LINCOLN'S GOD

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.