Abraham Lincoln was another thinker who tacked before the winds. Lincoln was certain that “God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.” But that was because Lincoln had been raised in a Calvinist household where every event, war or peace, was considered a predestined product of God’s will. What was more difficult for Lincoln to determine was what, exactly, God had willed this war for. In 1861, when his friend, Orville Hickman Browning, asserted, “Mr. Lincoln we can’t hope for the blessing of God on the efforts of our armies, until we strike a decisive blow at the institution of slavery,” Lincoln replied, “Browning, suppose God is against us in our view on the subject of slavery in this country, and our method of dealing with it.”

This problem bothered Lincoln enough that he took it as the central theme of his second inaugural address. “Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained,” Lincoln observed. What is more, “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.” Lincoln could not very easily declare his own side wrong about the Bible and God, but he could not, in similar fashion, nerve himself morally to throw all the opprobrium into the other balance. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” he said, but he would allow himself no more than to find the Confederate argument “strange.” In the end, Lincoln opted for Calvinist agnosticism, which cloaked the will of God in mysterious ways, and left humanity with only the gentle reminder that “The Almighty has His own purposes.” There would be no ethical victory lap for Lincoln, no deus vult for a righteous and victorious Christian Union; instead, Lincoln enjoined the nation to behave “with malice toward none; with charity for all.

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Instead of American religion corrupting the Civil War with absolutism, it is more possible to say that the Civil War corrupted American religion. An Iowa sergeant, shocked at the carnage at Shiloh, wondered, “Oh my God! Can there be anything in the future that compensates for this slaughter?” Religious discourse would become plagued more and more by incessant questioning, by decaying faith, and an increasing appeal to feeling and imagination over against confessional reason or evangelical conversion, and that did not provide much weaponry for an adventure into public forums.

“Perhaps people always think so in their own day, but it seems to me there never was a time when all things have shaken loose from their foundations,” wrote one of the correspondents of the popular revivalist, Charles Grandison Finney, in 1864, “So many are sceptical, doubtful, so many good people are cutting loose from creeds & forms ... I am sometimes tempted to ask whether prayer can make any difference.” Far from feeling satisfied that the North had pursued a righteous crusade to its fulfillment, Finney himself was enraged that, after two years of war, “in nopublick proclamation either north or south is our great national sin recognized.”