Was Abraham Lincoln a Christian?

Christianity Today: Was Abraham Lincoln a Christian?, by Marvin Olasky (Editor in Chief, Christianity Today):

Was Abraham Lincoln a Christian? The book Abraham Lincoln, The Christian (1913) claims he was. Contemporary Lincoln biographer Allen Guelzo said in 2000, “He was not.” It’s a hard question: Lincoln was a skilled politician who understood his public, a compassionate president who agonized about sending soldiers to die, a private man with marriage problems that became public, and a thinker who thought long and hard about God. …

Lincon in 1858 famously said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He did not have to spell out to listeners the meaning of his reference to Matthew 12, where Jesus heals a demon-possessed man. The Pharisees said Jesus did it by using Satanic power, but Jesus responded that “every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand. … But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you” (vv. 25–28, KJV).

Lincoln won Northern votes by implying that the South was evil and the North could somehow bring about the kingdom of God. He shied away from talking about war, but Congressman John Wentworth of Illinois went around proclaiming in 1860 that John Brown the previous year had been like John the Baptist, clearing the way for Lincoln, who “will break every yoke and let the oppressed go free.”

The “house divided” speech and fervent politicking afterward won him the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. To overcome the old accusations of deism, Lincoln included in his stump speech a line about how he could not succeed without “divine help.” Some Northern ministers ignored Lincoln’s previously expressed beliefs because the Republican Party was now the instrument to end slavery through a quick victory.

That did not happen, and for two years the strategies of Lincoln and his generals failed.

Beginning in 1862, Lincoln attended the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington on Sundays and sometimes Wednesday prayer meetings. Several long talks with pastor Phineas Gurley helped him go through “a process of crystallization,” which Gurley described as a conversion to Christ. Lincoln himself never said that, but he did tell journalist Noah Brooks, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I have nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for that day.”

That may have been for public consumption, but a key bit of evidence is a private note Lincoln wrote just after the Union’s second morale-sapping defeat at Bull Run. His “Meditation on the Divine Will,” a note found on his desk after his death, was not a politically pious missive for public consumption but an attempt to think through what was beyond human understanding.

“The will of God prevails,” Lincoln wrote. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong, [for] God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.”

Who was right? Lincoln wrote, “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party…. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills the contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”

Was it God’s will for slaves to be freed? When responding to clergymen from Chicago who asked him to carry out God’s will concerning American slavery, he said, “These are not … the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation.” But Lincoln read the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet five days after Union forces stopped the Confederates at Antietam, stating (according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles), “God has declared this question in favor of the slaves.” …

Lincoln had not been above using religion for political purposes, but it seems that the war, along with the death of one of his sons, changed him. After previously questioning prayer, he was becoming a praying man. He told one general that as reports came in from Gettysburg during the first two days of fighting, “when everyone seemed panic-stricken,” he “got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed. … Soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul that God Almighty had taken the whole business into His own hands.”

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