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Abraham Lincoln and American Civil Religion: A Reinterpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Melvin B. Endy Jr
Melvin B. Endy Jr
Affiliation:
Mr. Endy is associate professor of religion in Hamilton College, Clinton, New York.
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Extract

A period of consensus in American religious historiography has ended, but students of American religion representing a variety of perspectives have recently come to regard Abraham Lincoln, once a subject of great dispute among religionists, as one of the most important and profound of America's theologians and religious leaders, if not the religious center of American history. It is primarily as a spokesman for and symbol of a religious interpretation of American destiny that Lincoln has been placed at this pinnacle, and he has had an especially prominent place in the recent discussion of American civil religion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 1975 , pp. 229 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1975

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References

1. In this context, and in this article, “American civil religion” refers not to a somewhat autonomous religion that is more of less phenomenologically and functionally equivalent to Judaism or Christianity but simply to the mythic belief that the United States is a latter-day chosen nation that has been brought into existence and providentially guided as a fundamentally new social order to serve uniquely as a “city on a hill” for the rest of mankind.

2. “Abraham Lincoln's ‘Last, Best Hope of Earth’: The American Dream of Destiny and Democracy,” Church History 23 (1954): 3Google Scholar; “The ‘Nation with the Soul of a Church,’” Church-History 36 (1967): 277.Google Scholar

3. “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (1967): 9, 10.Google Scholar

4. Wolf's book was first published as The Almost Chosen People (New York, 1959)Google Scholar and reissued as The Religion of Abraham Lincoln in 1963.

5. See, for example, Neuliaus, Richard, “Going Home Again: America After Vietnam,” Worldview 15 (10 1972): 35.Google Scholar For a more critical perspective, see Richardson, Herbert W., “Civil Religion in Theological Perspective,” in Richey, Russell E. and Jones, Donald G., eds., American Civil Religion (New York, 1974), pp. 165–168.Google Scholar

6. Abraham Lincoln, pp. 106–107.

7. Lincoln's Religion, pp. 30, 186.

8. Mead, , “Abraham Lincoln's ‘Last Best Hope,’” p. 8.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., pp. 13–14.

10. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, 1953), 5:420.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Works.

11. Ibid., 4: 270.

12. Ibid., 7:302. See also 3:550.

13. See Charnwood, Lord, Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1917), pp. 75–77, 146.Google Scholar

14. See the Second Inaugural, Works, 8:332–333.

15. Works, 1:289; Abraham Lincoln, p. 437.

16. See Wolf, pp. 28, 29 and especially Current, Richard N., The Lincoln Nobody Knows (New York, 1958), chapter 3,Google Scholar for a summary of the evidence and sources.

17. Chittenden, L. E., Register of the Treasury, in Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration (New York, 1891), p. 448,Google Scholar remembers Lincoln as speaking these words, and the sentiment is found many places in Lincoln's corpus. For Charnwood's remark, see Abraham Lincoln, p. 437.

18. Works, 5: 420, 422.Google Scholar

19. Abraham Lincoln, p. 27.

20. Recollections, p. 448.

21. Works, 2:132.

22. Ibid., 1:112. In Lincoln's use of presidential power, see Degler, Carl, Out of Our Past (New York, 1959), p. 207.Google Scholar The remark on Lincoln and the law is by Goodhart, Arthur Lehman, “Lincoln and the Law,” in Nevins, Allan, ed., Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address (Urbana, Illinois, 1964), pp. 66–67.Google Scholar Possibly it should be noted that Goodhart was writing before the Watergate scandal.

23. “Abraham Lincoln's ‘Last Best Hope,’” pp. 12, 6, 7, 9.

24. See Charnwood, p. 75. Lincoln's great confidence in reason and its automatic progress is seen in his temperance speech of 1842, Works, 1: 279.Google Scholar This social optimism was, admittedly, combined with a deep tendency toward melancholy in his personal affairs.

25. Works, 3:96, 181.

26. Ibid., 6:536.

27. Ibid., 8:55.

28. Ibid., 1:438. Lincoln later indicated that the right to revolution existed only when exercised for “a morally justifiable cause”, and he did not believe that slavery was such a cause, but his modification does not affect my argument. Ibid., 4: 434n.

29. Ibid., 7:282.

30. Ibid., 5:478.

31. Wilson, James F. “Some Memories of Lincoln,” North American Review 163 (1896): 668–669.Google Scholar

32. Works, 2:385.

33. Niebuhr, Reinhold, “The Religion of Abraham Lincoln,” in Nevins, Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, pp. 81–85.Google Scholar

34. Works, 4:2, 9. Lincoln admitted that men could use the Bible for a variety of positions on slavery, but it was difficult for him to understand how anyone could combine Christianity and slavery without bmeing hypocritical. See ibid., 7:368.

35. Ibid., 2:275, 449; 3:90, 315, 486.

36. Ibid., 2:276, 452.

37. Ibid., pp. 87, 406, 493; 4:17–18. Less prominent in Lincoln's thought was a belief that the promise or covenant made by the Founding Fathers imposed a moral obligation toward their fellow citizens of the South on later generations. See Charnwood, p. 124.

38. Works, 7:507; 8:2.

39. Ibid., 3:462.

40. See ibid., 2:364; 5:52–53.

41. Ibid., 5:546. Wolf misleadingly entitles his chapter on Lincoln's views on slavery “Stamped with the Divine Image and Likeness.”

42. Works, 3:234.

43. Ibid., 2:406.

44. Ibid., 3:249; 2:405; 3:145–146.

45. Ibid., 3:16.

46. Ibid., 4:407–408.

47. Ibid., 5:373. See also ibid., 2:409; 3:145–146; 5:434. In his funeral oration for Henry Clay Lincoln spoke favorably of Clay's view of the enslavement and foreseen return to Africa of negroes as possibly God's way of bringing true religion, civilization, and law and liberty to Africa. Here again his view of providence led him to the assumption that possibly all had happened for the best. Ibid., 2:132.

48. Ibid., 7:101–102.

49. Ibid., 2:318.

50. Ibid., 3:181.

51. Ibid., p. 16; 4:156.

52. “Lincoln and the Law,” p. 64.

53. Works, 1:109.

54. Ibid., 4:255, 434.

55. Degler, p. 207.

56. See Goodhart, p. 68.

57. “Abraham Lincoln's ‘Last Best Hope,’” p. 14.

58. Works, 3:265–266, 276.

59. Ibid., 5:388.

60. Ibid., 8:2.

61. Sec especially Trueblood, pp. 70, 118, 125–126; Wolf, p. 187; Niebuhr, p. 75.

62. Nicbuhr, p. 75.

63. Works, 5:212; 4:421.

64. Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1951–1963), 3:310.Google Scholar

65. Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Anglo-Saxon Destiny and Responsibility,” in Cherry, Conrad, ed., God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1971), p. 304.Google Scholar

66. Abraham Lincoln, p. 3.