User:Tim Chambers/Abraham Lincoln

Was Abraham Lincoln a Christian? I found this at [1] (http://www.intouch.org/myintouch/mighty/portraits/abraham_lincoln_213718):

...Thanks to the devotion of his mother, Nancy, who died when he was quite young, and then his stepmother, Sarah Bush, Lincoln grew to regard the Bible as a foundational tool for life. Lincoln once said: "This great book [the Bible]...is the best gift God has given to man...But for it we could not know right from wrong."

...

Despite his Christian upbringing, Lincoln did not accept Christ as his Savior until later in life. While he governed the nation by many of the principles written in God's Word, he lacked a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. After the death of his son, Willie, Lincoln heard for the first time of Christ's personal love and forgiveness for each man and woman.

He wrote: "When I left Springfield, I asked the people to pray for me; I was not a Christian. When I buried my son—the severest trial of my life - I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg, and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ."

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Seems to me the implications of this are that Lincoln began as a Deist (a widespread stance among the earlier Founders of the USA) and later became a Christian. – AnonymousCoward 200.255.83.xxx

I don't think so. Belief in the Bible is a poor correlation to deist beliefs. The God of the Bible is hardly depicted as a watchmaker. <>< tbc

Ok, after I wrote that I thought, no, that probably isn't the right way to say it. :-) But we normally call people who "believe in the Bible" without "believing in Jesus Christ" Jews. You could probably get a best-seller and maybe a spot on Oprah from trying to defend that position (not that I'm suggesting you actually hold it!). :-) – AnonymousCoward 200.255.83.xxx

Again I have to disagree. I think you'll find that Jews today don't talk in terms of "believing in the Bible" the way Christians do. Jews are deeply grounded in tradition. Furthermore, the range of beliefs of those who "believe in the Bible" is vast. Jefferson, for instance, made a lot of anti-Christian comments, but he also funded Christian missionaries to the Indians. Mark Twain said, "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." (See [2] (http://www.magicmartini.com/deism/marktwain.htm) for one citation.) <>< tbc

Fascinating. I am glad to converse with you, even though we don't agree about everything. :-) (I didn't know that about Jefferson.) And for what it's worth, why do you suppose Twain said that? – AnonymousCoward 200.191.188.xxx

The enjoyment of the conversation is mutual.

From the little I've read about Twain, he was hostile to Christianity. So the context is that the parts of the Bible that he understood were enough to convince him that he wanted no part of it.

<>< tbc

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tbc: a lot of the Deists had some degree of respect for the Bible, although they often viewed it as mistaken at points. Witness e.g. Thomas Jefferson -- he liked the Bible, although he felt the need to cut it up and remove the bits he disagreed with... But I'd agree that Abraham Lincoln, if he was ever a deist at all, wasn't a very orthodox one...

Maybe the answer to all this is that Abraham Lincoln (like a lot of real world people, I suppose, including maybe even me) didn't fit easily into boxes like "deist" or "Christian". His real religion was Abraham-Lincolnism... :-) -- SJK

I found a couple other sources on the Web. [3] (http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/steinlinc.htm) seems partisan positiveatheism.org (http://www.positiveatheism.org/) but well-researched. [4] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/12/049l-021200-idx) reviews Allen C. Guelzo's book, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and has this to say:

Numerous biographers tried to twist Lincoln into what the public wanted in the martyred president, "a true Christian." They suggested that he was a closet Christian, who secretly attended prayer meetings, that he had been secretly baptized or had been converted after the death of his son Willie or after Gettysburg.

Guelzo concluded none of those stories was true. Lincoln, he said, was influenced by remnants of his Calvinist upbringing, which he had rejected long before he became president, and his belief in divine providence as life's guiding force.

This issue is a fascinating example of how historians attempt to reconstruct an individual's character from mere artifacts. I've only spent a handful of minutes researching this on the Web, and already I see how complex and unsatisfying the evidence is. I still think [5] (http://www.intouch.org/myintouch/mighty/portraits/abraham_lincoln_213718) offers the strongest piece of evidence, but I'd like to see the entire letter in which Lincoln says, "I then and there consecrated myself to Christ," before adding it to a Wikipedia article.

<>< tbc