Wall Street Journal Book Review: Amanda Brickell Bellows (The New School; Google Scholar), Calling Heaven to the Union’s Cause (reviewing Richard Carwardine (Oxford), Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union (2025)):
As a young man in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln was a religious skeptic. Raised in the Presbyterian Church, he would later decline to attend services and publicly question Christianity’s central tenets. But when the Civil War broke out following his election to the presidency, Lincoln underwent a spiritual transformation.
In “Righteous Strife,” Richard Carwardine explores how Lincoln’s faith shaped his actions during the Civil War and how the nation responded to his decisions. Mr. Carwardine, an emeritus Rhodes professor of American history at Oxford University, tackles a topic many Civil War scholars have tended to overlook: the influence of faith in wartime politics and nationalism. To understand how Lincoln and the broader populace viewed the Civil War and slavery through the lens of religion, Mr. Carwardine has studied underused primary sources, including pamphlets, sermons, church reports and newspapers. He argues that Lincoln’s “wartime religious turn” prompted the president to issue “executive action to upend the historic social order” and that, for many Americans, “the interpenetration of politics and religion became the wartime norm.” …
When the Civil War began, many Americans interpreted the conflict from a faith-based perspective. Mr. Carwardine finds that Lincoln intensified “his inquiry into the spiritual and religious dimensions of humankind” over the next four years, viewing God as a power who directly intervened in human events. …
Throughout the … war, Lincoln conversed with Catholic, Jewish and Protestant Americans to understand their perspectives and consider how popular opinion ought to shape his policies. In the autumn of 1864, Lincoln was re-elected for another term. During his second inaugural address he quoted from Scripture and, Mr. Carwardine observes, “reflected on the purposes of an Almighty God and His judgment on the American nation.”
“He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came,” Lincoln declared, condemning the South for seceding over slavery but also the North for previously perpetuating slavery through commerce and politics. With the war’s end in sight, he now called for unity, asking Americans to “achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace.”
One month later, John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, assassinated Lincoln on Good Friday, shocking the nation and ushering in a time of political uncertainty. Vice President Andrew Johnson soon stepped into the void to preside over a subsequent period of “Presidential Reconstruction” characterized by division, political infighting and white supremacist violence. As they did in wartime, many Americans would turn again to their faith to make sense of a dramatically changing postwar world.
Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:
- What The Bible Taught Abraham Lincoln About America (Feb. 17, 2020)
- Abraham Lincoln’s Use Of The Bible In His Second Inaugural Address (July 17, 2022)
- Was Abraham Lincoln A Christian? (Nov. 19, 2023)
- Abraham Lincoln’s Unchurched Faith (Feb. 11, 2024)
- Malice Toward None; Charity For All: Lincoln’s Vision Of Reconciliation For All Americans (Oct. 15, 2024)
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