Other thinkers deny him any religious impulses. Guelzo’s Lincoln is very complex with his religious thinking nuanced. Lincoln grew up in a Baptist home, but very soon rejected anabaptist thinking for an Enlightenment style skepticism. He called his faith “civil religion.” And he saw the Scriptures as he did the works of Shakespeare.

They were poetry to be used in speeches and conversation without necessarily being believed as creed. Perhaps the greatest speech by a President ever given was Lincoln’s second inaugural address. His language is magnificent, his biblically rich images powerful. But unlike many of his Christian supporters, Lincoln admired Jesus more than he believed in him. Resisting membership in any Church (the Lincolns attended the Presbyterian Church) the President’s religious views seemed to become more intense during the Civil War. Even the death of several of the Lincoln children did not affect his religiously deist convictions.

Shaped by more than a hundred years of post-civil war race relations, we 21st century Americans tend to think of the Civil War as a moral struggle between slave owners and abolitionists. Lincoln’s unionist thinking was more practical, more economically determined. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln was a Whig. He saw the growth of slavery as a direct challenge to the economic success of the western United States. In the 1830's and 1840's, Lincoln served as a state legislator and congressman. In those capacities, he never articulated opposition to slavery. He only began to oppose slavery when it presented, in his eyes, a threat to the economic well-being of men like him–entrepreneurs and workers. Thus, when his “Whigish freedom” was being compromised, and his middle class economic values assaulted, did he then take up opposition. More of a political issue than a moral one, Lincoln began to see the suppression of slavery as necessary if the United States was to economically flourish.

Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday, 1865, gave the President instant martyr status. Direct references to the murder of Jesus were made in thousands of pulpits on Easter Sunday that year. Thus, the subtitle of Guezo’s book, “Redeemer President.” Lincoln’s philosophy and religion are elastic enough for many to see what they want in him. More than anything, however, we find in this book an effective study of an uncommon man who was shaped by the great religious, cultural and political events of his time.

Thomas A. Skrenes, Bishop