Book Review: Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation

Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation. By Joshua Zeitz. New York: Viking, 2023. Hardcover, 313 pp. $30.00.

Reviewed by Max Longley

Historian Joshua Zeitz’s newest book, Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation, combines a couple of historiographical trends – the debate over Lincoln’s religious beliefs, and the history of religion and its influence in the Civil War era.

Lincoln’s religion was avidly discussed even while he was alive, and after his death there were pious accounts of his supposed evangelical Christian orthodoxy. Lincoln’s former law partner, William Herndon, reacted to this by portraying a deistic Lincoln, to much public indignation – the argument has persisted to this day. Scholars tend to agree that Lincoln was not a Christian in his pre-presidential years, but they still debate whether and how much he may have turned toward evangelical Christianity while in the White House and in response to war’s pressures and his family tragedies (such as the loss of his son Willie).

Scholarly works about the religious aspects of the war picked up steam in this century. Mark A. Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006), and George C. Rable’s God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (2010), have become classics in the field. There are numerous other studies about particular religious groups and denominations, such as Catholics. In addition, there are scholarly analyses of the prewar splits in major evangelical Protestant denominations, which presaged the split of the Union.

With Lincoln’s God, Zeitz attempts to merge these two historiographical streams. Using traditional archival sources and earlier works, Zeitz tries to combine the story of Lincoln’s religious development with the story of the Northern evangelical Protestants, who ended up as some of Lincoln’s most reliable wartime allies. Prewar, the two narratives come across as parallel, not linked stories. During the war, the narratives become more convergent.

Concerning Lincoln’s religion, Zeitz agrees that at least before 1861, the future President was pretty much a deist, deeming Christianity false – albeit perhaps a good source of inspiration to others.

Zeitz doesn’t give his attention to the entire religious scene, or even to the entire evangelical scene. He zeroes in on the antislavery element in Northern evangelicalism. Antislavery ministers and laity pressured the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists to denounce slavery as a sin and to add the abolition of slavery to the long list of reforms evangelicals already promoted. Influential Northern evangelicals who were “soft” on slavery – like the Presbyterian Charles Hodge of Princeton – do not get consideration here, nor do other religious groups like Catholics, Episcopalians, and Jews whose attitudes toward slavery, to put it mildly, were more muted.

Zeitz follows the increasing influence of the antislavery element among Northern evangelicals and suggests that by the outbreak of war evangelicals had turned into supporters of what they deemed a holy struggle against slavery and disunion. Zeitz does not focus much on the laggards – like the Old School Presbyterians, who didn’t condemn slavery until 1864.

But Lincoln and most evangelicals enthusiastically embraced each other as allies. Of course, this was hardly the only political alliance Lincoln formed during the war. He often had strained alliances with abolitionists, Blacks, border-state Unionists, financiers, and editors. Evangelicals were an important, and highly influential constituency, and they and Lincoln cooperated quite well with each other.

The civilian-based U.S. Sanitary Commission and nondenominational evangelical U.S. Christian Commission, obtained Lincoln’s help in bringing Bibles, tracts, chaplains, and better health care to soldiers in the field. On the home front, evangelicals gave the war effort spiritual strength by calling it a holy struggle requiring public support, despite the bloody sacrifice. From the pulpit and their religious press, evangelicals gave the Republican Party and its antislavery policies essential support by promoting Republican candidates.

In its alliance with evangelicals, the Lincoln administration even challenged the separation of church and state. Lincoln’s officials occasionally put Northern evangelical ministers into pulpits in conquered Confederate areas, replacing disloyal or absconding Southern ministers.

Lincoln’s wartime-inspired alliance with the evangelicals does not prove that he was one of them. Zeitz, though, sees Lincoln during the war, as at least somewhat moving away from pure deism and toward the evangelicals’ Christianity. Zeitz stresses that Lincoln did not share evangelicals’ seeming confidence about knowing God’s specific plans for the nation. Evangelical sermons, for instance, sometimes went into details about what God intended to accomplish through particular battles. But Lincoln did speak increasingly in Christian terms about the war. Lincoln was uncertain as to what God’s specific will for the nation was, but he grew more confident about the existence of a divine plan – details unknown but likely involving divine chastisement of both the United States and the Confederacy for their tolerance of slavery.

Lincoln’s God is highly informative about the history of the Lincoln/evangelical alliance, without saying Lincoln became evangelical. Zeitz’s portrayal of Lincoln’s evangelical associations nudging him in a more Christian direction has much plausibility, but as usual with this complicated subject, we cannot be sure.