I've taken advantage of my 32-year friendship with Prokopowicz to secure his permission and the permission of his publisher to reproduce the relevant section of the book below:

What were those views? It turns out that East Carolina University History Dept. chair Gerald Prokopowicz addresses this question at length in his new book, "Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And other frequently asked questions about Abraham Lincoln." (Pantheon). The bottom line: "His religious beliefs were dynamic, complex, and powerful, but not conventional."

Davis scolded Sherman, "This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God," and contributors have noted that this is ironic in light of Lincoln's own religious views.

This question has come up many times here in the discussion thread concerning the tirade that Ill. Rep. Monique Davis (D. Chicago) directed last week at atheist activist Rob Sherman of Buffalo Grove.

From pages 29-34 of ""Did Lincoln Own Slaves? copyright 2008 by Gerald J. Prokopowicz. Reprinted with permission by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

As postmaster, did [Abraham Lincoln] really carry letters around in his hat? My children have a book that says he did.

It’s right. There was no home delivery of mail in the 1830s, so Lincoln’s job as postmaster was a sinecure that allowed him to sit around the post office and read other people’s newspapers before they picked them up, which helped him expand his knowledge of national affairs. Although it was not his job to deliver the mail, he made it a point to do so (taking the letters in his hat) if he happened to be traveling to some distant part of Sangamon County, saving someone a long walk to town. While Lincoln was not responsible for carrying the mail, as the postal service is today, he also did not have the modern luxury orf Sundays off. In 1810 Congress passed a law requiring post offices to be open for mail pickup at least one hour every day, including Sundays. For the next two decades a political controversy raged over whether the government should recognize the Christian Sabbath by prohibiting Sunday mail. Curiously, it was evangelical Baptists who led the opposition to the Sabbatarian movement. A massive religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, beginning around 1800, had catapulted the Baptists and Methodists to numerical supremacy among American Protestants, overtaking more traditional sects like the Congregationalists and Episcopalians, but the older groups still held political power. In Connecticut, for example, Congregationalism remained the official state religion until 1818. Such lingering connections between traditional churches and the state made members of the newer evangelical denominations deeply suspicious of any government action involving religion, even something as apparently innocuous as banning Sunday mail.



What did Lincoln think about this? What was his religion?

In his New Salem days, Lincoln didn’t leave many clues about his views on Sabbatarianism, or on religion in general. His father had been a member of the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist church, and Lincoln must have been exposed to doctrines like predestination at an early age, but he never joined the Baptist church. New Salem had many believers, but no churches, so Lincoln’s failure to belong was not obvious. We know that it was at this time in his life that Lincoln read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, and probably the works of Voltaire and other Enlightenment skeptics. By the time he moved to Springfield in 1837, he had begun to develop his unique world view, a mixture of skepticism and providential fatalism that would continue to mature and evolve throughout his life.



Wasn’t he secretly baptized when he was older?

No, nor was he planning to convert to (fill in the church of your choice) on Easter Sunday, 1865, only to be tragically murdered on the preceding Good Friday. The answers to questions about Lincoln’s church membership are not the ones that most people are hoping to hear. He was never a member of the church you attend, or any church. His religious beliefs were dynamic, complex, and powerful, but not conventional. He wasn’t a Baptist, despite being raised in a Baptist tradition. He wasn’t a Presbyterian, although he attended Presbyterian services much of his adult life. He was not a Catholic, contrary to rumors started by the ravings of Reverend Charles Chiniquy, who published a bizarre diatribe called Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (1886), which accused Catholics of claiming that Lincoln had been born into their Church. According to Mrs. Lincoln, who ought to have known, he was not even a Christian. Many stories have circulated about Lincoln being secretly baptized, or planning to be, but they are all unsubstantiated. And yet, Abraham Lincoln was in many ways the most deeply spiritual person ever to occupy the White House. In the same 1866 interview with William Herndon where Mary said that her husband “was not a technical Christian,” whatever that might mean, she also said that “he was a religious man always” who “had a Kind of Poetry in his Nature.” Certainly no one who reads the Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln’s profound meditation on God’s role in earthly events and the proper response thereto, can doubt this. For most of the 20th century, historians tended to respond with dismayed contempt to the public’s desire for a conventionally religious Lincoln. They argued that Lincoln’s real faith was his almost mystical devotion to the Union, and harked back to one of Lincoln’s earliest speeches, in which he called for Americans to make a “civil religion” out of “obedience to the laws.” Lincoln’s many Biblical references in his speeches and writings were treated as metaphor or rhetorical embellishment. Not until the late 1990s, particularly after the publication of Allen Guelzo’s Redeemer President in 1999, did it become fashionable for historians to treat Lincoln’s religious and philosophical views with the same serious attention they had long devoted to his politics.



If Lincoln wasn’t a Christian, why are his speeches full of talk about God?

Because he believed in God, or Providence, or some kind of supernatural power beyond this earth that controlled the fates of people and nations. He sometimes quoted Shakespeare’s line, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will,” which must have appealed to the former axeman in him. As a child, he absorbed a stern Calvinism from Baptist preachers who emphasized the power of an omnipotent God, the kind of deity who notes the fall of every sparrow. As an adult, he must have spoken of his religious beliefs to his law partner William Herndon often enough to pique Herndon’s curiosity, but not fully enough to satisfy it, as evidenced by Herndon’s inclusion of questions about religion in almost all of his interviews with Lincoln’s New Salem acquaintances.

Lincoln’s ideas, whatever they were, were not easy to grasp. While he accepted the notion of providence, and referred to it often, he rarely spoke publicly of Jesus Christ. In New Salem Lincoln associated with freethinkers who doubted the divinity of Jesus, and he wrote an essay mocking the idea that Jesus was the son of God. Lincoln’s friends, anxious to protect his budding political career, threw the manuscript into the fire.

As he matured, Lincoln learned to be more careful about expressing his views on religion. He must have said enough, however, to develop a reputation as an infidel. In 1846, when he ran for Congress against a well known Methodist preacher named Peter Cartwright, he found himself on the defensive against Cartwright’s charges that he was not a believer. Lincoln responded with a public statement that would remain the longest explanation of his religious beliefs he would ever write. “I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular,” Lincoln wrote, in carefully measured words that reflect the tone of more recent political denials. Although strictly true, Lincoln left open the possibility that he had spoken with unintentional disrespect. In the next paragraph he agreed with his readers that it would be wrong for any candidate to scoff openly at religion, and stated that he himself would not vote for such a person, because “I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.” Lincoln again managed to have it both ways: he shared his audience’s disapproval of “infidels,” but only those who scoff “openly” and thereby insult the majority’s feelings. He didn’t say that he belonged to the majority, and tacitly reserved the possibility that he scoffed at religion, just not openly.

Over time, Lincoln’s interest in religion grew. The death of his son Eddie in 1850 gave him cause to ponder the brevity and meaning of life on earth, and of course the casualties of the Civil War forced him to confront the issue every day. By the time he came to write the Second Inaugural Address in 1865, with its mature theological contemplation of the inscrutability and justice of the Almighty, he had gone far beyond the easy skepticism of his youth.



This religious conversion he went through—didn’t this happen at Gettysburg?

No, it wasn’t a “conversion” and it didn’t happen in any one place. There is no evidence that he ever underwent a conversion experience, but the historical record does give us glimpses of Lincoln gradually developing a more personal relationship with God. For example, in the late summer of 1862 Lincoln was ready to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, but was waiting for the military situation to improve before doing so. When he met with his cabinet on September 22, a few days after Lee’s first invasion of the North was halted at the battle of Antietam, Lincoln told his advisers that the time was right, not just in strategic terms, but as a matter of keeping a divine covenant. He had made a promise “to his Maker,” he explained, that he would issue the Proclamation if the rebel army were driven out of Maryland, and now he was keeping his promise. He acknowledged that “It might be thought strange” to make the decision on this basis, but “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”

Two years later, Lincoln’s old friend Joshua Speed paid a visit to Washington. In a lecture he gave after the war, Speed claimed that he came upon Lincoln reading the Bible, and gently mocked him for it, asking if Lincoln had recovered from his youthful skepticism. Lincoln, according to Speed, said that he had and urged Speed to do the same. Indicating the Bible, Lincoln told Speed that he should “take all of this Book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man.” These two stories reveal Lincoln’s greater willingness to accept some of the ideas and sources of traditional Christianity, but they fall far short of implying any kind of conversion experience. In the former, Lincoln referred to his “Maker,” not to Jesus Christ personally, much as he did in all of his religious writings. Lincoln’s God was his Maker, the Old Testament God, the Almighty, a single all-powerful Providence, rather than the triune Christian God who offers salvation specifically through the medium of a personal relationship with His only Son. When Lincoln recommended the Bible to Speed (assuming the story is accurate), he did not say that he believed everything in it, nor that he considered belief necessary for salvation. His endorsement instead conveys the impression that he regarded it as a sort of self-help book that might be in part beyond the bounds of reason, but ought to be taken on faith anyway in order to “live and die a happier man.” The utility of Lincoln’s Bible ends with death; it’s not a ticket to the afterlife. In this, as in most of his religious and philosophical thought, Lincoln showed no evidence of undergoing a conversion to conventional Christianity.

Again, the above is from pages 29-34 of ""Did Lincoln Own Slaves? copyright 2008 by Gerald J. Prokopowicz. Reprinted with permission by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. Photo by Jens Zorn.

BONUS Q & A, JUST FOR CHANGE OF SUBJECT READERS

How often did Lincoln attend church?

Looking at "Lincoln Day by Day" for the years of Lincoln presidency, there are references to church attendance on these days:



1861- March 10, March 17, April 14, May 19, July 21, July 28, August 25, October 13, December 22.



1862- November 30



1863- January 4, January 18, August 6 (a Thursday)



1864- none



1865- March 5



"Day by Day" is not an exhaustive reference, and does not necessarily include references to every instance of Lincoln's attendance at services. The list does seem to indicate that he attended irregularly, more than merely on holidays in 1861, but less than that as the war went on.....Gerald Prokopowicz

ON THE WEB

Lincoln, the Freethinker by Joseph Lewis, 1924 (also by Lewis, Abraham Lincoln -- Freethinker, Soldier and Martyr , 1957)

Stuck in Lincoln's Land by David Brooks (New York Times), 2005

Lincoln's Religious Quest --Why his faith won't suit either side in the culture wars. by Richard Wightman Fox (Slate), 2006

Pilgrim Politician by Marvin Olasky (World) 2008

Book lays out story of Lincoln' complex beliefs -- by Richard N. Ostling (Associated Press), 1999





