WSJ: Abraham Lincoln’s Unchurched Faith

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  Abraham Lincoln’s Unchurched Faith, by Allen C. Guelzo (Princeton; Author, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2024)):

The First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Ill., opened in 1876, but its most famous congregant never crossed the church’s threshold. Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with First Presbyterian dates to an earlier location, across town, and it was by no means an easy connection. ...

John G. Bergen, a Presbyterian missionary, arrived in 1828 and two years later had built his first church.

Bergen led the congregation until 1848, when it had grown to some 500 members. By then it had also suffered its first division. Presbyterians are the heirs of the 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin, who organized churches around the leadership of presbyters, or elders. The most prominent feature of Calvinist Presbyterians is their belief in God’s providential control of all human affairs and, concomitantly, the “predestination” of saints to salvation. They were also known for their resistance to royal authority in England. John Witherspoon, the only active clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, was Presbyterian. ...

Lincoln moved to Springfield in 1837. He admitted he’d “never been to church” there and “probably shall not be soon.” He had been raised in a devout Baptist family and even imbibed a strong dose of Calvinist teaching on predestination, but rebelled nevertheless. By the time he arrived to town, Lincoln had a reputation as an “infidel” and “was skeptical as to the great truths of the Christian religion.” Even after he married Mary Todd—a niece of one of First Presbyterian’s founders—neither he nor she made any motion to join a Springfield church.

But in 1850 the Lincolns’ second son, Edward Baker, died shortly before his fourth birthday. The Lincolns found some measure of consolation in James Smith, who had succeeded Bergen as First Presbyterian’s pastor in 1849 and presided over their son’s funeral. Two years later, Mrs. Lincoln was received as a member of the church, and her husband became “a pewholder and liberal supporter of the Presbyterian Church in Springfield.”

Lincoln paid the customary annual pew-rental fee but withheld any personal religious commitment. Yet Smith was likelier to influence Lincoln than was any other clergyman he had met. ...

The Lincolns left for the White House in 1861, and the Civil War placed a new kind of stress on the president’s skepticism. The casualties convinced him that some divine purpose must be driving the war to an unanticipated conclusion. By mid-1862, he had come to see the abolition of slavery as that end. When he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing more than three million slaves, his justification was a “covenant” he said he’d made with God. His most famous utterance, at Gettysburg, Pa., in November 1863, would locate the nation itself as “under God.” As the war ended in 1865, he interpreted its costs as a divine judgment for the evil of slavery.

Yet Lincoln never joined a church. He was assassinated on Good Friday 1865, while attending a theater, not religious services. When First Presbyterian moved to its current location, John W. Bunn rescued the family pew and presented it to the church in 1912. The artifact—a pew reserved for a president who didn’t attend—remains a silent witness to the complicated nature of Lincoln’s faith.

Wall Street Journal Book Review:  ‘Our Ancient Faith’ Review: The Lessons of Abe’s Outlook, by Roger Lowenstein

 

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• Was Abraham Lincoln A Christian? (Nov. 19, 2023)
• Abraham Lincoln’s Use Of The Bible In His Second Inaugural Address (July 17, 2022)
• What The Bible Taught Abraham Lincoln About America (Feb. 17, 2020)