“Dishonest Abe” No Christian - Part II
In a previous article, Pastor Steve Wilkins wrote about the evidence that indicates that Abraham Lincoln was not a Christian. In his book “Lincoln” (Simon & Schuster, 1995), David Herbert Donald, a Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard, supports what Pastor Wilkins wrote.
Donald says (p. 15) that from his earliest days Lincoln had a sense his destiny was controlled by “some Higher Power” and that he “turned away from orthodox Christianity” finding it easier as a young man to accept something called the Doctrine of Necessity which Lincoln defined as the belief “that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” He calls this view “fatalism” and says it made for “a pragmatic approach to problems, a recognition that if one solution was not fated to work another could be tried.” He adds that “a kind of motto” for Lincoln was: “My policy is to have no policy” another way of saying that our 16th President had no fixed principles at all.
Donald says (p.33) that in 1823 Lincoln joined the Pigeon Baptist Church but his son never became a member. Lincoln’s stepmother says: “Abe had no particular religion — didn’t think of these question at that time, if he ever did.” Indeed, it is said that the young Lincoln, after church, would climb on a tree stump, and “rally the other children around him and repeat — or sometimes parody — the minister’s words.” Offended, his father, Thomas Lincoln, as one of the other children recalled, “would come and make him quit — send him to work.”
Donald says (p.48-49) Lincoln was “reluctant to accept any creed and though his parents’ Baptist belief in predestination was ingrained in his mind, “he felt more comfortable in thinking that events were foreordained by immutable natural laws that by a personal deity.” In fact, Lincoln’s analytical mind was more persuaded by “the few local freethinkers” (read: atheists — J.L.) than by any evangelists.
Donald says that Lincoln’s conversations with these “freethinkers” led him to Thomas Paine’s “Age Of Reason,” that classic rationalist attack on revealed religion, and Constantine de Volney’s “Ruins of Civilizations” which saw morality as the only essential, demonstrable part of religion. So damaging was the allegation that Lincoln was “an open scoffer at Christianity” that in his 1846 race for Congress (against the circuit-riding preacher Peter Cartwright) he was obliged to issue a formal denial.
Donald says (p.337) that when his son Willie died, Lincoln “increasingly turned to religion for solace,” his wife Mary saying: “He first thought.. .about this subject — never before.” And although he talked about God numerous times during his Presidency, Donald says these references, for Lincoln, “were abstract invocations of a Higher Power to save a society.” When a Presbyterian minister said Willie was in heaven, Lincoln wanted to believe this but “did not experience a religious conversion, reflecting later that he underwent what he called “a process of crystallization” in his religious beliefs. Still, he never became a member of any Christian denomination, “nor did he abandon his fundamental fatalism.”
Donald says (p.514) Lincoln said, when a friend saw him intently reading the Bible: “Take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.” He says (p.566) that Lincoln’s doctrine of necessity “was not a dogma accepted by most Americans.” - J.L.