Lincoln's God

How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation

By: Joshua Zeitz

Narrated by: Dan Woren

Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

Lincoln’s spiritual journey from spiritual skeptic to America's first evangelical Christian president believer—a conversion that changed both the Civil War and the practice of religion itself.

Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm’s length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But as he came to appreciate the growing political and military importance of the Christian community, and when death touched the Lincoln household in an awful, intimate way, the erstwhile skeptic effectively evolved into a believer and harnessed the power of evangelical Protestantism to rally the nation to arms. The war, he told Americans, was divine retribution for the sin of slavery.

This is the story of that transformation and the ways in which religion helped millions of Northerners interpret the carnage and political upheaval of the 1850s and 1860s. Rather than focus on battles and personalities, Joshua Zeitz probes ways in which war and spiritual convictions became intertwined. Characters include the famous—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher—as well as ordinary soldiers and their families whose evolving understanding of mortality, heaven, and mission motivated them to fight. Long underestimated in accounts of the Civil War, religion—specifically evangelical Christianity—played an instrumental role on the battlefield and home front, and in the corridors of government.

More than any president before him—or any president after, until George W. Bush—Lincoln harnessed popular religious enthusiasm to build broad-based support for a political party and a cause. A master politician who was sincere about his religion, Lincoln held beliefs that were unconventional—and widely misunderstood then, as now. After his death and the end of an unforgiving war, Americans needed to memorialize Lincoln as a Christian martyr. The truth was, of course, considerably more complicated, as this original book explores.

©2023 Joshua Zeitz (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Zeitz adds meaningful context to the story, examining the ways in which soldiers experienced religion in the field . . . Importantly, Zeitz includes the perspective of Black Americans, who held views of their own that were often at odds with the tendency to see the United States as a promised land, or Canaan . . . Zeitz has chosen an important element of Lincoln’s life to explore, especially in an age when the virus of religious certainty drives so much autocratic thinking, at home and abroad.”—The New York Times Book Review

"In his thoughtful new book...Zeitz writes a compelling chronicle of Lincoln's evolving relationship to faith against a backdrop of events that influenced the Great Emancipator as much as he influenced them. Such a portrait of young Lincoln in particular, who "studiously avoided mixing religion and politics," is timely and provocative."—The National Catholic Reporter

“A broad overview of the rapidly changing faith journey of Lincoln individually and of the antebellum U.S. as a whole [and] a worthwhile addition to the corpus of Lincoln studies.” —Kirkus Reviews

Thoughtful examination of Lincoln and American religion

I read a lot of Lincoln history and still found this book fresh and informative on the history of Christianity in 19th century America and what we can tell about Lincoln’s views on it. I feel that I have better understanding of his thinking and especially the Second Inaugural Address. I learned about the book from American History Hit podcast and enjoyed that interview, as well.

Separation of Church and State

Thomas Jefferson had it right in separating Church and State. Too bad it was destroyed.