Lessons from Lincoln
There isn’t any real news today. That’s kind of a relief, since news about The Question tends to be discouraging.
But we do have some wonderful thoughts expressed by Andrew Ferguson in First Things. The entire piece is a must read, but here’s the conclusion:
“I don’t know anything about Lincoln’s religion,” a longtime friend, David Davis, remarked after Lincoln’s death, “and I don’t believe anybody knows anything about it.” Though Davis’ skepticism should give pause to more historians than it has, he overstated the case. We will never know for sure whether Lincoln held orthodox Christian beliefs, whether he believed in the Trinity, the divinity of Christ or his resurrection, the life everlasting, the forgiveness of sins, the inerrant word of God as revealed in the Old Testament or the New.
But perhaps the country has benefited from not knowing. The uncertainty has made Lincoln our common property, whoever we are, from Robert Ingersoll to Cardinal Mundelein to Nettie Maynard. It may be indeed that Lincoln’s is the only kind of religious expression that will travel in a free country like ours. His religion has lasted a century and a half and has appealed to believers of all kinds, and to skeptics too, exactly because of its generality. Yet it still means something definable and concrete: The country, Lincoln believed, is the carrier of a precious cargo, a proposition that is the timeless human truth, and the survival of this principle will always be of providential importance. We assent to Lincoln’s creed, wide open as it is, when we think of ourselves as Americans.
(HT: Hugh Hewitt.) This seems like such an obvious point. It is both astonishing and disheartening that so many smart people who should know better either reject or ignore it.
Consider: Today, Lincoln would very likely not even get the Republican nomination. Is it so hard to imagine certain Evangelical leaders telling the world that they are deeply disturbed over Lincoln’s failure to profess publicly that he has accepted Jesus Christ? That they do not feel comfortable supporting him? Not just any acceptance of Christ would do for candidate Lincoln, of course — he would need to adopt only the Evangelical version of what Jesus was and is like.
Why, such folks might decide to vote for a smooth-talking former Baptist preacher instead, primarily because they simply feel more comfortable about that candidate. 
You must admit, dear readers, it is something to think about.
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2 Responses to “Lessons from Lincoln”
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conservativeinbama on 11 Apr 2008 at 11:29 am #
I guess one of the things on Huckabee’s list of “Getting the Constitution in line with God’s Standards” would be eliminating Article VI’s No Religious Test for Public Office provisions.
Nixon was a Quaker, would he have been able to get nominated? I’m thinking No.
coltakashi on 15 Apr 2008 at 1:04 pm #
In Lincoln’s day, Huckabee’s denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, was offering religious arguments supporting slavery and its members were almost entirely Democrats and supporters of secession.
It is odd that part of the attack on Mitt Romney by Huckabee partisans was the claim that he and the LDS Church were racist because of the policy against black ordination that they had ended in 1978. The notion that if you or your ancestors ever once discriminated on grounds of race, you can never be forgiven for it, is rather odd, coming from people (a) whose own ancestors and church supported the institution of slavery, (b) who supported legal discrimination into the 1960s, (c) who maintained segregated churches in many locations into the 1980s, and (d) who proclaim as their main message that God can forgive even egregious sinners through the grace of Christ. Where is the forgiveness of the penitent?
The Lincoln Memorial has engraved on the two interior walls the text of the Gettysburg Address, on one side, and of his Second Inaugural Address, given just a few days before his assassination, on the other. The only words most people know from the Second Inaugural are the concluding ones about “malice toeward none”. Leading up to it is Lincoln’s pondering about the fact that both sides in the Civil Ward invoked the blessings of God on their own cause, and his speculation that the consequences of the war for both sides were the judgment and justice of God for the terrible sin of allowing and profiting from slavery. It is a bold statement about America’s accountability to God for the way it treats its inhabitants, and it echoes the many statements in the Book of Mormon that the nations in the Americas have a special duty to God to live righteously. Lincoln was a contemporary of Joseph Smith when both lived in Illinois. I do not know if he ever read the Book of Mormon as he rode his horse around the judicial circuit. But if he did, those statements in the book may have found purchase in his own pessimistic view of humanity.