Editorial Content for Lincoln's God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
In LINCOLN’S GOD, bestselling author Joshua Zeitz delves deeply into the religious beliefs of Abraham Lincoln and the effect they would have on a nation divided and in chaos.
When Lincoln took office for his first term, seven states seceded, and war broke out two weeks later with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Issues of slavery were at the forefront, making his moral stance an essential piece of his presidency. Raised by a domineering father who held to a strict Calvinist view that included the doctrine of predestination, Lincoln had a mind of his own and wanted to succeed where others, including his father, were willing to accept less than the best.
"Since Lincoln is a figure much studied and often glorified, Zeitz has created a focus that successfully encompasses his personal convictions and public face."
As he campaigned for the nation’s high office, Lincoln’s intellectually lodged, deist understandings would need to be fused within a larger format as he met with faith leaders and addressed abolitionists. Lincoln, who suffered the crushing loss of a son as the war raged on, was no stranger to tragedy and its consequences. Gradually he took on the cloak of religion in language, and, with the Emancipation Proclamation, in deed. The alteration in his beliefs, presented here in fascinating detail by Zeitz, is seen most clearly in his second inaugural address, which is unique for its “religious sentiment and phrasing.”
Since Lincoln is a figure much studied and often glorified, Zeitz has created a focus that successfully encompasses his personal convictions and public face. This includes his disdain for those avowed Christians who could use their Bible to justify the continuation of slavery, and his willingness to encourage believers by addressing that institution head on with the Proclamation, sweeping large blocs of Christian voters to his side. Though it is likely, given the well-researched materials presented here, that Lincoln privately held fast to his personal understanding that God does not take sides, it is equally plain that he believed Black slaves should be freed. He would stand on that principle and face the consequences.
Zeitz portrays the man on the podium and immersed in congressional debate and declaration, as well as the son, husband and father who had to rise beyond the pangs and crises that those roles required. In this thoughtful assessment, Lincoln was someone who learned and grew from his service as the nation’s leader, who was able to state, as the war was reaching its end, that all Americans should proceed “[w]ith malice toward none; with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right...”
Teaser
Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm’s length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But as he came to appreciate the growing political and military importance of the Christian community, and when death touched the Lincoln household in an awful, intimate way, the erstwhile skeptic effectively evolved into a believer and harnessed the power of evangelical Protestantism to rally the nation to arms. The war, he told Americans, was divine retribution for the sin of slavery. This is the story of that transformation and the ways in which religion helped millions of Northerners interpret the carnage and political upheaval of the 1850s and 1860s.
Promo
Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm’s length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But as he came to appreciate the growing political and military importance of the Christian community, and when death touched the Lincoln household in an awful, intimate way, the erstwhile skeptic effectively evolved into a believer and harnessed the power of evangelical Protestantism to rally the nation to arms. The war, he told Americans, was divine retribution for the sin of slavery. This is the story of that transformation and the ways in which religion helped millions of Northerners interpret the carnage and political upheaval of the 1850s and 1860s.
About the Book
Lincoln’s spiritual journey from spiritual skeptic to America's first evangelical Christian presidentbeliever --- a conversion that changed both the Civil War and the practice of religion itself.
Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm’s length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But as he came to appreciate the growing political and military importance of the Christian community, and when death touched the Lincoln household in an awful, intimate way, the erstwhile skeptic effectively evolved into a believer and harnessed the power of evangelical Protestantism to rally the nation to arms. The war, he told Americans, was divine retribution for the sin of slavery.
This is the story of that transformation and the ways in which religion helped millions of Northerners interpret the carnage and political upheaval of the 1850s and 1860s. Rather than focus on battles and personalities, Joshua Zeitz probes ways in which war and spiritual convictions became intertwined. Characters include the famous --- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher --- as well as ordinary soldiers and their families whose evolving understanding of mortality, heaven and mission motivated them to fight. Long underestimated in accounts of the Civil War, religion --- specifically evangelical Christianity --- played an instrumental role on the battlefield and home front, and in the corridors of government.
More than any president before him --- or any president after, until George W. Bush --- Lincoln harnessed popular religious enthusiasm to build broad-based support for a political party and a cause. A master politician who was sincere about his religion, Lincoln held beliefs that were unconventional --- and widely misunderstood then, as now. After his death and the end of an unforgiving war, Americans needed to memorialize Lincoln as a Christian martyr. The truth was, of course, considerably more complicated, as this original book explores.
Audiobook available, read by Dan Woren
