Abraham Lincoln's Religion

by Madison Clinton Peters

In regard to his religious views, Lincoln was always exceedingly reticent, but this reserve gives but greater force to the striking proof of the deep faith professed in his proclamations and public addresses, and that his life was actuated by high religious principles. He was too broad, too big brained, to care for doctrinal beliefs or sectarian differences.

His mother and father were Free-Will Baptists in Kentucky. In Indiana they became members of what was then known as the Predestinarian church, not from any change in belief, but because it was the only denomination in the neighborhood. When Thomas Lincoln removed to Illinois he united with the Christian church, commonly known as "Campbellites," and in that faith he died.

In his early days Lincoln had little opportunity for the practice of religion, and his parents, though religious enough in themselves, as has just been pointed out, took little trouble to inculcate its precepts on his youthful mind. The charge has been brought against him that he was an agnostic, but this arose from the fact that when a young man at Salem, in 1834, he prepared a review of Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" and Volney's "Ruins of Empires," with a view to reading it before a literary society that had been organized in the neighborhood. A friend of his—Sam Hill—burned the manuscript, which made the young man very indignant, as he had spent much time in its preparation. He had, to an extent, indorsed the views of these deistic writers, and their works had made a deep impression on him, but he came to realize their specious sophistries at their true value and turned away from them with feelings of strong aversion, so that he thanked Sam Hill for the service he had done him in destroying the manuscripts of approval and thus turning his thoughts in the right direction which led him to see the evils of infidel teachings.

He never was an unbeliever, and as he advanced in years his religious conceptions deepened and his faith and reliance on the Divine Power strengthened with time.

In common with those reared under similar circumstances in rural localities he was highly superstitious, and this superstition he was never able to shake off in after life, though to offset it and counteract the morbid influence it exerted over him he had recourse to humor and tried to look on the bright side of everything, often on the ludicrous side, and gave such free rein to his inclination in this direction that he gained for himself something of the reputation of a humorist and wag, but in reality his love for jesting and telling humorous stories came to him as a second nature, an inheritance from his father, who was renowned in his section for droll sayings, funny anecdotes, and striking illustrations.

He was also somewhat interested in spiritualism, but as the occult art of communicating with the denizens of the unseen world had not attained such a degree of perfection in his day as in ours, his opportunity for investigation was limited to a few seances given by peripatetic mediums, which, however, instead of increasing his faith in intercommunication with the manes of the departed, only excited his disgust for the fakirs who laid claim to the power of summoning spirits to mortal presence.

All his life Lincoln was a man who thought for himself; he would not allow the opinions of others to obtrude themselves on him, he investigated for himself, and his intellectual honesty would not permit him to make pretense to faith or simulate what he did not feel.

Some writers would have us believe that he was not a Christian at all, in fact, was an out and out infidel of the stripe of Voltaire and Paine; but we have seen what gave rise to this misconception of his character and caused it to gain circulation. The works of Paine and Volney were the only books of an infidel tendency that he ever read, and when he saw his error he tried to disabuse his mind of their teachings as quickly as possible.

To get at a right consideration of his religious beliefs, we must go back to those early days in the life of the future statesman after the family had removed from Kentucky to Indiana. It was a wild place in which his boyhood was spent; the primeval American wood which was only beginning to hear the voice of a crude civilization, and had not, as yet, heard the sound of a church bell. There were no places of worship; there were no schools or even stores or shops; in truth, so isolated and primitive was the location of the Lincoln camp that the necessities of life were many miles removed from it.

His father, Thomas Lincoln, though a good man in a general way, was but an indifferent parent, and consequently a poor guide or mentor for the youth. The poor man had received many hard knocks from the iron hand of misfortune and had become almost wholly disheartened, which led to carelessness and thriftlessness, and besides, he was illiterate and unpolished. It could not be expected that a man thus handicapped himself could give his boy good training, either morally or intellectually. The mother, too, had been ground down by poverty to such a degree as to lose almost all interest in life; her burden soon became too heavy to bear, and she had to lay it down before coming to the middle milestone of life. It is not to be wondered that, under such circumstances and amid such surroundings, the boy Abraham grew up after the manner of a wild, strong weed, following the bent of his own rugged nature.