{"id":1962536,"date":"2023-07-02T05:08:02","date_gmt":"2023-07-02T09:08:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-god-of-abraham\/"},"modified":"2023-07-02T05:13:08","modified_gmt":"2023-07-02T09:13:08","slug":"the-god-of-abraham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-god-of-abraham\/","title":{"rendered":"Abraham&#8217;s God"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">4<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-god-of-abraham%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1962536&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div>\n<blockquote>\n<h2>REVIEW: \u2018Lincoln\u2019s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation\u2019 by Joshua Zeitz<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n<figure><figcaption>\n      President Abraham Lincoln with members of his cabinet (from left), Gideon Welles, the secretary of the Navy, Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the Treasury, Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, William Seward, secretary of state, Caleb Smith, secretary of the interior, Edward Bates, attorney general and Edwin Stanton, secretary of state for war. \/ Getty Images<br \/>\n    <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>People who met Abraham Lincoln for the first time were charmed by his open-handed and affable manner, easy, humorous, and unassuming. Those who knew him better understood that behind the likability lurked a depth, a remoteness, a firmly closed door that only a few were allowed to open. Lincoln once spoke of friendship as the greatest boon of life; yet, he had few real friends whom he drew into close confidence. Partly, this was a matter of prudence. Lincoln was a politician, and he had learned early on that a politician did himself no favors by putting all his cards on the table. Partly, it was a matter of temperament. He was not one of those genial souls who enjoyed self-revelation. And on no point was his prudence, and his temperament, more on guard than on the subject of religion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/winred.tomcotton.com\/tom-cotton\/defend-scotus-ads-beacon?utm_source=rc&#038;utm_medium=beaconads&#038;utm_campaign=2023maybeaconscotus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/winred.tomcotton.com\/tom-cotton\/defend-scotus-ads-beacon?utm_source=rc&#038;utm_medium=beaconads&#038;utm_campaign=2023maybeaconscotus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Just on those terms, Joshua Zeitz\u2019s new book, <em>Lincoln\u2019s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation<\/em>, is a gamble, since Lincoln never handed out descriptions of what his religion was. He is the only president never to have joined a church, never to have been baptized, never to have taken communion, and attempts to lure affirmations (or denials) from him on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/theologian-warns-woke-pastors-are-preaching-neo-racism-they-think-the-ultimate-medal-they-can-win-is-to-offend-no-one\/\" title=\"Theologian Warns Woke Pastors Are Preaching Neo-Racism: \u2018They Think The Ultimate Medal They Can Win Is To Offend No One\u2018\">religious topics<\/a> usually fizzed away evasively into qualifications and metaphors.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, though, Lincoln had more to say publicly about faith, and with greater sophistication, than any other American president. This is enough to persuade Zeitz that Lincoln &#8220;underwent a spiritual renewal&#8221; during his presidency and that religion became &#8220;a commanding force in his personal and public lives.&#8221; The principal difficulty in making this declaration is that the personal part of the evidence is so scanty. Despite well-meaning claims after his death that Lincoln had been secretly baptized (as in the notorious Maria Vance narrative), or that he kept his religious renovation concealed for political reasons (as his first full biographer, Josiah Gilbert Holland, believed), or that he was on the eve of making some public declaration of Christian faith at the time of his assassination, there is not only no worthwhile substance behind any of these suppositions, but a good deal of testimony otherwise. One of the best proofs <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> offers of Lincoln\u2019s religious vitality are the numerous thanksgiving and fast-day proclamations Lincoln issued as president\u2014except, of course, that it\u2019s generally understood that these were not written by Lincoln at all, but by his secretary of state, William Henry Seward.<\/p>\n<p>The case <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> wants to make for Lincoln is further compromised by how the reach of the book frequently exceeds its grasp, since <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> at the same time wants to be a history of American Protestant evangelicalism in the Civil War years. The argument it formulates runs more-or-less like this: Religion in early America was a feeble affair, burdened with the weight of Puritan Calvinism; however, evangelical revivals tossed aside the encumbrance of Calvinism in favor of a self-centered free-willism that just happened to blend harmoniously with the new republic\u2019s free-will political democracy; Lincoln pushed away his own family\u2019s Calvinism and rallied American evangelicals to become activist supporters of the kind of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-god-of-abraham\/\" title=\"Abraham's God\">large-scale modern government needed<\/a> to win the Civil War. These evangelicals became the heart and soul of a war to end slavery, just as Lincoln became &#8220;the nation\u2019s first evangelical president,&#8221; and they grew from there to become liberal Social Gospellers.<\/p>\n<p>But the moment any real weight is placed on it, this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/questions-remain-as-capitol-officers-death-narrative-collapses\/\" title=\"Questions Remain as Capitol Officer\u2019s Death Narrative Collapses\">narrative collapses<\/a>. In the first place, <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> displays no real sense of what <em>evangelical<\/em> means, and certainly seems to have missed entirely the fact that the revivals which are supposed to have transformed a sickly American religion into a boisterous powerhouse of democratic self-assertion were themselves the offspring of Calvinists, both in their 18th- and 19th-century forms. In the second place, it makes no sense to speak of Lincoln as an exemplar of this evangelical democratization when, as <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> repeatedly concedes, Lincoln regarded God as an &#8220;abstract and unknowable force&#8221; and &#8220;never shared the personal relationship with God in Christ that most of his coreligionists felt.&#8221; Even more of a contradiction is the assertion in<em> Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> that the God Lincoln is supposed to have recognized was really a renascence of the predestinating Calvinist deity &#8220;he had rejected in his youth.&#8221; If evangelicalism was a movement that shucked off Calvinism in favor of abolitionist democracy, how can Lincoln be its model?<\/p>\n<p>The wiser path for <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> to have pursued begins with a concession that Lincoln grew up a rebel against his parents\u2019 Calvinism and against any real form of evangelical piety at all. There is little to show that this changes in Lincoln before his presidency. It was the Civil War and its maddeningly unpredictable course that forced Lincoln to reflect on the purposes of a God who was visiting this calamity on the nation, and which produces the private &#8220;Memorandum on the Will of God&#8221; and the Second Inaugural. It is true that the Second Inaugural is the closest thing to a sermon ever delivered by an American president. What is also true is that the theology of the Second Inaugural is not an evangelical one; it contains no reference to Christ, and speaks only in terms of judgment, with no concept of redemption.<\/p>\n<p>This is not the only way in which <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> often seems out-to-sea with the complexities of 19th-century American religion, not to say of Lincoln himself. The endnotes do not indicate much beyond the use of secondary literature (for instance: in the chapter on &#8220;Soldiers\u2019 War,&#8221; 20 out of the 45 citations are drawn from just three secondary works). And the narrative is content to repeat superficial howlers about the Civil War being a &#8220;total war,&#8221; without any explanation of how one can wage a &#8220;total war&#8221;\u2014or even a modern war\u2014with infantry weapons limited to single-shot black-powder firearms. <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> claims that the war was originally supposed to be waged politely according to a &#8220;West Point code.&#8221; But there was no such &#8220;West Point code,&#8221; which is why <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> does not quote from it. Congress moved beyond politeness when it passed two Confiscation Acts to seize rebel property<b>\u2014<\/b>but Lincoln\u2019s administration did little to enforce them, and what was confiscated under the acts was frequently turned back to its owners through <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/cnn-ripped-for-bizarre-distortion-of-clarence-thomas-dissent-in-pa-election-case\/\" title=\"CNN Ripped For \u2018Bizarre Distortion\u2019 Of Clarence Thomas Dissent In PA Election Case\">federal court challenges<\/a> after the war. Above all, <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> never addresses the conundrum that bothered so many of the evangelical clergy in 1865: Why was Lincoln in a theater, watching a comedy, on Good Friday, when he was shot?<\/p>\n<p>And then there is the plethora of simple factual errors: that Lincoln had an &#8220;older brother&#8221; (he had a <em>younger<\/em> brother who died in infancy), that Elijah Lovejoy was &#8220;lynched&#8221; by a &#8220;proslavery horde&#8221; (he was shot to death in an exchange of gunfire), that Lincoln received a &#8220;bar license&#8221; to practice law (he was licensed by the Illinois state supreme court to practice in all of the state\u2019s courts), that it was Arthur Tappan who found a translator for the <em>Amistad<\/em> captives by wandering the &#8220;wharves of Brooklyn&#8221; (it was the Yale linguist Josiah Willard Gibbs), that his business partner in New Salem was William F. Barry (it was <em>Berry<\/em>), and that &#8220;millions of Americans&#8221; sang &#8220;Rescue the Perishing&#8221; or &#8220;Blessed Assurance&#8221; by &#8220;the eve of the Civil War&#8221;\u2014which they could <em>not<\/em> have done because these hymns were not written until 1869 and 1873.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the best thing which can be said about <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> is that it wants to take Lincoln seriously as a religious thinker. But doing that requires a more complicated set of tools than <em>Lincoln\u2019s God<\/em> displays.<\/p>\n<p><em>Lincoln\u2019s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation<\/em><\/p>\n<p>by Joshua Zeitz<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/winred.tomcotton.com\/tom-cotton\/defend-scotus-ads-beacon?utm_source=rc&#038;utm_medium=beaconads&#038;utm_campaign=2023maybeaconscotus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/winred.tomcotton.com\/tom-cotton\/defend-scotus-ads-beacon?utm_source=rc&#038;utm_medium=beaconads&#038;utm_campaign=2023maybeaconscotus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Viking, 331 pp., $30<\/p>\n<p><em>Allen C. Guelzo is director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in Princeton University\u2019s James Madison Program and author of<\/em> Robert E. Lee: A Life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In &#8220;Lincoln&#8217;s God,&#8221; Joshua Zeitz explores how faith shaped both President Abraham Lincoln and the nation. The book delves into Lincoln&#8217;s relationships with his cabinet members, including Gideon Welles, Salmon P. Chase, Montgomery Blair, William Seward, and Caleb Smith. It offers a compelling analysis of the transformative power of faith during a pivotal time in American history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2180,"featured_media":1962537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[544],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1962536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-free-beacon"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1962536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1962537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1962536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1962536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1962536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}