User:JimWae/AL


 * Lincoln born to hard-scrabble Baptists
 * Likely never baptized
 * Rebelled from father
 * Herndon(?) says he was atheistic, agnostic, infidel
 * 1843 - re 1842 campaign, acknowledged he was suspected of being a deist
 * On March 26, 1843, at the time Lincoln was attempting to obtain the nomination for Congress, he wrote to Martin M. Morris, of Petersburg, Ill.:
 * "There was the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose with few exceptions, got all of that Church. My wife had some relations in the Presbyterian churches, and some in the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, was suspected of being a Deist and had talked about fighting a duel." (Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Nicolay & Hay edition, vol. 1, p. 80.)http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/steinlinc.htm http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.2/bookid.3237/sec.61/
 * He was accused of being infidel and scoffer at religion in campaign
 * He said he had never joined a church
 * did not reply to claim he was an infidel
 * Talked of Doctrine of Necessity (Calvinistic, deterministic, deistic)


 * Conversion? to what? Deism? Xty? belief in immortality?
 * Became convinced(?) God's plan included him

Calvinized Deism (p. 447).


 * http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3818/is_200010/ai_n8917113
 * http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_17_117/ai_62724230
 * http://www.powells.com/review/2003_07_29.html

How did Lincoln’s religion impact the civil war?
 * http://modeforcaleb.blogspot.com/2006/03/guelzo-on-lincoln.html
 * http://www.patrickkillough.com/history/lincoln_religion.html

Abraham Lincoln accepted “a distant and implacable Judge who revealed himself only through crisis and death” (446). Lincoln did not believe in personal redemption. According to Allen Guelzo,

“Lincoln’s own peculiar providentialism, his Calvinized deism, in fact played a controlling role in the outcome of the civil war” (447). Providence would have its way regardless of anything men might do or pray for. Early political compromise by mere mortals was therefore off the table. The war had to unfold on God’s unknowable timetable. Guelzo presents some slight evidence that as the war progressed, Lincoln may even have made a wager with providence. If God gave the Union victories, then Lincoln would free the slaves to win the war. Allen Guelzo occasionally spins sweeping conclusions from slim evidence. But as more scholars delve into contemporary reminiscences of Lincoln, our knowledge of Lincoln’s religion will correct itself and become more accurate

The role of religion in Lincoln’s own life is, as Carwardine notes, a considerable puzzle. He was not himself an evangelical Protestant; indeed, he may not have been, in an orthodox sense, a Christian at all. He rejected his parents’ hard-shell Baptist faith and was, as a young adult in New Salem, Illinois, something of a village atheist. He never denied the existence of a remote creator God, but he did reject, as Shenk notes, standard Protestant notions of “eternal damnation, innate sin, the divinity of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible.” He never publicly expressed Trinitarian faith and he seems not to have believed in an afterlife. Yet it is also the case that the trajectory of Lincoln’s religious life moved in the direction of affirmation; what Allen Guelzo (another Lincoln Prize winner) summarizes in his superb Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) as a “Calvinized deism” edged, by the end of Lincoln’s life, toward an openness to, if not precise discernment of, divine purpose. The young Lincoln was a fatalist who perceived God as, at most, a distant designer revealed only through the mechanical and deterministic operations of natural law. He held to a “doctrine of necessity” that denied free will. The Lincoln of the war years, however, saturated his speeches in the language of a providence that, however finally inscrutable, was active in history and that made room for purposive human behavior. “We must work earnestly in the best light He gives us,” Lincoln concluded, “trusting that so working ... conduces to the great ends He ordains.” Whether by the end of his life Lincoln had arrived at some semblance of orthodox faith cannot be known. Shenk, reflecting the scholarly consensus, is doubtful. “He visited, but he didn’t move in,” Shenk says of Lincoln’s relation to Christianity. Perhaps so, but his increasingly frequent comments during the White House years of reliance on divine favor suggest an emerging spiritual sensibility, however uncertain its precise nature.
 * http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5330


 * http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002195.html