President Barack Obama recently has directed a special iridescent light on this fellow Illinoisan he calls his model. For all this attention, what continues to remain mostly in the shadows is Lincoln’s journey of faith. It remains either overlooked or undervalued.
Born in Kentucky, Lincoln grew to young manhood in Indiana where all the members of his family became members of the Little Pigeon Baptist Church. He did not. As a boy he mimicked the emotional sermons of the preacher. As a teenager he pushed against a tradition that did not allow for his searching questions. As a twenty-something, while living in the village of New Salem, Illinois, he read Enlightenment critics of revealed religion and became a skeptic.
Lincoln eventually develops into a fatalist, a kissing cousin to the Deism of Thomas Jefferson. The writer of the Declaration of Independence espoused a creator God who set the world in motion, but not a redeemer God who acted in history. And there the Lincoln religious story usually stops. Lincoln’s politics are characterized by his ability to change his mind over time, but his religious views have been frozen in time by biographers and historians, if they choose to choose to comment on them at all.
It has often been pointed out that Lincoln never joined a church, but this observation overlooks the fact that Lincoln attended two Old School Presbyterian churches. At the death of Eddie Lincoln at age four in 1850, Abraham and Mary invited James Smith, the new pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Springfield to conduct the funeral service. Touched by Smith’s pastoral ministry to them in their season of grief, Mary joined the church “by examination” in 1852, and the Lincolns rented a pew for $50 a year. In the spring of 1853 Lincoln accepted an invitation to be one of three lawyers to represent the church in a suit in the Sangamon Presbytery.
Smith quickly developed a reputation in Springfield for learned preaching. As a young man, as a confirmed Deist, Smith was attracted to the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers Constantin Volney and Thomas Paine. Smith traveled in his faith odyssey from Deism through the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a denomination whose accent on revivalism and experience had some similarities to New School Presbyterians, to the more rational Old School Presbyterian tradition. The Presbyterian Church had divided in 1837 over a number of theological, political, and organizational issues.
In the early 1850s Smith gave Lincoln a copy of his book, The Christian’s Defense, on the authority of the Bible. Robert Lincoln, the eldest son, remembered that Smith’s book sat on the bookshelf of the Lincoln home at Eighth and Jackson. Lincoln, who all his life was critical of a reliance on emotion in both religion and politics, would have agreed with Smith’s proposal that in matters of faith “everything must be given up to the supremacy of argument.”
When the Lincolns arrived in Washington in 1861, a number of churches invited them to attend Sunday worship, including the New School First Presbyterian, the “church of the presidents,” and the Old School New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. As in Springfield, the Lincolns chose to attend an Old School congregation. In A. Lincoln I tell the story of Phineas Densmore Gurley, the minister at New York Avenue, who I believe to be the missing person in the Lincoln story. A fine-looking man of large frame and voice, Gurley had graduated first in his class from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1840 where he was a student of Charles Hodge. Gurley, becoming well known for his thoughtful sermons, received an invitation to return to the seminary in 1860 to head up the preaching and pastoral department, but declined. When asked about Gurley and his sermons, Lincoln is said to have replied, “I like Gurley. He don’t preach politics. I get enough of that through the week. He preaches the Gospel.” A fellow minister described Gurley’s ministry as “Calvinism presented in his beautiful examples and spirit and preaching.”
The death of Willie Lincoln at age eleven, the boy most like the father, in February 1862, became a turning point in Lincoln’s life. He invited Gurley to conduct the funeral service in the White House. The Presbyterian minister said to the grieving parents, “It is well for us, and very comforting on such an occasion, to get a clear and Scriptural view of the providence of God.” Gurley pointed Lincoln to a divine providence where “His kingdom ruleth over all.” Gurley, in the spirit of Hodge, was not announcing some wooden, arbitrary providence. He acknowledged the perplexity of providence, calling it “a mysterious dealing.” In his final words of comfort, Gurley invited the president to “bow in His presence with an humble and teachable spirit; only let us be still and know that He is God.”
In the few attempts to chart Lincoln’s faith journey, historians have constructed a straight line from fatalism to providence, as if they are two different expressions of the same kind of determinism. No preacher or theologian in the 19th century would have made that judgment. In 1859, Francis Wharton, an Episcopal minister, authored A Treatise on Theism and Modern Skeptical Theories in which he characterized fatalism as “a distinct scheme of unbelief” because it failed to recognize the personality and action of a loving God. Wharton, who after the Civil War would become one of the first professors of the new Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, contrasted fatalism with the God of Christianity known by “his watchful care and love.”
For Princeton Seminary’s Hodge, the appreciation of the personality of God was the key to the distinction between providence and fatalism. In his exposition of God’s “government,” Hodge argued, “this doctrine necessarily flows from the Scriptural idea of God. He is declared to be a personal being, infinite in wisdom, goodness, and power.” In his three volume Systematic Theology Hodge said of providence that “an infinitely wise, good, and powerful God is everywhere present, controlling all events great and small, necessary, and free, in a way perfectly consistent with the nature of his creatures and with his own infinite excellence.” In fatalism, events unfold according to certain laws of nature. In Christian theology, God’s divine power is able to embrace human freedom and responsibility.
A clear statement about the meaning of providence and fatalism came on the occasion of remembering one of the South’s leading generals of the Civil War. “Stonewall” Jackson was renowned not only as Lee’s right arm but as a Presbyterian Sunday School teacher. Moses Drury Hoge, minister of the Second Presbyterian Church, spoke at the unveiling of the statue of Jackson on Capitol Square on October 26, 1876 in Richmond. Hoge, who had been a frequent correspondent with Charles Hodge, spoke at length about Jackson’s abiding trust in God’s providence. He called this belief in providence “surely the primary fact, the supreme fact in the history of General Jackson.” He added, “I cannot leave the subject without adding that those who confound his faith in Providence with fatalism, mistake both the spiritual history of the man and the meaning of the very words they employ.”
Lincoln’s personal presidential pilgrimage of faith became public in his remarkable Second Inaugural Address delivered on March 4, 1865. In 701 words, Lincoln mentions God 14 times, quotes the Bible four times, and invokes prayer three times. This address is not fatalism. Rather it is a “Scriptural understanding of the providence of God,” which Lincoln had been hearing now for four years from Pastor Gurley at New York Avenue.
The Almighty has His own purposes. At the exact architectural center of Lincoln’s address, after discussing different actors, Lincoln concentrates on God as the primary actor. In quick strokes Lincoln describes God’s actions:
He now wills to remove
He gives to both North and South, this
terrible war,
Yet, if God wills that it continue…
In Lincoln’s much-loved Shakespeare, one needs to progress to Act III in order to understand the events and dialogue in Act I. Just so, in the first and second paragraphs of his Second Inaugural, when Lincoln discussed the actions of the soldiers, the generals, and the Commander-in-Chief, he was preparing his audience for his dramatic affirmation of the divine attributes of a Living God whom he declares in the central paragraph to be the chief actor in the war.
I have been asked countless times: might not Lincoln’s words about the Bible and God be any more than what a cultured person would say in the middle of the nineteenth century? Or, more sharply, are these not the words of a shrewd politician who understood he was speaking to a largely religious audience? None of these proposals or questions offers an adequate explanation for Lincoln’s ideas and language, nor do they take into account the development of his faith and belief during the turbulent years of the Civil War.
The question about Lincoln’s integrity is answered by a reflection about the will of God he wrote for his eyes only. This brief musing, undated but probably written in 1864, is upon examination the intellectual and religious foundation of the Second Inaugural Address. Unknown during Lincoln’s lifetime, the reflection was found after Lincoln’s death by his young secretary, John Hay, who gave it the title “Meditation on the Divine Will.” By comparing the two texts (see bottom of this page) we can see both continuity and development.
In the midst of speaking about Lincoln’s legacy during this Bicentennial year, I am delighted at author events in bookstores, and in public lectures, to bring this part of the Lincoln biography into the light, special delight has been to do so in Presbyterian churches that have offered special Lincoln events on Saturdays or Sunday afternoons that have allowed them to reach out beyond their own congregants to members of their larger communities.
I have been asked again and again on talk shows whether I think it is possible in our increasingly multicultural and multireligious nation for a modern politician to speak today of a God who acts in history. After first acknowledging all of the problems and missteps of recent attempts to do so, I always answer in the affirmative. I am convinced that Lincoln’s humble bearing and inclusive spirit, his biblical wisdom and balancing of justice and mercy, is a model for how we may attempt to speak of God in our own time.
Ronald C. White Jr., is the author of A. Lincoln: A Biography, published by Random House in January, 2009. He is a Fellow at the Huntington Library, a Visiting Professor of History at University of California at Los Angeles, and Professor of American Religious History Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary.
