and the development of the English constitution and built a Biblical argument against the Devine Right of Kings and in favor of popular resistance to unjust government in answer to a higher law.  He concluded that the execution of Charles was justified when he when he “too greatly infringed upon British liberties.  It was also a lesson for any future monarch with inclinations to despotism. 

While the justification for regicide may have been in line with the Puritan inheritors of Oliver Cromwell, his reasoning was far more radical and seemed pointed as much at the existing monarchy as the headless Stuart.

The sermon was widely printed and circulated as a pamphlet, for a while supplanting Jonathan Edwards old screed in popularity.  It was also reprinted in London in 1752 and again in 1767 as relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies were reaching crisis.  Mayhew became an international celebrity, albeit a highly controversial one.  His radicalism was denounced from other pulpits, and, of course, condemned by authorities.

But Sam Adams and his boys and a rising generation of patriots did listen.  Years later Sam’s cousin John Adams would recall, that Mayhew’s sermon “was read by everybody.”  Some would call it the intellectual opening salvo in the run-up to the American Revolution. 

Mayhew's words inspired the Sons of Liberty, seen here burning copies of the Stamp Act.  They were "read by everybody" recalled John Adams.

Mayhew continued to preach influential, widely circulated sermons including two election day charges in 1750 and 1754 espousing colonial rights and the civic duty to resist tyranny.  He became particularly aroused with the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765.  The essence of slavery, he argued in a new sermon, consists in subjection to others—“whether many, few, or but one, it matters not.” The day after his sermon, a Boston mob attacked and destroyed Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s house.  Mayhew and his sermon were held responsible by the “respectable citizens of Boston.”

Powerful Lt. Governor Thomas Hutchinson blamed Mayhew's sermon for the mob that burned down his house.

In 1763 Mayhew rebuked the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for its plans to dispatch missionaries, priests, and teachers to the Colonies as well as the eminent appointment of an Anglican Bishop.  He regarded all of this as a camel’s nose under the tent meant to bring the colonies back into conformity with the Crown and its institutions.

In 1765 Mayhew was invited by Harvard to deliver the annual Dudlean Lecture on religion. This was a rare show of approval from the New England establishment and an acknowledgement of his popular leadership against the Crown.

The Snare Broken was a thanksgiving discourse preached by Mayhew on May 23, 1766 occasioned by Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp Act.  It was a warning to William Pitt and others in England who he knew would read it that taking self-government into private hands in some circumstances must surely proceed from “self-preservation, being a great and primary law of nature.”

Weeks after delivering this last famous salvo, Mayhew died.  Most of the Boston clergy still avoided his funeral as did virtually all officeholders.

In addition to his influence on the Sons of Liberty and the American Revolution, Mayhew’s religious ideas, except for his proto-universalism, were quietly adopted by a new generation of Harvard graduates and ministers.  In the years following the revolution all most all Boston churches affiliated with the Standing Order were quietly but unofficially unitarian.  An open break with the Congregationalists however would not come until William Ellery Channing’s Baltimore sermon in 1819.  Ironically Mayhew’s old congregation Old West would be one of only two Boston churches to remain with the orthodox Congregationalists.

Comparing and Contrasting—The Religion and Spirituality of Lincoln and Trump

One of these Republicans is not like the other.

Note:  This post on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln has been nearly annual fixture here on his birthday.  But it remains ever relevant.  No more so than now.  The latest—and perhaps last—Republican President could not have a more starkly different religious life than the first and greatest. 

Abraham Lincoln spent a life time wrestling with the deepest religious and spiritual questions.  He kept his personal beliefs generally close to his vest.  Although not a conventional Christian, he knew the Bible intimately from thousands of hours of reading and study and could quote chapter and verse with ease.  He was a deeply moral man who agonized over the consequences of his decisions and actions and never let himself off the hook with facile excuses.  

Donald Trump, on the other hand, although a nominal Presbyterian and self-declared good Christian, seems totally unaware of the basic precepts of his professed faith and actually ignorant of basic Biblical literacy.  During the campaign he famously fumbled questions about favorite Bible verses and the teachings of Jesus.  At the National Prayer Breakfast the morning after his inauguration TV cameras caught him fidgeting in the pew and obviously bored by the proceedings.   Then, when it his turn to speak he delivered rambling, incoherent remarks including bragging about the ratings on Celebrity Apprentice, chiding his replacement Arnold Schwarzenegger who had been critical his climate change denial and environmental recklessness; and asking the worshipers to pray for the show’s ratings.  These are the action of a man with no serious faith of his own.  

Likewise, like any classic narcissist, he his only morality seems to be the notion that any criticism or slight to him is “unfair.”  But he displays absolutely no moral compunctions in his own behavior—he will do or say anything that pleasures or advantages him no matter the consequences to others.  He is a man for whom the Golden Rule is not only empty words but is completely unfathomable as a concept.

Trump gloating at the National Prayer Breakfast before refuting basic Christian values and attacking his political enemies for their religious convictions.

That could not have been more evident at yet another National Prayer Breakfast this year on the heels of his acquittal in the Senate of Impeachment charges immediately made a point of refuting the remarks of Washington Post columnist Arthur Brooks addressed traditional Christian themes during his remarks, urging attendees to “love your enemies” and transcend “contempt.”  Trump refuted these core values of the New Testament and teachings of Jesus—

Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you.  As everybody knows, my family, our great country, and your president have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people.  They have done everything possible to destroy us, and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation.

Clearly, this was a man in no mood to love his enemies or turn the other cheek.  Instead in his rambling, sometime incoherent, comments he went on to attack his political enemies— Mitt Romney, the lone Republican Senator to vote for a count of impeachment for citing his faith and conscience for the stand and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for daring to say that she prayed for him:

I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say, “I pray for you,” when they know that that’s not so.

Despite this, the most rabid elopements of the Religious Right including Franklin Graham, Jim Bakker, and his alleged spiritual advisor Paula White contuse to embrace him and anointed him as a fulfillment of prophesy.  Most Republican leaders and prominent Evangelicals remained silent.

If Trump’s religion is facile and fraudulent, Lincoln’s is endlessly fascinating. 

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.

Lincoln summed up his view.

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.

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.

• At no time in Lincoln’s life did he ever claim to be a Christian as understood in his time or to be saved.
• As far is known he was never baptized and never became a member of any church.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

  

  Despite the claims by some, Lincoln was no Unitarian but did avidly read the sermons of Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and social reformer the Rev. Theodore Parker and famously paraphrased him in speeches.

  
  
• 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.

Maybe Abe was a prophet after all...

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.