Abraham Lincoln: Was He a Christian?

by John E. Remsburg

Colonel Lamon is confident that while Lincoln finally ceased to openly promulgate his Freethought opinions, he never abandoned them. He says:

"As he grew older, he grew more cautious; and as his New Salem associates, and the aggressive Deists with whom he originally united at Springfield, gradually dispersed, or fell away from his side, he appreciated more and more keenly the violence and extent of the religious prejudices which freedom in discussion from his standpoint would be sure to arouse against him. He saw the immense and augmenting power of the churches, and in times past had practically felt it. The imputation of Infidelity had seriously injured him in several of his earlier political contests; and, sobered by age and experience, he was resolved that that same imputation should injure him no more. Aspiring to lead religious communities, he foresaw that he must not appear as an enemy within their gates; aspiring to public honors under the auspices of a political party which persistently summoned religious people to assist in the extirpation of that which is denounced as the 'nation's sin,' he foresaw that he could not ask their suffrages whilst aspersing their faith. He perceived no reason for changing his convictions, but he did perceive many good and cogent reasons for not making them public" (lb., pp. 497, 498).

But he never told anyone that he accepted Jesus as the Christ, or performed a single one of the acts which necessarily follow upon such a conviction.

"At Springfield and at Washington he was beset on the one hand by political priests, and on the other by honest and prayerful Christians. He despised the former, respected the latter, and had use for both. He said with characteristic irreverence that he would not undertake to 'run the churches by military authority;' but he was, nevertheless, alive to the importance of letting the churches 'run' themselves in the interest of his party. Indefinite expressions about 'Divine Providence,' the 'Justice of God,' 'the favor of the Most High,' were easy, and not inconsistent with his religious notions. In this, accordingly, he indulged freely; but never in all that time did he let fall from his lips or his pen an expression which remotely implied the slightest faith in Jesus as the son of God and the Savior of men" (Ib., p. 502).

Lamon was Lincoln's intimate and trusted friend at Washington, and had he changed his belief, his biographer, as well as Noah Brooks and the Illinois clergyman, would have been in possession of the fact.

In 1851 Lincoln wrote a letter of consolation to his dying father, in which he counseled him to "confide in our great and good and merciful Maker." This letter was given to the public by Mr. Herndon, and has been cited by the orthodox to prove that Lincoln was a believer. Adverting to this letter Lamon says:

"If ever there was a moment when Mr. Lincoln might have been expected to express his faith in the atonement, his trust in the merits of a living Redeemer, it was when he undertook to send a composing and comforting message to a dying man.... But he omitted it wholly. He did not even mention the name of Jesus, or intimate the most distant suspicion of the existence of a Christ" (Ibid., p. 497).

Lincoln's mind was not entirely free from superstition, but though born and reared in Christendom, the superstitious element in his nature was not essentially Christian. His fatalistic ideas, so characteristic of the faith of Islam, have already been mentioned by Mr. Herndon, and are thus referred to by Colonel Lamon:

"Mr. Lincoln was by no means free from a kind of belief in the supernatural.... He lived constantly in the serious conviction that he was himself the subject of a special decree, made by some unknown and mysterious power, for which he had no name" (Ibid., p. 503).

"His mind was filled with gloomy forebodings and strong apprehensions of impending evil, mingled with extravagant visions of personal grandeur and power. His imagination painted a scene just beyond the veil of the immediate future, gilded with glory yet tarnished with blood. It was his 'destiny'—splendid but dreadful, fascinating but terrible. His case bore little resemblance to those of religious enthusiasts like Bunyan, Cowper, and others. His was more like the delusion of the fatalist conscious of his star" (Ibid,, p. 475).