Biographers debate Lincoln's religious views

LITTLE ROCK — Abraham Lincoln "will always be remembered as eminently a Christian president," one of his first biographers declared in 1866.

That was news to Lincoln's friend James H. Matheny, who insisted that the president's convictions "bordered on absolute Atheism."

Since Lincoln's Good Friday assassination in 1865, evangelical Christians, mainline Protestants, agnostics and atheists have all claimed the "Savior of the Union" as one of their own.

The 16th president's faith continues to be a source of inspiration and debate as the 200th anniversary of his birth is celebrated Thursday.

With the bicentennial come Lincolntheme events across the country and a stack of new Lincoln biographies. Many explore how a self-taught backwoods lawyer who was never baptized and never joined a church became the Great Emancipator who routinely invoked Scripture to comfort and challenge a warring nation.

Dewey Wallace, who teaches U.S. religious history at George Washington University in Washington likened the academic wrangling over Lincoln's beliefs to the scholarly pursuit of the "historical Jesus."

"The fact is Lincoln was very cagey about what he said about religion," Wallace said. "He didn't commit himself. I think the evidence is clear that he left his early skepticism behind without ever finding some firm, conventional Christian belief."

The president's widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, perhaps put it most succinctly.

"He was a religious man always," she wrote after his death, "but he was not a technical Christian."

Lincoln's father and stepmother brought him up among Baptists who rejected missionary work because they believed God had already chosen who would be saved. Called "Hard-shell Baptists" during Lincoln's day, their spiritual descendants today comprise the Primitive Baptist denomination.

As a youngster, Lincoln ridiculed the revivalist fervor of his Baptist upbringing. But some historians suggest that the emphasis on predestination helped shape Lincoln's strong fatalism as a young man.

"All things are fixed, doomed in one way or the other," Lincoln reportedly told his law partner William H. Herndon. "No efforts or prayers of ours can change, alter, modify, or reverse the decree."

Such a view put Lincoln outside the mainstream of Christian thought, said Ronald C. White Jr., the author of three books on Lincoln and a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. White's most recent release, A. Lincoln: A Biography, published in January, aims to reveal more about the 16th president's spiritual journey.

White said Lincoln's early fatalism denied moral responsibility and God's power to intercede in human events.

But as he grew older, White and Wallace argue, Lincoln's views began to change.

After the Lincolns' son Eddie died in 1850, the family began attending - and Mary Todd Lincoln formally joined - First Presbyterian Church in Spring-field, Ill.

The couple had been married in an Episcopal church, but the minister was out of town when their son died and couldn't perform the funeral. The Lincolns turned to the Rev. James Smith, First Presbyterian Church's new pastor, who comforted the grieving parents.

In Washington, the Lincolns attended New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, about two blocks from the White House.

Lincoln wasn't the first U.S. president to worship at the church. His immediate predecessor, James Buchanan - who had a far different view of the Union than Lincoln - also was a frequent visitor.

Wallace, who is working on a history of the storied church, said the Lincolns even rented the same pew that was once occupied by Buchanan.

Lincoln became particularly close to New York Avenue's pastor, the Rev. Phineas Gurley, after his favorite son, Willie, died of typhoid in 1862. White said some of Lincoln's speeches even echoed language in some of Gurley's sermons.

In the 19th century as now, a political candidate's religion often came under public scrutiny.

Early in his political career, Lincoln faced strong criticism for his lack of piety. When he ran for Congress against Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright, Democrats lambasted Lincoln as "an open scoffer of Christianity."

Lincoln defended himself with a pamphlet in which he proclaimed: "I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular."

But White believes Lincoln's frequent references to Scripture and later church attendance weren't just for political show.

As proof, he points to a memo the president wrote to himself that he never expected the public to see. Lincoln's personal secretary John Hay discovered the document after his death and gave it the title "Meditation on Divine Will."

"The will of God prevails," Lincoln wrote. "In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong.God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party ..."

White thinks the meditation, which he dates to 1864, served as the intellectual foundation for Lincoln's famed Second Inaugural Address.

In the 1865 address, delivered not long before his death, Lincoln said North and South must suffer for the sin of slavery.

"[I]f God wills that it continue ... 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,'" Lincoln said, alluding to Psalm 19:9.

Some newspapers said the address, which refers to the Bible four times, crossed the line between church and state, White said. But he sees in that inaugural address and Lincoln's personal meditation a man deeply engaged in religious ideas.

"He is not reading the Bible simply as literature," White said. "He is trying to understand the Bible in a very deep theological sense. What is the meaning of this? Where is God in the Civil War?"

By the end of his life, White and Wallace say, Lincoln had embraced a more conventionally Christian view of biblical Providence.

"It's not fatalism; it's not deism," White said. "He believes not just that God is in control, but that God is also acting in human events."