Abraham Lincoln’s American civil religion
Abraham Lincoln (center, at pedestal) delivering his second inaugural address. Evidently, somewhere in the top row stands John Wilkes Booth.
In our own ways, we mark today the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. As we should.
And it’s worth noting here the legacy Lincoln left on what we now call American civil religion. Historian Mark Noll has written a very good summary of Lincoln’s “puzzling” religious faith.
I don’t think it is a stretch to say that in many ways he is American civil religion’s founder, in the sense that he crystallized many of America’s varied religious impulses into a non-sectarian whole. And his second inaugural address is its central text (although the Gettysburg Address is up there too). What is striking is the second inaugural’s utter lack of triumphalism, Lincoln’s attempt to pave a middle road between North and South while still acknowledging the evil of slavery, and the way he so eloquently expresses…
