Richard Wightman Fox: Lincoln's Religious Quest
[Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, is the author of Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession.]
The recent avalanche of Abraham Lincoln books announces the ever-closer approach of Lincoln's 200th birthday. (Lay in some extra bunting: Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, Feb. 12, 1809.) The year 2005 began with C.A. Tripp, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, freely speculating about Lincoln's alleged "homosexual side" and with Ronald C. White Jr., in The Eloquent President, reminding us that this self-educated son of a small-time farmer evolved against all odds into an accomplished prose stylist. The year ended with Joshua Wolf Shenk inviting us to ponder Lincoln's Melancholy, a broader state of soul-suffering than what we now call "depression," and with Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, refocusing attention on Lincoln the politician and president. Nothing in his psychic life stopped him from defanging his Republican presidential competitors, slyly bringing them into his Cabinet, and exploiting their talents while keeping their higher aspirations in check and turning a couple of them into firm friends.
In Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, Richard Carwardine, a history professor at Oxford, extends Goodwin's emphasis on Lincoln the politician, leaving Lincoln's personal life wholly aside. Carwardine is not trying to protect the president's image of greatness—he explicitly rejects the tradition of "biographical pietism" that often elevates Lincoln above mortal men. But he is wary of speculative scholarship about Lincoln's personal life that relies not on Lincoln's own written or publicly spoken words but on the post-assassination recollections of others (sometimes first published decades after Lincoln's death). This Lincoln, first published three years ago in a British series called "Profiles in Power" and now reissued by Knopf in an illustrated edition, nevertheless contributes something new to our grasp of Lincoln the person as well as the politician. The author of two previous books on religion and politics before 1865, Carwardine shows how deeply religion informed Lincoln's exercise of power and ultimately his sense of himself.
Here he joins forces with Allen Guelzo, whose ground-breaking Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) challenged the reigning outlook among 20th-century historians. They had presumed that the non-church-member Lincoln maintained a secular perspective throughout his life, even as, during the war, he found psychic solace in the Scriptures and accommodated the religious cravings of his fellow citizens by framing some of his speeches in biblical language. David Donald's superb Lincoln (1995), while noting the president's apparent religious turn, saw even his deeply theological second inaugural address as a translation by Lincoln of his persistent secular fatalism into religious terms familiar to his audience....
Thanks to Carwardine and Guelzo we can see that Lincoln, by the end of his life, had inverted Thomas Jefferson on the subject of religion. The third president, the great exponent of Enlightenment, had tried to banish mystery from religion while preserving a privileged place for Jesus as the greatest ethical teacher of all time. For his part, the 16th president dropped Jesus by the wayside while rekindling awareness of the unfathomable mysteries of religion. Lincoln resembles the ostensibly secular Benjamin Franklin more than he does the Jesus-infatuated Jefferson. The skeptical Franklin kept a place for Providence in his thinking about the ultimate fate of humanity, while dismissing the pleas of his friend the Rev. George Whitefield that Franklin "close with Christ." Lincoln transformed Franklin's Providence into a vigorous historical actor but, like Franklin, he found little use for Jesus. ...
One reason why Lincoln has endured as Americans' prime civic icon (white Southerners having come on board in large numbers even by the late 19th century) is his straddling of the secular-religious boundary line. He can gather disciples on both sides. The 2009 commemorations will surely coincide with attempts to induct Lincoln into the ongoing American cultural tug-of-war by forcing him onto one side or the other. Pundits of faith are liable to pit a secular Darwin against a religious Lincoln. Perhaps Carwardine's book will help shield him from such treatment. The real Lincoln remains a straddler, too religious for most secularists but too fatalistic for most religionists.
Read entire article at Slate
The recent avalanche of Abraham Lincoln books announces the ever-closer approach of Lincoln's 200th birthday. (Lay in some extra bunting: Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, Feb. 12, 1809.) The year 2005 began with C.A. Tripp, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, freely speculating about Lincoln's alleged "homosexual side" and with Ronald C. White Jr., in The Eloquent President, reminding us that this self-educated son of a small-time farmer evolved against all odds into an accomplished prose stylist. The year ended with Joshua Wolf Shenk inviting us to ponder Lincoln's Melancholy, a broader state of soul-suffering than what we now call "depression," and with Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, refocusing attention on Lincoln the politician and president. Nothing in his psychic life stopped him from defanging his Republican presidential competitors, slyly bringing them into his Cabinet, and exploiting their talents while keeping their higher aspirations in check and turning a couple of them into firm friends.
In Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, Richard Carwardine, a history professor at Oxford, extends Goodwin's emphasis on Lincoln the politician, leaving Lincoln's personal life wholly aside. Carwardine is not trying to protect the president's image of greatness—he explicitly rejects the tradition of "biographical pietism" that often elevates Lincoln above mortal men. But he is wary of speculative scholarship about Lincoln's personal life that relies not on Lincoln's own written or publicly spoken words but on the post-assassination recollections of others (sometimes first published decades after Lincoln's death). This Lincoln, first published three years ago in a British series called "Profiles in Power" and now reissued by Knopf in an illustrated edition, nevertheless contributes something new to our grasp of Lincoln the person as well as the politician. The author of two previous books on religion and politics before 1865, Carwardine shows how deeply religion informed Lincoln's exercise of power and ultimately his sense of himself.
Here he joins forces with Allen Guelzo, whose ground-breaking Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) challenged the reigning outlook among 20th-century historians. They had presumed that the non-church-member Lincoln maintained a secular perspective throughout his life, even as, during the war, he found psychic solace in the Scriptures and accommodated the religious cravings of his fellow citizens by framing some of his speeches in biblical language. David Donald's superb Lincoln (1995), while noting the president's apparent religious turn, saw even his deeply theological second inaugural address as a translation by Lincoln of his persistent secular fatalism into religious terms familiar to his audience....
Thanks to Carwardine and Guelzo we can see that Lincoln, by the end of his life, had inverted Thomas Jefferson on the subject of religion. The third president, the great exponent of Enlightenment, had tried to banish mystery from religion while preserving a privileged place for Jesus as the greatest ethical teacher of all time. For his part, the 16th president dropped Jesus by the wayside while rekindling awareness of the unfathomable mysteries of religion. Lincoln resembles the ostensibly secular Benjamin Franklin more than he does the Jesus-infatuated Jefferson. The skeptical Franklin kept a place for Providence in his thinking about the ultimate fate of humanity, while dismissing the pleas of his friend the Rev. George Whitefield that Franklin "close with Christ." Lincoln transformed Franklin's Providence into a vigorous historical actor but, like Franklin, he found little use for Jesus. ...
One reason why Lincoln has endured as Americans' prime civic icon (white Southerners having come on board in large numbers even by the late 19th century) is his straddling of the secular-religious boundary line. He can gather disciples on both sides. The 2009 commemorations will surely coincide with attempts to induct Lincoln into the ongoing American cultural tug-of-war by forcing him onto one side or the other. Pundits of faith are liable to pit a secular Darwin against a religious Lincoln. Perhaps Carwardine's book will help shield him from such treatment. The real Lincoln remains a straddler, too religious for most secularists but too fatalistic for most religionists.