Book review: “Lincoln and Religion” by Ferenc Morton Szasz with Margaret Connell Szasz  

It may seem strange that the question of Abraham Lincoln and religion is a “thing” in historical circles. This, after all, is the president who mentioned God often in his speeches and writings while leading the Union in the Civil War.

For instance, in his second inaugural address of March 4, 1865, in a statement of national policy and an official government document, Lincoln talked about the two sides of the four-year-old war and their relationship with God.

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

Rarely has religious belief and its implications and contradictions been presented so clearly, soberly and starkly.

Lincoln then quoted Matthew 18:7: “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” And went on:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

 

“As God gives us to see the right”

This terrible war, he says, this woe, is due to the sin of slavery, and he goes on:

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

If this war, rooted in the sin of slavery, needs to continue until all of the wealth, produced so sinfully, is exhausted — well, Lincoln writes, quoting from Psalm 19:9, “God’s judgments are true and righteous.”

And then he ends with a civic prayer as deeply spiritual, as deeply transcendent, as any from the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer or any prayer book or scripture:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In this vision of what the better angels of our natures need to do at this moment in the national story, Lincoln is enunciating a faith that goes to the heart of the teachings of Jesus Christ — and of virtually any religion.

And it’s a vision of compassion and solidarity, even across enemy lines, that is worth quoting at length because it is in stark contrast to the mean-spirited nature of much of the present-day political rhetoric.

 

Co-believer or non-believer?

Yet, for all of Lincoln’s references to God in speeches and documents, historians, church leaders and average Americans have been debating the nature of Lincoln’s religious beliefs since he first rose to national prominence, as Ferenc Morton Szasz explains in Lincoln and Religion.

For instance, everyone wants to claim the martyred president as a co-believer, as Szasz notes.

Today even American atheists declare Lincoln to be one of their own, as do the Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Episcopalians, Spiritualists, and even the Jews. A contemporary Disciples of Christ tale includes him in their legends. A Church of the Brethren tradition suggests Lincoln had plans to convert to their pietistic faith just before his assassination.

Nevertheless, at the same time, there has been a running argument about whether Lincoln had any religious beliefs at all.

It began in 1873 when, in Scribner’s Monthly, Rev. James Reed, the pastor at the Presbyterian church in Springfield, Illinois, asserted that the assassinated president had been an avowed Christian. Lincoln had occasionally attended the church before he left for Washington and before Reed, who never met him, arrived.

While a seemingly mild enough contention, Reed’s statement brought Lincoln’s former law partner William Herndon, an atheist, “off his chair, and Herndon spent the rest of his life trying to prove Lincoln was a nonbeliever.”

 

“Not frozen in time”

Ferenc Szasz, a history professor at the University of New Mexico for more than 40 years, was an expert on American religion, American intellectual history and Lincoln.

As his friend and colleague Richard W. Etulain, explains in a preface, Szasz had agreed to write Lincoln and Religion as part of the Concise Lincoln Library series from Southern Illinois University Press, but, then, in February, 2010, he was diagnosed with virulent leukemia.

Nonetheless, while grappling with the disease, he was able to write two drafts of the book before dying four months later. His wife Margaret Connell Szasz, a University of New Mexico historian herself, and other family members put the finishing touches on the manuscript, and the book was published as a hardcover in 2014.  It was released as a paperback earlier this summer.

Szasz’s central point in Lincoln and Religion is that the sixteenth president’s understanding of God and of God’s interaction with humans was something that was constantly evolving. “But it must be emphasized at the onset: as far as Lincoln was concerned, his own faith was not frozen in time,” Szasz writes.

 

Lincoln and the King James Version

Never was Lincoln a regular attendee at religious services, and, in his early adult years, he flirted with skepticism and free-thinking.

Still, Szasz writes, Lincoln was deeply shaped by the pervasive religious context in which he grew up as a child and well into adulthood. In addition, one of his intellectual and emotional touchstones was the King James Version of the Bible which he often quoted.

According to reporter Noah Brooks, who knew the president well, Lincoln had memorized most of Isaiah, many of the Psalms (which he deeply admired), scores of Proverbs, and numerous passages from the New Testament, especially the most famous sayings of Jesus.

Even so, Lincoln was the sort of believer who “could quote scripture without a hint of unctuousness.”

 

“A terrible visitation”

And, once he became president and had to contend with a gruesome Civil War, pitting American against American, Lincoln thought more and spoke more about the role of God in human affairs.

From Lincoln’s perspective, the war did not “just happen.” Rather, it was a “terrible visitation” from Providence for purposes yet unknown. Lincoln believed he must try to reconcile the two. Thus, when Lincoln prayed, he was searching for a way to merge the persistent Union defeats and setbacks with his own understanding of covenant theory and the words of scripture.

In his second inaugural address — his “with malice toward none” speech — Lincoln astonished his contemporaries.

Carl Schurz, a German-born Union general and Republican politician, called it “a sacred poem.” Noah Brooks said it was “as truly a religious document as a state paper.” And Frederick Douglass, the African American leader and former slave, called it a “sacred effort.”

 

“Complexity and tenacity”

Szasz notes that, according to historian Allen Guelzo, the second inaugural echoes the paradox of Lincoln’s life as “a ‘fatalist,’ who had no assurance that the will of any person was free…(and also) the great giver of liberty…the man who believed that all human action was decided by powers beyond human control, and the president who reiterated his faith in the capacity for individuals to improve themselves…”

And Szasz concludes:

By embracing the Second Inaugural in its entirety, Guelzo reminds us of why Lincoln — a man of spiritual complexity and frontier tenacity — has endured as the subject of such extended commentary.

That’s the man who’s at the core of Lincoln and Religion — a man of spiritual complexity and frontier tenacity.

No wonder that every generation wants to find its own understanding of Lincoln and his religious beliefs.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.16.26

 

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 8.18.26