American History Hit - Lincoln & God: Scepticism to Spiritualism

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

He's the best president that the United States has ever had ... at least according to one 2021 C-span study.But how did Lincoln's religious views affect his life and leadership? In this episode, Don is joined by Joshua Zeitz, author of 'Lincoln's God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation'.We hear about Lincoln's journey from scepticism to spiritualism, and the growth of connections between politics and the church in the United States.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Between meals of hard tack and salt pork, we clean lice off each other's uniforms and gather for services in the makeshift chapel. I've watched our comrades baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, only to fold. dead the very next day. Pity that poor pastor who writes his letters home to the mothers, assuring them that their sons had accepted our Savior Jesus Christ in their final hours. What a comfort that must be. According to the pastor, this is all by God's design, that we are frozen to the bone, eating pitiful rations, and fighting an uncivil war that for today at least feels futile, unwinnable. I guess I'd rather put my faith in the divine leadership of Mr. Abe Lincoln, who's really calling the shots.

If I'm going to heaven or to hell, best I know who sent me there. Hello, this is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. Thanks for listening. On the show today, we're going to take a look at Abraham Lincoln's life and presidency

in very specific terms of his spirituality. This has always been a fertile realm in which to consider the man given the complicated and contradictory elements of his personality. On one hand, he begins life at a distance from Christianity, but then it later emerges in his life, personally and professionally, and all against a backdrop of spiritual revivalism in the United States in the decades leading

up to and including the Civil War. These were heady times in a still young nation, with cataclysmic changes afoot, socially, culturally, and of course, politically, not to mention a rising standoff between the states. In this crucible of conflicting forces, an evangelical fervor among many Christians was born that in so many ways was a reaction to the traditions of stern puritanical Protestantism that had dominated American spiritual life since the colonial era. With the advent of industrial development and commercial markets, giving new purpose and identity to everyday American life, in some regards replacing the church, this new religious awakening was sweeping the nation. It's fascinating to consider the spiritual life of our 16th and

greatest president in this context as he journeyed from backwoods poverty to state politician to the White House, all the while forced to come to terms with his God. Under pressures, no mere mortal is really equipped to handle. With us today, we have the author of a brand new book, Lincoln's God. Joshua Zites, welcome to the podcast. We're glad to have you. Hello. Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Seemingly every aspect of Abraham Lincoln's life and times, his religious identity has always been of paramount concern. But especially when he was alive and running for office, why were people then so curious about his outlook? What was it about the man? In Lincoln's first race for the state

legislature's first two races, and then in his only race for the U.S. House representatives in 1846, there were great many rumors swelling around central Illinois where he had settled and built his career, that he was a scoffer, that he was an atheist and a vocal opponent of Christianity. And the fact of the matter is that he was at this point in his life. He was very much an icon class in the sense that he was coming of age in a nation that was in the throes of a great evangelical awakening. And yet he was vocally skeptical about Christianity, the divinity of Christ, about even the notion that God existed. And he was a little bit indiscreet in those early years and learned to keep his mouth shut about that after the 1846 congressional race. But I think that there was a great deal of concern about

it because his friends felt that this was his weakness, and they could not understand how somebody could stand this much apart from something that was so integral to American culture and society. But by 1860, even though I would argue in the book, he's not as yet a believer, he begins to recognize that there's a necessity, a political necessity to at least make a nod to the churches, particularly in the Midwest and central Illinois, which was his home base. And he begins to court them. But I think that the concern at the time, at least before he was president, was that this put him too far outside the cultural and political mainstream. His views on religion really begin with his outlook on his father.

I mean, maybe that's simplistic, but I think it's a fascinating way to look at it. His father had a very Calvinist belief system. They were Baptist, hard-shell Baptists. I read them called. Love that term. What was Calvinism and how did Lincoln's early rejection of it and his father shape his life? So at the risk of oversimplifying, Calvinism is a strain of Protestantism. The Puritans and the pilgrims who first populated what is now present-day New England were strict Calvinists.

You know, generally speaking, the Calvinist churches in the colonial era in the early republic would have been the Presbyterian churches, the congregationalist churches, and the Baptist churches. And that's an oversimplification as well because the Baptist church was incredibly rich and diverse. But, you know, generally speaking, they shared a commitment to something called the West. Westminster Covenant. There was a particular belief system that held that people were either born of the elect or not elect. In other words, you were born and you were either going to be saved in the next life or not. There was nothing you could do in this life to change that, to alter that course. You couldn't buy your way to heaven through good works, through charity, through leading an upright Christian life. You were either born to be elect or not elect. So it's a, it's a worldview that

sort of denies humans a great deal of agency. And it made a lot of sense in the world that Thomas Lincoln and his wife, and then later his second wife, Abraham Lincoln's stepmother, lived. These were subsistence farmers living in a pre-market or a proto market world where it didn't really matter how industrious you were. There was no, there were no roads, there were no canals, there were no railroads to move excess produce to market. So you kind of farmed for yourself and you built kinship ties with, you know, brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles, and you lived in a kind of barter economy, which is precisely what Lincoln grew up in Kentucky, in Indiana, and then briefly as a young man in Illinois before he struck out on his own.

But, you know, his parents' hardshel Baptist faith, which was deeply Calvinistic and really denied humans much agency, it made a lot of sense. It was a good organizing thesis for a world in which individuals didn't have a great deal of agency. But Calvinism undergoes a tremendous sort of reexamination and also a challenge from new emergent churches in the early 19th century. And you can chart the course of that happening alongside the development of a market economy in the U.S. in which people do feel that they have a lot of agency and they do feel that they have a lot of choice.

And they do feel that ambition is something that could potentially be rewarded, that hard work can result in something, whereas, you know, before the world that Tom Lincoln grew up and that was not necessarily the... case. It's really interesting for me to align the development of spirituality of the church in America with the emergence of a new kind of economy. It's really fascinating and you can't really separate them. They're hand in hand. There's a lot about this age of Lincoln that's about modernization, you know, finding a new American path, letting go of our European legacy. Americans in general were anti-Catholic, since that religion implied you followed a monarch, the Pope. Judaism was here,

but not yet in a hugely significant sense. It had been Puritanism that had dominated, and Americans were now turning away from that past. So this is going to change everything. It kind of results in a whole explosion of different kinds of religions, or at least sex of religion. People don't really realize this all sort of happens

in the first half of the 19th century, right? That's exactly right. There's this, you know, what historians call the second great awakening, so a major decades-long religious revival that really begins in the late 1790. and peaks in the 1820s and 30s, but it's still in full force, even on the eve of the Civil War, there were these incredible urban religious revivals as late as 1857 and 58 in northern cities, particularly.

And while they're very complicated, there are a couple of things that we see happening. You know, then you can make a couple generalizations. First of all, while it's happening everywhere, North and South, rural and urban America, it's really happening with fierce intensity in parts of the country that are underdard. going a kind of market revolution where capitalism is infusing itself in everyday life. So regions like the burnt over district of western New York or parts of Ohio, but also parts of the south where the market economy was coming into force as well, particularly around the cotton economy, people are becoming market participants and capitalists at the same time they're

becoming Christians. And it's something that a lot of European travelers like Tocqueville, when they were in the United States touring and sort of fact-finding, they observed it. They didn't know what to make of it, but they saw the rise of banks and churches in the same places, and they thought it was curious. So that's happening. Alongside, I would add, the rise of popular democracy, you're moving from the kind of federalist era sensibility about politics, which is very much elite-driven and based on the notion that there should be a national consensus and organic will to this noisy democratic culture,

you know, from Jefferson to Jackson that you get. I think the pull through for all of this is that people are perceiving a great deal of choice. They have choice in what church they're going to join. They have choice in what profession they'll pursue or how hard they'll work and or what their ambitions are. They have choice in who they're going to vote for and what political ideology they cleave to. And in the world of religion, this manifests itself in the rise of a diverse number of churches. You see movements that were pretty insignificant before the revolution in the United States, relatively speaking, like the Methodist movement within the Anglican Church, which eventually becomes its own church in the United States in the 1790s. You see the Baptist and the Methodists

challenging the old mainline churches, the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, congregationalist churches. For members, you see the rise of other churches like the Disciples of Christ, which in the early 19th century were enormously influential. And then you also see in the antebellum period the rise of new Christian movements that seem unrecognizable to an earlier generation, for instance, Mormons, right, or Millerites. It's just a rich tapestry of options for people. And a lot of these churches are hyper-democratic. They're lay-led, or at least lay people have a great deal of say in their governance and theology. And there's a wholesale rejection of Calvinism. I mean, you see Presbyterians, New Light Presbyterians rejecting the

traditional tenets of Calvinism. You see old school Presbyterians even coming to embrace what might be called a kind of light form of Calvinism or what they call it an Arminiized form of Calvinism. And then you see, of course, the Methodist Church, which wholesale rejects it. And there is, in these popular revivals and in these churches that are on the ascendance, there is a belief, it's really what we would call evangelical Christianity in the 19th century, a belief that humans do have agency that through developing a personal relationship with Christ, Christ is not part of an unknowing and unknowable distant God, but he's someone who's in your heart and you have a personal relationship with him. They believe that through that, through accepting Christianity and

embracing it in your heart, through a spiritual rebirth, you can secure your own salvation in the next world. And so it's a very different form of Christianity that is powerfully aligned with the market economy and a new kind of noisy democratic culture. Was it uniquely American, all of this, or was this happening all around the world? I mean, of course, the Methodist movement it was incredibly influential in England than it originated in England. But I think that this was a uniquely American phenomenon at the time. And European visitors to the U.S., you know, noted that. Now, it helped that we didn't have an established church at that point after the revolution, of course, right? I mean, in pre-revolution New England, you had established churches,

mostly the congregationalist church in the south that would have been the Church of England, the Anglican Church. We didn't have an established church. So that helped foster that religious democratization. But it was very much, I think, bound up in the... the political and economic development of the country. And people thought it was really unusual. Well, and one of the inner contradictions of this country is the idea of separation of church and state, which is pushing back against all of this. As religion rises in this country, you have this constitutional fact. This is true, but what was fascinating about the religious revivalism of this period was that, you know, most religious leaders, be they lay or clergy,

strongly believe that the role of religion was to focus on filling pews on Sunday and winning souls. So there was a real focus on personal conversion. These revivals were all about inspiring people to accept Christ into their life. They were not political. They did not have a political strain. And in fact, most churchmen believed that their role was not to participate in politics. Now, that is not to say that the evangelical churches in the antebellum period were disinterested in social issues. They were incredibly interested in a range of issues running from Sabbath observance to temperance to whether, you know, the male should be.

delivered on Sundays to abolitionism in some respects as well in certain pockets of the evangelical Christian churches. But even then, the focus was on the individual. So the ministers weren't out there in the 1830s and 1840s lobbying for laws that would prohibit the sale of liquor. They were out there trying to convert individuals to Christ and get them to understand that to lead a Christian life, they had to be abstemious. So you had two things happening at the same time. You had like a noisy democratization of the country. You had a religious revival that was sweeping the whole nation. And yet there was really a separation still between the two.

So Abe Lincoln is one of these evolving Americans. As a young man, he reads Tom Payne, Age of Reason, Hobbs, Voltaire. I mean, if you were looking for a new way in the world back then, these were the guys. And as Lincoln works as a lawyer in Springfield then starts his political career. He is a skeptic. Or so the later biographies call him as such. but he never joined a church, and many called him an infidel at the time. How did this play out for him early on?

Was he conflicted? I don't think he felt conflicted. I think, you know, you mentioned earlier that he really had this tension with his father and the world that his father represented it. And I don't want to psychoanalyze this too much. But the fact of the matter is that the minute he turned 20, 21 years old and was permitted legally to separate from his father's household. He did, and he never looked back.

I mean, he and his father had an incredibly difficult and tense relationship. It's hard to say which one of them would. was more responsible than the other for it and probably, you know, both bore responsibility. But he leaves home and he barely ever looks back. His parents are never invited to his wedding, despite the fact that he has this very close and intimate relationship with his stepmother. He rarely talks to them. He rarely sees them.

Part of what he rejected was not just their worldview and the limited, what he believed was his father's sort of limited scope of ambition and almost his resignation to his lot in life, which is something that Lincoln, a man on the make in Antibald of America, wholly rejected. He also rejects their religion, but what's interesting is that he rejects religion full stop. He could have rejected their religion and embrace the sort of new evangelical Christian spirit that really was in many ways counter to his father's worldview. But he doesn't. And he is in his early days in New Salem, where he becomes a member of the state legislature before moving the Springfield. He's pretty outspoken.

He reads the books that you referenced. He talks about them in a pretty vocal way, and he lets people know on certain terms that he just doesn't. believe in God and he believes that, you know, standard Christianity is sort of nonsense. There's a rumor that dogs him in his early political campaigns, that he actually penned kind of anti-Christian tract purporting to sort of disprove Christian doctrine. We can't prove it happened, although more people remembered it than probably should have if it had just been a rumor, but it's hard to say. But the fact of the matter is that enough people thought it was true. He had to issue a couple of statements in his early runs for political office in which he denied being an infidel. But even if

you read those statements, they're very clever and lawyerly. They're a little too clever by half. So it's clear that he just can't bring himself to just lie and say that he believes in God or in Christ. He just denies being an active scoffer. So he basically settles on saying, I've never said anything bad about Christianity. That's all I have to say. So was it a professional choice, a political choice, to become affiliated with the church? I mean, was it as cynical and opportunistic as that? In Lincoln's part, he doesn't belong to a church. And he rarely attends even though his wife, He rent a pew in Springfield at a local Presbyterian church, but that was really more Mary's deal. She had been raised in a Presbyterian, became an Episcopalian, and gravitated back to the Presbyterian

church. But Lincoln's not a churchgoer. He will occasionally attend with her, and he obviously rents a pew on her behalf. But what's remarkable about Lincoln in the 1840s and 50s is that any other politician probably would have just gone through the motions, and he just pointedly refuses to do so. So in the late 1850s, the local Presbyterian minister, who was a friend and neighbor of the Lincoln's attempted by some accounts to convert him. And as somebody, one of his friends later said, tried, couldn't do it.

That was as late as 1857 or 58, which is a remarkable thing. I mean, for anybody else, it would have been an easy decision to at least go through the motions. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Why were medieval priests so worried that women were going to seduce men with fish that they'd kept in their pants. Who was the first gay activist? And what on earth does the expression sneezing in the cabbage mean? I'll tell you, it's not a cookery technique, that's for sure. Join me, Kate Lister on Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast where we will be bedhopping throughout time and civilization to bring you the quirkiest and kinkiest stories

from history. What more could you possibly want? Listen to Betwicks the Sheets today, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Podcast by History Hit. Hey, Josh, he is married to a very religious woman, Mary Todd Lincoln. I imagine this led to some sort of conflict or at least a complication. I would say Mary is religious. I don't think that she was, you know, zealous in her religious conviction. But over the years, she certainly maintained a closer relationship to the churches.

And, you know, she gravitated particularly to the Presbyterian church. And they rented a pew in Springfield. And then she attended regularly in Washington, D.C. and he increasingly over the years attended with her, probably out of deference to her. They had a complicated marriage. They also had a close marriage. I think she gets a raw deal in a lot of histories because I think people don't appreciate that he was a very difficult person to be married to and that she was also someone who he viewed

as being a primary backer of, encourager of, and an advisor in his early political career. I mean, there's, I don't think you see a president, Abraham Lincoln unless he had been married to someone like Mary Todd Lincoln. She was incredibly ambitious for him and politically savvy. Yeah, she was religious relative to him. I don't know that that was a huge portion of their strain, but it probably was one of the things that differentiated them. I may be thinking of her spiritualism after his death and her later life. During the war, there's a whole other evolution going on in this religious sensibility in America, right? So two things are happening. Let's talk about Mary

first, because I think it's a good segue into how religion affects the way that people think about what's happening to their loved ones who are dying in this war. Mary, you know, after Willie's death becomes in the thrall of spiritualism. It's a movement that sort of took hold in the 1850s through 70s in both the U.S. and England. People believe that they could commune with the dead. They held seances. They believed the dead could speak to them, that they could see the dead. They're departed, you know, brothers and sons and wives and sisters. And Mary really clings to this after Willie's death. She desperately wants to believe that on some level she can still commune with him and talk to him and see him. And she brings mediums into the White House to hold seances. She gets Lincoln to attend

one of them at one point, not during the war, but in later years, you know, biographers would use this as evidence that she was mentally unstable, that she was insane, that she was nuts. The problem, of course, with that is that this was a really popular movement and fad in the 1860s and 70s. And if you think that Mary Todd Lincoln was crazy for entertaining it, then you have to think quite a few U.S. senators who lost children or brothers during the war. Little children participated in it. Some of his cabinet members flirted with it. Queen Victoria flirted with it. Like there were a lot of influential people who were gravitating to this notion, this concept. So you can't really think that Mary Todd Lincoln is singularly insane for entertaining it and for just being so desperate

to make sense of Willie's death that she was willing to entertain it if you don't believe everyone else was as well. But more to the point, it's just the more extreme version of what's how happening writ large among evangelical Christians during the war. Up until the 1850s, the notion of heaven was much more theoretical. It was a place where you went after you died. And if you were going there, that is, of course, because not everyone was. But if you were, all earthly cares and concerns drifted away. You almost existed in a state of non-consciousness. You were leaving this world behind. And so while it's kind of liminal, there was a belief that, you know, you lived on and you lived with Christ, but not in a way that was at all recognizable, and you probably wouldn't even

recognize your former life. But what happens in the late 1850s, and then with great fervor during the war, as many Christians, most Christians, come to embrace a version of heaven, which would be more recognizable to us today. It's almost as though you're just recreating your Victorian home and family, but in heaven. So you're going to be reunited with your loved ones who preceded you or who die after you. You're going to be reunited in a setting that looks very much like your front parlor or front porch or bedroom. So heaven becomes almost a replica of the world that you inhabited here. And Christians really wanted to believe this particularly during the war.

The whole culture, the letters to and from, you know, soldiers and their wives or siblings and parents were full of references to being this certainty that as long as you die to Christian, you'd all be reunited in the next world soon enough. and people just sincerely believed it and wanted to believe it. And it's an idea of heaven that kind of stuck, I think, for a lot of people for decades after. But if you look at spiritualism and what Mary believed, it was a more literal interpretation of something that was more widely felt. Well, it's taking that idea of personal agency to an extreme. I mean, not only do you have a more personal relationship with Christ, but that personal relationship continues on into infinity.

That's exactly it. And I think what's so important about this is a couple of things, but one of them is that you see the war. Not only is Christianity a prism through which people understand the war and make sense of it, makes sense of their own role in it. The war is also changing Christianity. It's changing theology. It's changing people's perception of something so fundamental as the afterlife or heaven and what it means to be there. And so I think what I tried to do in this book is talk about how religion was a way that people understood the war and experienced it,

but also how the war itself impacted Christianity. And that's everything from changing conceptions of heaven and the afterlife to the politicization of the churches during the war. A third thing, which I think was really important during this period, which was a shifting emphasis from the New Testament to the Old Testament. Evangelical churches in the Antebellum period were much more focused on the New Testament. But I should say that's white evangelical churches. Black evangelical churches were very much focused on the Old Testament in the Antebellum period.

On one hand, stories like the Exodus were really. resonant for former enslaved people who populated, you know, a lot of the black churches in the north. But at the same time, I would argue that there was a more a belief in a harder, more retribute of God. And that kind of black church emphasis on the Old Testament found its way into the white churches during the war because, you know, it's really difficult to square Christian pacifism and love with total war. But the Old Testament gives you a really powerful tool for doing it and a powerful tool for understanding the war as an emancipation war, which more Americans came to embrace.

Everything changes, of course, when he enters into office and the civil war begins. It's a fascinating way to look at the war. I mean, the war was very much framed by Americans in the press on the pulpit as a religious struggle, a struggle between good and evil, on both sides, actually. But Americans use religion to make moral sense of the conflict. Does Abraham Lincoln do the same? I believe that he does. A couple of things are happening.

As early as 1860, we see Lincoln beginning to weave. religious imagery and language into his speeches and his public statements. Now, although he was not a believer, and quite the contrary, he was a close and careful student of the Bible. It was one of the books that he read over and over and over again, and he once told his law partner, he didn't read widely, but when he read something, it became etched like into steel with him. So he was a careful student of the Bible, even if he wasn't a believer. And he recognizes by 1860 the importance of the evangelical churches in culture and politics. And this would be particularly the case within the anti-slavery politics in the North, because while it is true that the evangelical churches in the

north were not uniformly abolitionist in any sense of the word by 1860, most anti-slavery and abolitionist Americans were evangelical. And it was an enormously important part of the Republican Party, the new Republican Party's coalition. So he recognizes that for a lot of people, religion has resonance, religious rhetoric has resonance. But during the war, to your point, as millions of northerners are turning to religion to understand, to make sense of the carnage, the death, the destruction, and their role in it, and then to make sense of what it means to be participating in a war that goes from being a war for union to a war to emancipate four million, you know, enslaved human beings. Religion becomes a powerful organizing tool for them. It also becomes a way

for them to probe and think about what the death of their loved ones in this war meant. And that was no less the case for Lincoln, who in this period is dealing with the death of his son, Willie, who died of typhoid in 1862. He was their beloved son, and it was a huge blow for him and for Mary. At the same time that he's dealing with his personal responsibility as the person who is overseeing this carnival of carnage, the weight that that bore on him, knowing that it was his war in many ways. I think religion does become a more profound.

influence for him or an interpretive tool, but two or three things are important. One, he never moves toward what we would recognize as a standard and prevailing sense of, you know, evangelical Protestantism. He still is really icon-classic. That's one piece. The second is that as he's becoming more spiritual and sincerely so, he also really steps up his efforts to incorporate the churches and their members and their leaders into the coalition that supports the war and the Republican Party. The third thing that's happening, and it's really remarkable, is that as most evangelical Protestants in the North come to believe that the war is a holy war, to your point, that God is on the Union side and the Union is on God's side, Lincoln remains really unconvinced that that's

the case. He believes that the war is in many ways divine retribution for the sin of slavery that northerners and southerners have to pay in equal measure. But he's not entirely sure that God wills that the North win the war. And that puts him quietly at odds with most of his countrymen. Those northern churches really had a lot to do with the raising of an army. I mean, they were a big practical part of the effort. And he knew that. Yeah. You have to understand that in this period, there were no other institutions in the U.S. that had the size, the scope, the money, the resources, and the influence to aid the government other than the churches. The churches were well. bigger than the federal government on the eve of the Civil War. Now, obviously the federal government

and the army become really bloated during the war. But the churches, you know, there were more Methodist ministers and churches in the country on the eve of the war than there were employees at the Postal Service, which is a remarkable statistic in as much as the Postal Service was the largest branch of the federal government in this period and one that most Americans had more direct relationships with. And these churches, the evangelical churches, both white and black churches in the north, threw themselves in a full-throated way behind the, you know, Union war effort. And so you would see American flags flying at church services and on church steeples, which at the time was quite unusual, maybe less so in certain church circles today,

ministers and lay leaders openly embracing the war effort, embracing emancipation as a war aim increasingly. They were early adopters at that point of view. You saw church leaders forcefully arguing for total war. They were early supporters of shifting from a war that was based on trying to just sort of corner the Confederate Army to actually destroying it and destroying the southern economy and destroying really the southern landscape in the furtherance of the effort to win the war. So they were early embracers of total war. As the war ran its course, the churches and the church leaders both lay and religious became pretty partisan advocates for the Republican Party because if you believe that it's a holy war

and that the North must win this war because God ordains it to be so, it's not a long step from there to believing that the only person who can see us through is Abraham Lincoln and the only party that can be reliably counted on to win this war would be the Republican Party is the Democrats did themselves no great service in the North as they, you know, particularly so-called copperhead Democrats, a good half of the party that wanted to sue for peace and let the South back in with their slaves or just let them go and be their own country with slavery intact. They were seen as being, you know, traitorous. And so it wasn't hard for a lot of religious leaders to get from being for the war to being for the Republican Party and against

the Democratic Party. And so you saw politicization of the churches, which was remarkable. Was there a pastor that he turned to? Was there somebody like a Billy Graham to Nixon kind of guy? I mean, there were quite a few of them, but I think the one who stands out in this period is Matthew Simpson, who was a Methodist bishop. No church through itself so wholeheartedly behind the Union War effort and the Republican Party in this period than the Methodists. You know, there was a saying Methodism is Americanism or means Americanism. And the Methodist churches were particularly outspoken in their opposition to slavery and their advocacy of abolition, in their advocacy of total war.

There were a bunch of clergymen known as the war bishops in the Methodist church. These were people who, because, you know, Methodist bishops rotate in their service. But Simpson was the kind of ultra war bishop. And he, in 1864, you know, he was on the stump, you know, campaigning for Lincoln and the Republican Party, almost as though he had been an Republican elected official. But he also really threw the weight of the church behind the war effort. He threw the weight of the church behind abolitionism. And he was just remarkably influential and so much so that although Lincoln had been raised a Baptist and I guess he was nominally affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, which he attended in Washington

during the war with his wife. When he dies, the family invites Matthew Simpson to deliver the eulogy at the funeral service in Springfield. While he's skeptic, while I buy this entire pragmatic view of religion, there seems to be something earnest that happens in office while he's there, some kind of transformation. He describes it the crushing pressures, the loss of his son, even his marriage to Mary Todd. Religion is a big part of his life regardless, and he seems to turn the corner. Is that fair to say or not? Oh, it's absolutely fair to say.

When you're trying to look at Abraham Lincoln and his internal world, it's really difficult because he leaves behind a pretty large record of public statements and speeches and letters that are political, but he leaves behind very few personal letters. So you have very few personal documents that give us any insight into his inner world. And that's particularly the case during the war when he just didn't have time. So you have that. The second thing you have are the recollections of people who are around him. But those recollections are really difficult and dicey to use because people's memory kind of faded over the years and people also wanted to voice their own agenda on him. And there were plenty of people who wanted to write him down in history

as a Christian after the fact. I'm sure that they felt they were sincerely doing him and the family of favor, but they were remembering things that almost certainly never happened. And then you have his public statements and utterances, which as the war wound on, became not only just infused with more biblical references, but if you look at documents like the second inaugural address, which Frederick Douglass said, you know, he was sort of confused almost. He loved it. But he said that it read more like a church document than a state document or even the Gettysburg address, which I'm not an evangelical Christian. I'm Jewish. If you're not raised in an evangelical Christian church today, you might not recognize the biblical references and tones in the Gettysburg

address, but they're there and I benefited from close readings that other people have conducted. And if you kind of wind your way backward, okay, well, you could be a bit cynical and say, well, he's infusing his public statements and speeches with biblical language and reaching out to the churches more because he knows that it's a powerful tool. And that's probably true on some level. You could say that people remembered him as they wanted to, and that's true. But we also have a couple of his private and personal reflections, and those were written for himself. And so, you know, in late 1862, he jots down some thoughts on divine will. And it's really interesting. It's obviously just him trying to hash some stuff out. It never gets published. He never sends it to

anyone. He doesn't show it to anyone as far as we know. His two presidential aides, John John Haye and John Nicolai discovered it years after the fact. And he's really has through like, what is God's plan here? God has a plan for me, is a plan for the country, is wrestling with whether he has agency. But he clearly through that and other statements he makes to other people, becomes convinced that there is a God. The war is retribution for slavery. It's punishment for slavery. He comes to believe that he, Abraham Lincoln, is God's instrument, as he says.

But there's a sort of passivity to it. He's not convinced that he understands what he's. is supposed to do other than fight this war until its conclusion. But he does become sincerely, I think, a believer. But his God is more distant. It's more unknowable than an evangelical Christian's God, which is personal and it's not Trinitarian. So it's a little different, even as he becomes way more steeped in the evangelical culture and appeals to it and marshals it in support of the war, he's moving toward a God that's much, much more similar to his father's God, which is really fascinating. Interesting. I think of him in such modern terms. First of all, an incredibly savvy politician. He sees the levers he needs to pull so many times in his career. That to me seems like the truest lens through which to look at Lincoln and why he's so good at the job and gets such amazing things done. But it's so tempting to get personal about it and try to find in this great president this humanity that may be overwhelming him more than he thought it was earlier.

his life. The Emancipation Proclamation, he states to his cabinet, or at least the account goes, that he saw this as his duty, given the redemptive factors involved in the Civil War, right? If things were going to turn in the North's way, he really needed to do this in 1863. I would add that, you know, Mary, who would later say that her husband was not a quote-unquote technical Christian, did acknowledge that during the war, particularly after Willie's death and at its height, she said when he went to Gettysburg in late 1863, where he delivered the Gettysburg address, she said that he was feeling. more and more religious and spiritual at that point. And when he talks about a new birth of freedom

at Gettysburg, that was both, you know, forecasting that emancipation would now be an outcome of the war of the North One, but it was also a knowing reference to the whole Methodist notion of regeneration and rebirth, second birth. Yeah. Let's talk about the Gettysburg Address. It is obviously so famous. It can be read as a testament to his spiritual transition, at least from reticence to a more religious a depth to him. You can sort of see it as a statement of going from an infidel as he's a accused of being early on, at least an agnostic, to a true believer in the redemptive qualities of Christianity. And if this is infused in this document, Boy, did he do a good job? With less more words, he basically attributes to the deaths of all these soldiers on the battlefield,

this sacrificial element, through the shedding of their blood, they are as a whole a Christ-like figure. And it is this sacrifice which redeems the United States. That's all in this address, which is amazing. It's a remarkably evangelical speech, which I think a lot of people miss, right? When he talks about the new birth of freedom, new birth is something that's deeply steeped in evangelical theology. It's a reference to the sinner's regeneration upon accepting Christ and his or her life. And most Americans at that point, most northerners, would have instantly recognized that language for what it was, particularly Methodists.

He uses phrases like shall not perish from this earth, which that phrase appears two times verbatim in the King James Bible on a third time nearly verbatim. So the whole thing is suffused with New Testament language and theology, but to your point, I think he viewed this whole notion of a national regeneration, the atonement and the repayment for this great sin that was slavery. And I think, A, he believed it, but B, equally important, he understood that to get the country to a place where it was willing to shift its understanding of the war from war just for union to war for union without slavery. And to do that enthusiastically, he had to meet Americans where they were, and that is where a lot of them were. And the churches certainly helped him in this,

because they reinforced it every Sunday. They reinforced it in their church publications and their tracks in their speeches. And so you can't really understand how Northerners came to embrace emancipation as an end and aim of the war without understanding the way in which religion influenced that point of view. And I think for Lincoln, it wasn't just. just a powerful rhetorical tool. It was something I think that he felt. He was such an order. You wonder what he would have done with his own eulogy, you know, as a sacrificial figure himself, taking the fall for a nation he'd carry through its worst times. It's a fascinating story. The journey of Lincoln is so much the rebirth of America, really the creation of modern America,

in my opinion. For my money, the United States really begins post-civil war in its complexities and its pluralism and so forth. And Lincoln is there to carry us through. The book is called, called Lincoln's God. The writer is Joshua Zites. Thank you so much for this conversation. I encourage everyone to read this book. It's a really accessible view of a very complex part of Lincoln's life and times and his mind. Thank you, Joshua. Thank you so much. Appreciate the invitation. Thanks for joining us today on American History Hit. If there's anything you'd like us to cover, we'd love to hear from you with any questions or comments or subjects. Just write to us at A-H-H at historyhit.com.

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