This work is a summary and analysis of Abraham Lincoln's religion. This study begins with a description of the earliest relations Mr. Lincoln had with religion, his parents' dedication to a sect known as the "Separate Baptists." By late adolescence, Lincoln began to reject his parents' faith, and he appears to have been a religious skeptic until his marriage to Mary Todd. After his marriage, he attended Protestant services with his wife and family, but there was little evidence that he was deeply religious in that time. Lincoln knew the Scriptures quite well, but it was not until the death of his two sons, Eddie in 1850 and Willie in 1862, that as the sixteenth president put it, "He became more intensely concerned with God's Plan for human kind."
This biography of the sixteenth president explores Lincoln's life and political career along with insights into his philosophy, religious views, and moral character.
Join New York Times bestselling author Stephen Mansfield as he dives into the incredible story of Abraham Lincoln's spiritual life and draws from it a deeper meaning that's sure to inspire us all. Abraham Lincoln is, undoubtedly, among the most beloved of all U.S. presidents. He helped to abolish slavery, gave the world some of its most memorable speeches, and redefined the meaning of America. He did all of this with endless wisdom, compassion, and wit. Yet, throughout his life, Lincoln fought with God. In his early years in Illinois, he rejected even the existence of God and became the village atheist. In time, this changed but still, he wrestled with the truth of the Bible, preachers, doctrines, the will of God, the providence of God, and then, finally, God's purposes in the Civil War. Still, on the day he was shot, Lincoln said he longed to go to Jerusalem to walk in the Savior's steps. In this thrilling journey through a largely unknown part of American history, Mansfield traces Lincoln's exploring: Lincoln's lifelong spiritual journey The ways that Lincoln's faith shaped his presidency and beyond How Lincoln's struggle with faith can inspire modern believers Let Lincoln's Battle with God show you Lincoln's life and legacy in a brand new light.
The nature of Abraham Lincoln's religious beliefs is perhaps the most perplexing enigma of his legacy. Examining the relationship between Lincoln's religious language and antebellum political culture, Winger offers a new perspective on the Great Emancipator. Lincoln's greatest speeches, Winger shows, articulate a Romantic Protestant vision of American identity and destiny. Recent considerations of Lincoln's religion have presented conflicting views of the president as either a conventional nineteenth-century evangelical or a skeptic in the tradition of Thomas Paine. Winger offers an illuminating alternative based on the connections between Lincoln's personal piety and his public performance. Exploring Lincoln's quest for the moral basis of politics, Winger shows that Lincoln's religious language reflected a poetic, Romantic understanding of faith and its political implications. A man who took ideas seriously, Lincoln conducted a decades-long dialogue with Stephen Douglas and George Bancroft about popular sovereignty and America's place in history. Although the Lincoln-Douglas debates became almost theological arguments about the ethics of slavery in a democracy, they were carried out in the context of intense party politics and personal ambition. Throughout, Lincoln expressed an intellectually grounded piety that placed his beloved Union under the judgment of both history and God. The crisis of war transformed and deepened Lincoln's religious politics, and the Second Inaugural Address reveals a Lincoln brought to humility by his powerlessness before God's commanding will. Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics presents a powerful vision of Lincoln, one that will challenge and intrigue everyone interested in this towering figure.
Lucas Morel examines what the public life of Abraham Lincoln teaches about the role of religion in a self-governing society. Lincoln's understanding of the requirements of republican government led him to accommodate and direct religious sentiment toward responsible self-government. As a successful republic requires a moral or self-controlled people, Lincoln believed, the moral and religious sensibilities of a society should be nurtured.
One of the most influential philosophers of liberalism turns his attention to the complexity of Lincoln’s political thought. At the center of Lincoln’s career is an intense passion for equality, a passion that runs so deep in the speeches, messages, and letters that it has the force of religious conviction for Lincoln. George Kateb examines these writings to reveal that this passion explains Lincoln’s reverence for both the Constitution and the Union. The abolition of slavery was not originally a tenet of Lincoln’s political religion. He affirmed almost to the end of his life that the preservation of the Union was more important than ending slavery. This attitude was consistent with his judgment that at the founding, the agreement to incorporate slaveholding into the Constitution, and thus secure a Constitution, was more vital to the cause of equality than struggling to keep slavery out of the new nation. In Kateb’s reading, Lincoln destroys the Constitution twice, by suspending it as a wartime measure and then by enacting the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. The first instance was an effort to save the Constitution; the second was an effort to transform it, by making it answer the Declaration’s promises of equality. The man who emerges in Kateb’s account proves himself adequate to the most terrible political situation in American history. Lincoln’s political life, however, illustrates the unsettling truth that in democratic politics—perhaps in all politics—it is nearly impossible to do the right thing for the right reasons, honestly stated.
In February 2009, America celebrates the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and the pace of new Lincoln books and articles has already quickened. From his cabinet’s politics to his own struggles with depression, Lincoln remains the most written-about story in our history. And each year historians find something new and important to say about the greatest of our Presidents. Lincoln Revisited is a masterly guidePub to what’s new and what’s noteworthy in this unfolding story—a brilliant gathering of fresh scholarship by the leading Lincoln historians of our time. Brought together by The Lincoln Forum, they tackle uncharted territory and emerging questions; they also take a new look at established debates—including those about their own landmark works. Here, these well-known historians revisit key chapters in Lincoln’s legacy—from Matthew Pinsker on Lincoln’s private life and Jean Baker on religion and the Lincoln marriage to Geoffrey Perret on Lincoln as leader and Frank J. Williams on Lincoln and civil liberties in wartime. The eighteen original essays explore every corner of Lincoln’s world—religion and politics, slavery and sovereignty, presidential leadership and the rule of law, the Second Inaugural Address and the assassination. In his 1947 classic, Lincoln Reconsidered, David Herbert Donald confronted the Lincoln myth. Today, the scholars in Lincoln Revisited give a new generation of students, scholars, and citizens the perspectives vital for understanding the constantly reinterpreted genius of Abraham Lincoln.
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, it is tempting to regard their perpetrators as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln shows in this timely offering, were profoundly and intensely religious. What we need, then, after September 11 is greater clarity about what we take religion to be. With rigor and incisiveness, Holy Terrors examines the implications of September 11 for our understanding of religion and how it interrelates with politics and culture. Lincoln begins with a gripping dissection of the instruction manual given to each of the hijackers. In their evocation of passages from the Quran, we learn how the terrorists justified acts of destruction and mass murder "in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate." Lincoln then offers a provocative comparison of President Bush's October 7 speech announcing U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden's videotape released hours later. Each speech, he argues, betrays telling contradictions. Bin Laden, for instance, conceded implicitly that Islam is not unitary, as his religious rhetoric would have it, but is torn by deep political divisions. And Bush, steering clear of religious rhetoric for the sake of political unity, still reassured his constituents through coded allusions that American policy is firmly rooted in faith. Lincoln ultimately broadens his discussion further to consider the role of religion since September 11 and how it came to be involved with such fervent acts of political revolt. In the postcolonial world, he argues, religion is widely considered the most viable and effective instrument of rebellion against economic and social injustices. It is the institution through which unified communities ensure the integrity and continuity of their culture in the wake of globalization. Brimming with insights such as these, Holy Terrors will become one of the essential books on September 11 and a classic study on the character of religion.
This work is a summary and analysis of Abraham Lincoln's religion. This study begins with a description of the earliest relations Mr. Lincoln had with religion, his parents' dedication to a sect known as the "Separate Baptists." By late adolescence, Lincoln began to reject his parents' faith, and he appears to have been a religious skeptic until his marriage to Mary Todd. After his marriage, he attended Protestant services with his wife and family, but there was little evidence that he was deeply religious in that time. Lincoln knew the Scriptures quite well, but it was not until the death of his two sons, Eddie in 1850 and Willie in 1862, that as the sixteenth president put it, "He became more intensely concerned with God's Plan for human kind."
One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images, many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection, that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before. Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire country. By the time of his assassination in 1865, large-scale immigration, principally from central Europe, had brought that number up to more than 150,000. Many Americans, including members of Lincoln's cabinet and many of his top generals during the Civil War, were alarmed by this development and treated Jews as second-class citizens and religious outsiders. Lincoln, this book shows, exhibited precisely the opposite tendency. He also expressed a uniquely deep knowledge of the Old Testament, employing its language and concepts in some of his most important writings. He befriended Jews from a young age, promoted Jewish equality, appointed numerous Jews to public office, had Jewish advisors and supporters starting already from the early 1850s, as well as later during his two presidential campaigns, and in response to Jewish sensitivities, even changed the way he thought and spoke about America. Through his actions and his rhetoric—replacing "Christian nation," for example, with "this nation under God"—he embraced Jews as insiders. In this groundbreaking work, the product of meticulous research, historian Jonathan D. Sarna and collector Benjamin Shapell reveal how Lincoln's remarkable relationship with American Jews impacted both his path to the presidency and his policy decisions as president. The volume uncovers a new and previously unknown feature of Abraham Lincoln's life, one that broadened him, and, as a result, broadened America.
