THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to preach on Abraham Lincoln on his very birthday; the chance simply won’t be mine again, and Honest Abe remains one of my true heroes. Plus, if I’m not mistaken, Lincoln’s life and religious philosophy are very relevant to the historic vote we’re taking today as Summitarians.
Lots has been written on Lincoln, 1191 books to be exact, far more than on any other American figure. Plus there’s a wealth of new research emerging and books arriving, sleuthing out the real Abe Lincoln: focusing upon his complicated views on race, the secrets of his political genius, his private struggle with depression, and the strange saga of his wife.
    Sorry, nothing scintillating on those items from me today. Instead I’ll be doing something too rarely done: plumbing Lincoln’s emotional intelligence and religious depth. I think that his spiritual vision is particularly useful in today’s world of bigotry and fundamentalism. His was a liberal religious perspective; clearly in word and in deed.
    It’s been noted that every great pioneer and pacesetter seems to suffer two forms of indignity: the first during their lifetimes when orthodoxy persecutes them, and the second after they’re dead when the same orthodoxy tries to claim them as its own.
    Lincoln was no exception. For when Abe spoke his mind on the subject of religion, the orthodox of his day were downright suspicious, even reproachful, but now that history has raised him to the ranks of the immortals, some folks want to prove that he was an orthodox believer after all.
    But he wasn’t. Like Washington, Jefferson and Franklin before him, Lincoln rejected creeds. He belonged to no church. It’s true that he once rented a pew, but it was mostly Mary Todd Lincoln who sat in it. When Abe was invited to join his wife and become a church member himself, he said that “he couldn’t quite see it.”
    This was in Illinois, but it was an attitude Lincoln fully maintained after becoming President. Not that he was unwilling to enter a church, far from it. He attended several Washington churches, and if any hymn was sung or prayer prayed that seemed to enhance his life, he was duly grateful. But Lincoln was not an orthodox believer; if anything, he was more of a Unitarian sympathizer.
    But believing according to his own conscience and admitting it so openly, Lincoln paid a steep political price. During one crucial campaign, Lincoln’s early law partner tried to smear him by publicly charging that Abe “was a freethinker.” Which he was, but in the eyes of mainline religion, a damnable condition indeed.
    When a critic termed him “one wandering astray”, this was Lincoln’s reply:
I doubt the possibility or propriety of settling the religion of Jesus Christ in the models of human-made creeds and dogmas. It was a spirit in the life that he laid stress on and taught, if I read aright.
    
As you can see, while Lincoln held major reservations with regard to the official religion of his day, nonetheless he firmly endorsed the moral teachings of the Nazarene. These sentiments, plus Lincoln’s known interest in the sermons of Unitarian ministers William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker as well as several Universalist ministers of the day mark him clearly as a card-carrying religious liberal.
Back to Parker. Do you know how the paths of Parker, an Easterner, and Lincoln, a Midwesterner, crossed? Well, it’s quite a story. During the years 1846-1859, it wasn’t uncommon for the great Yankee Crusader, Theodore Parker to preach fifty-two Sundays in the year, and, in addition, to deliver between 80 and 100 lectures all over the Eastern seaboard. That’s a prodigious output of wisdom, but I bet Parker didn’t attend as many committee meetings as we modern Unitarian Universalist clergy do!
Parker’s exceptional lectures and sermons were printed and spread far and wide. They were sent regularly to an associate of Lincoln’s who found therein a phrase describing democracy as that “government of all the people, for all the people and by all the people.” Alas, Lincoln loved Parker’s cogent phrase and lifted it for later use.
Before describing the hallmarks of Lincoln’s unorthodox religion, I want to note his striking kinship with universalism. It began with his youth. God, thought Lincoln, could never become a vengeful being. Consequently, the young Lincoln rejected the belief in hell, which at that time and in those parts was heresy indeed, for no theme was more popular than hell at Midwestern evangelistic revivals. Of course, hell’s still popular, if you haven’t noticed!
On the contrary, Lincoln chose to affirm: “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad,” as his notion of a kinder religion than that of the revivalists. On another occasion Lincoln said: “Surely, God would not have created human beings to exist only for a day. No, no, we were made for immortality!”
Lincoln also felt that there was already an ample supply of both heaven and hell on earth, so he jokingly described one of the earthly locales of hell as follows: “I’ve been told I was on the road to hell, but I had no idea it was just a mile down the road with a Dome on it!”
Today, I would salute but three of Lincoln’s religious qualities: his senses of justice, compassion, and humor.
First, a look at his sense of justice or equality. Here’s what I mean. Remember that memorable dedication of the Union cemetery at the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg on the 19th of November 1863? In it, Lincoln claimed that four score and seven years ago a group of people had established a nation which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.
This sort of equality, accepted in the newly united states as a basic tenet, was unique in a world which still held to the divine right of kings and to the feudal power of lords over their serfs.
Lincoln’s unerring sense of justice was the essential genius and strength of the American system. He went right on to state that this experiment in political organization was undergoing a real test that would determine whether our nation so constituted could long endure. This is a very relevant observation, for today America’s still straining to reach the idea of equality of opportunity for all persons. We still haven’t got it right, but, at our moral best, we remain on the path.
Elsewhere, Lincoln put his vision of justice and equality very succinctly: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” Lincoln was far from perfect, to be sure; he was a person of his times. He advocated colonization for African Americans yet later issued the Emancipation Proclamation and recommended they be given voting rights. What changed Lincoln’s thinking?
Basically, his view on colonization was due to a failure of imagination. He didn’t think blacks would ever be treated fairly in America. Lincoln later understood differently, largely through the persuasive views of African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Lincoln listened and learned when Douglass made clear that America, despite all the difficulties facing African Americans, was where they wanted to live. And when Lincoln saw the fervor of black soldiers willing to fight and die for their country, his thinking evolved.
 Again, Lincoln exhibited a core quality of the liberal religious mind: the willingness to change one’s viewpoint.
Lincoln also demonstrated an enormous sense of compassion, another hallmark of our liberal religious way of life.
For example, a Kentucky boy was enticed into the Confederate Army, but later deserted and came to the Union lines, where he was arrested and condemned as a spy. Considering his case, Lincoln said: “If someone had more than one life, I think a little hanging might prove just, but as we have only one life, I think I’ll pardon this person.”
Lincoln seemed to major in empathy: the gift of putting himself in the place of others, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. Even as a child, Abe was uncommonly tenderhearted. He once stopped and walked back half a mile to rescue a pig caught in a mire, not only because he respected the value of animals, but moreover to remove the pain from his own heart.
Far better he believed to reach into the soul of one’s opponents, which of course he memorably did in his Second Inaugural when he suggested that the sin of slavery was shared by North and South. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes God’s aid against the other…let us judge not that we be not judged.” In the largest sense, Lincoln’s empathy allowed him to absorb the sorrows and hopes of all his country people.
Then there is the ultimate example of compassion, demonstrated in loving even your enemies.
When Lincoln was campaigning for the presidency, one of his archenemies was Edwin Stanton. For some reason Stanton hated Lincoln ever since they met in 1855 at a trial in Ohio. And Stanton used every ounce of energy to degrade Lincoln in the eyes of the public. He even caricatured Lincoln saying: “Where did that long-armed creature come from, why he’s nothing but a low, cunning clown.”
But in spite of such abuse, Lincoln was elected President of the United States and the moment arrived to select his cabinet who would furnish his most intimate associates in implementing his public policies.
Well, the day came for Lincoln to appoint the person to fill the all-important post of Secretary of War. Can you imagine whom Lincoln chose to fill his post? None other than Stanton. There was an immediate uproar in the inner circle when the news began to spread. Adviser after adviser cried out: “Mr. President, you’re making a mistake. Do you know this man Stanton? Are you familiar with all the ugly things he said about you? Why, he’s your clear-cut enemy. He’ll sabotage your program.”
And Lincoln replied: “Yes, I’m aware of all the terrible things Stanton has said about me, but after looking over the nation, I find that he’s the best person for the job.” Can you imagine something like that happening in today’s American politics?
So Stanton became Lincoln’s secretary of War and rendered invaluable service to both nation and President. Not many years later Lincoln was assassinated, and standing near the dead body of the man he once hated, Stanton referred to Lincoln as one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.
It was this same attitude that made it possible for Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War when feelings were most bitter. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could do this, Lincoln said, “Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” Again, the power of redemptive love.
Another day a group of church leaders came to President Lincoln saying that they were quite sure, after deep prayer, that God was on their side. And Lincoln gave them the kind of answer they deserved: “I’m not so much concerned as to ask whether God is on my side. What I am concerned with is to try to be sure that I’m on God’s side.”
During the Civil War a good many churches in both the North and the South were convinced that God was on their side, therewith justifying mutual hatred and vengeance.
Lincoln expressed the heart of his liberal religion in the second Inaugural Address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
Lincoln was a person committed to equality and compassion and blessed with the saving grace of humor. He called laughter “the joyous, beautiful, universal evergreen of life” and used it to defuse tension and relax colleagues at the tensest of times.
One day, during the dreary times of the Civil War, President Lincoln assembled his cabinet and commenced to read some of the humorous nonsense of Artemus Ward. No one else in the cabinet seemed to share Lincoln’s amusement. “Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh?” said Lincoln. “With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.” Then the President reached into his tall hat and brought out the serious business of the day: his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Two Quakers in a railway coach were overheard in a conversation: “I think Jefferson Davis will succeed.” “Why does thee think so?” “Because Jefferson is a praying person.” “But so is Abraham Lincoln a praying person.” “Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking!”
Oh, for the incisive wit of an Abraham Lincoln, Adlai Stevenson, or John F. Kennedy. We desperately need neither sarcasm nor cynicism, but a healthy, cleansing sort of humor emanating these days from governments the world over.
Lincoln would jab and jest at his companions. He once said: “That person can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any person I ever met.” But he could also could poke fun at himself. Abe once said to a delegation who congratulated him on his nomination as the Republican candidate for President:

I do not allow myself to suppose that either the convention or the League have concluded that I am the best person in America but rather they have concluded it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river, and have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse that they might make a botch of it in trying to swap.

You see, Lincoln took himself and his task seriously but never grimly.
So, there you have it, a sense of justice, a sense of compassion, and a sense of humor…quite a valuable trio of virtues for a political leader of our land or, for that matter, for any one of us who aspires to be a liberal religious ambassador.
Tom Owen-Towle
February 12, 2006