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Let's get into the story. Lincoln's religious views before the Civil War are a matter of controversy or a matter of uncertainty. He had certainly been attracted to the ideas of Tom Paine. He had an inquiring mind. He was an intellectual. He knew his Bible as well as any other book with the possible exception of Shakespeare.
They were the two staples of his reading. He attended the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield with his wife, Mary. They were pew holders. She was a member. He was not a member. He was an adherent.
He attended. And I think probably by the late 1850s, we can say that he was broadly in tune with what we would say today in Unitarian theology. It could be summed up in a belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. One thing we do know is that he had no time for pro-slavery theology.
And I'll just say a little bit about that. The South in the immediate post-revolutionary early republic period thought that slavery would gradually disappear. They regarded it as a necessary evil. But by the 1840s and 1850s, more and more southerners were standing up for the principle of slavery and the goodness of slavery. And they developed a pro-slavery theology. And their position is that slavery is scripturally sound. The Old Testament prophets owned slaves.
Nowhere in the New Testament does Christ declare slavery to be unsinful or unlawful or wrong. Major churches split over the issue of slavery. The biggest church methodism split in the 1840s.
And it was a really important step on the way to civil war because the breakdown of these national institutions had implications for politics. When we look at the secession movement, it's quite clear that it's being driven as much by the preachers and the pulpit as it is by the political conventions. Lincoln was deeply unimpressed with this theology, as indeed were very many other northerners. Lincoln was not a Methodist. He was not a Baptist. He was possibly a Unitarian. He certainly was attached to the Presbyterian church. And a Presbyterian by the name of Frederick Ross wrote a book on how slavery was ordained of God. And Lincoln wrote a little memorandum to himself in which he said, well, there's a biblical tussle over the Bible's position on slavery. But Dr. Ross has come to the rescue and he's given us his answer.
And if I may, I'll quote it. It's an ironic passage. Dr. Ross, he sits in the shade with gloves on his hand and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun. If he decides that God wills Sambo to continue a slave, he thereby retains his own comfortable position. But if he decides that God wills Sambo to be free, he thereby has to walk out of the shade, throw off his gloves, and delve for his own bread.
Will Dr. Ross be actuated by that perfect impartiality which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions? Lincoln had no time for pro-slavery theology. He's alleged to have had a conversation with the state superintendent of education, Newton Bateman, in which he says, I cannot see how our God could regard slavery as just. On the eve of the election of 1860, the vast majority of Calvinist traditional preachers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and increasingly Methodists, are subscribing to the idea of the United States as having a special mission under God. There's a torrent of sermons during the secession crisis, and then subsequently through the war, completely immersed in this idea that the United States is a modern day Israel, and that nations under God are expected to atone for their sins. Nations have a responsibility, just as individuals do, to behave in a godly way, in a godly fashion. God will reward those nations that walk in the paths of righteousness.
God will punish those nations that sin. That's deeply, deeply imbued in the American pulpit in the Civil War. Lincoln, on his way to Washington in February of 1861, he stops off at a number of places, including the New Jersey Senate, at which point he refers to the American people as an almost chosen people. There's that one kind of Lincolnian qualification, just tentativeness. Lincoln speaks to those people, and he has innumerable meetings with Presbyterians, with Congregationalists, with Episcopalians, with Methodists, and with Baptists.
They're always coming to the White House in deputations. William Tecumseh Sherman says, I wish Lincoln wouldn't spend so much time with all these grannies. Why does he get on with the business of state? And the answer is, well, for Lincoln, this is the business of state, and he's absolutely au fait with an understanding of this providentialism, this idea of God as the ruler of nations. And whereas individuals can be punished in the afterlife, nations have to be punished here and now, because there is no afterlife for a nation. In fact, the only after a life for a nation is the destruction of the nation, if it actually behaves completely outside the scope of the political morality. And you've been listening to Richard Carradine, a Lincoln prize-winning historian and emeritus Rhodes professor in American history at Oxford University in England, telling the story of the complicated faith life of Abraham Lincoln.
And it is complicated. And one thing we knew for sure is Lincoln had no time for the slavery theology developing in the South, that somehow slavery was ordained by God. Also fomenting around that time was quite the opposite feeling from the pulpits of the North, that America had this special mission and must atone for our sins as humans must.
When we come back, more of the story of Lincoln's faith life here on Our American Stories. Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? Wash away your worries with Anibay. Anibay is the only machine washable sofa inside and out, where designer quality meets budget friendly prices. That's right, sofas start at just $699. Enjoy a no risk experience with pet friendly, stain resistant and changeable slipcovers made with performance fabric. Experience cloud-like comfort with high resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.
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Visit addi.com to learn more about Addi. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your stories, small or large, to our email, OAS at OurAmericanStories.com.
That's OAS at OurAmericanStories.com. We'd love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them too. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of Lincoln's Faith Walk with Richard Corradine. Let's get back to the story, and you'll also be hearing from Hillsdale College's Bill Maclay later in this piece. I don't think he became the Christian that many Christians wanted him to be.
They kept pushing him and kept asking him. But there's no clear evidence that he ever saw Christ as anything more than a prophetic figure, not as a divine figure, inspired by God, but not God. But what he does do during the war is turn to faith. He's a seeker after faith and a seeker after the true reading of God. I wouldn't say there's anything like guilt in a Lincoln search for an almighty, but I do think that as the bringer of war, as the person who sees the deaths of hundreds of thousands, in the end, of course, three quarters of a million, north and south, who are the victims of war, as he suffers the terrible death of his own son, our favorite, favorite son, Willie, in February of 1862, as he loses the emotional support of his wife through the rest of the war, basically, it is no surprise, it seems to me, that he would turn for nourishment to the Bible. He's to be found frequently reading the Bible.
The housekeeper on one occasion crept up behind him to see what he was reading and discovered that, no surprise, he was reading the Book of Job. He clearly spent as much time reading the Old Testament as the New Testament, recognizing that there were lessons to be learned there. And first days were very familiar to the colonial settlers, to the inhabitants of the colonies, as they were indeed to British Christians in the 17th and 18th centuries, but had been pretty few and far between in the American Republic.
There was real tussle as to how legitimate it was. George Washington called one, Madison called one, but when Andrew Jackson was asked to call one at the time of the cholera epidemic, he said, no, this is tying church and state. The fast days and federal days of Thanksgiving only come in significant numbers under Lincoln, and Lincoln issues three separate calls for fast days. One is after the defeat of Bull Run, the second on the eve of the battles of the summer of 1863, when there have been severe losses in the period leading up to that, and then again after the terrible summers events in 1864, the Battle of the Spotsylvania, the wilderness. And on each of those occasions, Lincoln calls fast days.
In addition, he calls days of Thanksgiving after Vicksburg and Gettysburg in 1863, and again after the fall of Atlanta. These are moments where the theology that I've explained earlier, this theology of nations under God, spelled out in some detail. These are religious occasions. These are profoundly theological occasions. The citizens will attend church. They will be preached at by ministers who are exploring the ways in which the nation, the American nation, has failed. Now for some people that failing has absolutely to do with slavery, but for others it has to do with, not with slavery, but with the shortcomings of the people in other particulars.
And Lincoln at the second inaugural, at odds with the majority pulpits of the north, in March of 1865, it was very clear that the war was in its final stages and the union was going to triumph. But instead of saying, as you might have expected a triumphalist president to say, he says, we both north and south pray to the same God. And each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces.
But let us judge not that we be not judged. Maybe in praying to the same God, we are actually speaking the language that he doesn't accept from either of us. The deist God was utterly predictable. The God of Tom Paine was, you know, he was the clockmaker and the world was just running according to Lincoln's God is unpredictable. The prayers of both could not be answered.
That of neither has been answered fully. The almighty has his own purposes. Maybe we are both north and south are to blame for the sin of slavery. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come, but which having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove and that he gives to both north and south this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.
Justice is at the heart of this second inaugural. This is an American sin. It is not simply a southern sin. We have been commercially and politically embraced in the sin of slavery.
We've not stood up as we should have done. How God chooses to punish the unjust is for God to decide and God is punishing us all. Shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.
As was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. It is in fact a remarkable plea for kind of national unity in a basement, in religious abasement before God for the sins that the nation has committed and this is what's at the heart of the second inaugural forgiveness and reconciliation of the true Christian virtues. He knew when he delivered this that he was saying something that was not likely to be acceptable to many people and he wrote this to Thurlow Weed, the political boss Thurlow Weed who had written to Lincoln and Lincoln, I think Lincoln misread his letter thinking that Thurlow Weed had commended the second inaugural. I don't think we should have done that but anyway Lincoln took it to be such and he said he'd expended the speech, I quote, to wear as well as perhaps better than anything I have produced but I believe it is not immediately popular.
Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it however in this case is to deny that there is a God governing the world and that's Lincoln in a private letter very clearly stating that this document, the second inaugural, it was not just for public consumption but he personally, Lincoln, believes there is a God governing the world, a mysterious God who intervenes in human affairs and that's a dramatic statement and then he ends and says it is a truth which I thought needed to be told and as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might have fought for me to tell it. So that extraordinary humility, we're all sinful and I'm saying that I am one of us who have committed this sin. To that extent it's reasonable for me to say that this is a sin of all Americans. It is a remarkable document and the nearest thing that I guess one has ever had from a president that could be called a sermon. And last a special thanks to the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to access this wonderful audio, originally a part of their Scholar Talk series, The Story of Lincoln's Faith, here on Our American Stories.
This is Jana Kramer from Windown with Jana Kramer. Have you ever felt that uneasy anxiety when the 4 p.m. hour strikes? The creeping meal related distress that happens when you don't quite feel prepared? You know, dinner dread. Let's get rid of that unpleasant feeling forever with one word, Stouffer's. No matter what happens, you'll have a dinner plan that everyone loves with Stouffer's. Some chicken enchiladas or a cheesy chicken and broccoli pasta bake is always well whether it is Plan A or Plan D-licious. When the clock strikes dinner, think Stouffer's. Shop now for family favorites.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Chase Mobile App is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Copyright 2025, JPMorgan Chase & Co. This message comes from Greenlight. Ready to start talking to your kids about financial literacy? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app that teaches kids and teens how to earn, save, spend wisely, and invest with your guardrails in place. With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on what your kids are spending with real-time notifications. Join millions of parents and kids building healthy financial habits together on Greenlight. Get started risk-free at greenlight.com slash iHeart. Homes.com is the only place where you can find specialized neighborhood guides with the in-depth insider info home shoppers want.
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