While for most Americans the month of November recalls the sights and sounds of Thanksgiving, for Civil War buffs it is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, delivered November 19, 1863, that resurfaces from our deep pools of memory. Between Thanksgiving, the Meditation on the Divine Will Lincoln wrote a year earlier, the Gettysburg Address, and the ongoing funerals of soldiers dying daily in Virginia and Tennessee, God was clearly on Lincoln’s mind. Mark J. Larson, in God and the Civil War: Lincoln in Moral and Theological Perspective, argues that God played more than a passing role in the political life of Abraham Lincoln. Far from the more common depiction of Lincoln as a doubter who practiced an entirely secular politics, Larson offers a compelling picture of Lincoln as a Christian statesman whose thinking was contextualized not only by the Sectional Crisis, but also by the debates over slavery and Christianity playing out in American pulpits.
Admittedly, this writer approaches Larson’s thesis with caution. Abraham Lincoln was well known for his reticence about all things religious. Even now, 160 years after his death, it is difficult to know exactly what he believed at the end of his life. Allen Guelzo argued in Redeemer President that Lincoln was not a Christian, at least in the traditional sense of the term. Those closest to him wrote repeatedly that he was not a man of faith, let alone one who thought deeply about theology. Of Lincoln’s major biographers, Richard Carwardine departs somewhat from his peers by highlighting Lincoln’s childhood upbringing in the strict Calvinistic Regular Baptist churches he attended. Carwardine proposes in Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power that what Lincoln retained most from his upbringing was a sense of predestined purpose and providential mission rather than a Calvinist Baptist theology per se. Larson’s contribution to the Lincoln literature is unique insofar as his book is neither a biography nor a typical work of political philosophy. Major works on Lincoln’s politics hardly mention religion—Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided comes to mind—and Lincoln usually emerges as a strictly secular natural rights thinker. Larson, however, posits that Lincoln was a practitioner of the political philosophy—and by proxy political theology—of northern Old School Presbyterians characteristic of Princeton University.
Larson proposes that in the middle of the 19th century there were three substantive political Protestant philosophies, all attached to a respective theological tribe within the Reformed tradition. Slavery, says Larson, fractured the Reformed tradition, and whatever united Reformed tradition that might have developed in the aftermath of the Edwards-ian renaissance of the mid 18th century foundered on southerners’ commitment to enduring social hierarchies. Northerners, particularly New Englanders, followed Samuel Hopkins and embraced an equality of all mankind, white and black. Southern Presbyterianism and New England Puritanism represented two poles on the Reformed political spectrum. South Carolina and Massachusetts, as exemplars of these two traditions, seem to have been culturally, politically, and even theologically destined for war. Lincoln emerges in the pages of Larson’s book as an essential third way between Congregationalist New England and slaveholding southern Presbyterianism: a practitioner of a political theology rendered from Old Princeton, the home of Jonathan Edwards in addition to other Reformed luminaries. Old Princeton was moderately antislavery, politically conservative, and nationalists, without resorting to the theocratic antecedents of New England Puritanism or the over-realized Aristotelian order of the slaveholding South.
The idea that Lincoln adopted a Princetonian political theology is an attractive one. I want to believe that Lincolnian Protestant politics had its roots in the hallowed halls of Princeton Seminary, and that there is some sort of mystical chord of Protestant wisdom—shorn of Puritan theocracy, Cromwellian Caesarism, or slaveholding oligarchy—that was neatly nationalist and devoted to human liberty. Larson’s evidence is—for the historian—circumstantial. Lincoln’s political life occurred at the same time as major political questions rocked Reformed churches in North America; Lincoln was undoubtedly influenced by the Calvinist tradition in some capacity; and at the end of his life Lincoln was spiritually mentored by a prominent and politically active Old School Presbyterian pastor, Rev. Dr. Phineas Gurley. Larson, to his credit, is modest in his claim. Lincoln became a teachable and humble churchgoer in the second year of the American Civil War, which led to the 16th president practicing Christianity, in some form, for the last two years of his life. This same Christianity, Larson argues, had a profound affect on the statesmanship of the president.
While there’s much to commend in Larson’s book, there are also some areas to be critiqued. The first is that even if Lincoln was a practicing Christian—more on that later—there is absolutely no evidence he thought systematically about Christianity or its political applications. This is not to say he did not think about those things; it is simply to say that Larson’s evidence does not sufficiently reflect the image of Lincoln as a religious political thinker. Larson seems content to put Lincoln’s ephemeral religious thought within a broader conversation about politics and religion amid the Civil War. That’s a valid choice, but it leaves this historian asking what to make of the fact that there very much were, in that era, systematic biblical political theologians, and as Mark Noll notes, they tended to be southerners. Thornwell, and later Dabney, both brought ferocious intellects to bear on political theology, and they were effective. In The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Noll reminds us of the unfortunate fact that in the realm of religious ideas in the 1850s, southern slaveholders often appeared to be far more capable exegetes of the Christian scriptures than their anti-slavery co-religionists.
These criticisms not withstanding, Larson’s book is important precisely because he’s not writing a history. This is a work of political theology, centering Lincoln in political theology debates of the era. Such works as Larson’s are in short supply. Political philosophy is dominated by secularists, and those religious scholars who are interested in the discipline increasingly tend towards integralism or so-called Christian nationalism. Hence, Larson’s book as a work of political theology centered on a distinctly American figure seeking neither to import a continental European style of authoritarian Catholicism nor to project 19th and 20th century nationalism onto the 16th and 17th century reformers is most welcome. I don’t know if he’s right about Lincoln, Princeton, Gurley, and Christian statesmanship—but I want him to be.
If Larson is right, the United States after 1861 was made in the image of an expression of Protestant statesmanship that was both liberal and conservative, national and universal, anti-slavery and ordered, confessional and covenantal without being sectarian, Christian without being theocratic. And if the history of the United States between 1865 and 2015 is any indication, it seems like the United States did in fact reflect the sort of Protestant-based conservative liberalism that allowed for other religious to flourish in the American republic. Succeeding generations of immigrants did not have to sign up for the religion of Lincoln, but they did have to concede that his statesmanship offered the world a free republic that was nonetheless shaped by Christian statesmen. I don’t know if that world is still possible in 2025. But I want it to be.
