This is filed under ‘founding fathers’, although technically, Abraham Lincoln came later. I put him in the moral category of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and the rest. My contention has always been, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (A big reason why we shouldn’t accept revisionists’ version of the Holocaust.)
The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were. . . the general principles of Christianity.~John Adams
In the Newdow case, the United States Supreme Court avoided deciding whether the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance are unconstitutional by holding that the plaintiff lacked standing to bring the case. But no one thinks that the issue is finally settled. That it could arise at all is a measure of how much we have forgotten our nation’s first principles. It is the merit of Abraham Lincoln’s Political Faith that reminds us that our nation is not founded on hostility or indifference towards God, but that it indeed rests upon a particular concept of the divine, a concept that is perfectly appropriate to acknowledge in the Pledge and necessary for us to express in our public life.
The words “under God” were placed in the pledge during the Cold War when Congress wished to make even more clear how our beliefs differed from those of the Communists. It is sometimes suggested that the words are therefore illegitimate—that they are tied to an obsolete historical situation or reflect an anti-Communist extremism. But the Communist threat was merely the occasion that reminded Congress of something fundamental.
Fornieri says in his book, Abraham Lincoln’s Political Faith, “The ideologies of Communism and fascism both sought to murder the Judeo-Christian God and to replace Him with a human power that was beyond good and evil and freed from any higher moral obligation.”
The result was the rule of tyrants who “sought to wield both the sacred and the secular swords with absolute power, becoming a law unto themselves [from] which there could be no higher appeal in either principle or practice.”
To acknowledge God’s rule is to recognize that human beings are not the masters of their fate or of the universe, and hence that human government is properly limited in scope. As Fornieri correctly notes and explains at length, such a belief is not a violation of the separation of church and state, but the very foundation of it.
In his great biography of Lincoln, Lord Charnwood noted that no other speech of a modern statesman uses so unreservedly the language of intense religious feeling as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. One can add that behind that intensity was a clarity of thought to match. As with so many of America’s beliefs, the relationship between belief in God and American political principles was more deeply understood by Abraham Lincoln than by any other American statesman. In Abraham Lincoln’s Political Faith, Joseph Fornieri attempts to give a comprehensive portrayal of Lincoln’s understanding of this relationship.
Fornieri begins this portrayal by outlining Lincoln’s private or personal faith. He calls this faith “biblical” because Lincoln seemed to form it out of his own reading of the Bible, because it does not seem to be an exclusively New Testament faith, and because Lincoln did not formally join any Christian denomination. To establish his reading he uses Lincoln’s private correspondence, testimony from those who knew him, and inferences from the beliefs of those who appeared to have influenced him. In then comparing this faith to his public references to God or the Bible, Fornieri shows that Lincoln’s private and public statements were consistent with each other, and argues that Lincoln’s public words and deeds were an expression of his personal faith applied to the political realm.
This procedure has the merit of showing that Lincoln did not say or do one thing in private and another in public. He was not a hypocrite, but a man of principle.
Fortunately, Fornieri does not confine himself to showing Lincoln’s public and private consistency. At the beginning of his discussion of Lincoln’s public faith, Fornieri acknowledges, “Lincoln’s biblical republicanism developed as an urgent response to the political challenges of his own time, not as an abstract doctrine composed from some Archimedean vantage point outside the political realm.” Fornieri sees that Lincoln did not have one set of thoughts about the Bible, and another set of thoughts about politics, which he then somehow combined. Nor did he simply have a set of religious views, which, from an Archimedean vantage point, he used to judge politics and determine his own actions. Rather Lincoln’s thoughts about God and his thoughts about politics were bound up together and woven of the same cloth. This is presumably why Fornieri refers in the title to Lincoln’s “political faith” rather than to his “religious faith and political beliefs.” And it is why the God Lincoln reveals to us is not merely Lincoln’s God, but the God of our country and our political principles.
Nowhere does Fornieri show this more clearly than in his fine chapter on Lincoln and pro-slavery theology. Lincoln understood that slavery was not merely an economic system, but “part of an overarching worldview that suffused Southern culture.” That worldview had theological implications and a theological defense that was powerful in shaping Southern opinion. With succinctness and clarity, Fornieri lays out the biblical and theological arguments used by Southerners to justify slavery and shows the distortions and inconsistencies they had to engage in to make these arguments. He shows that their attack upon the principles of human equality, consent of the governed, free labor, and the Union had a necessary foundation in the claim that “God has actually embodied slavery in his moral law.”
In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln noted that both North and South “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.” He then pointed out the perversity in Southern Bible-reading and praying, before counseling his countrymen to look at their own sin: “It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not that we be not judged.” Lincoln’s response to the observation that both Southerners and Northerners cited the Bible in their own behalf was not to conclude that the Bible therefore provided no guidance. Rather, Fornieri shows that Lincoln not only refuted the Southerners’ interpretation of the Bible on biblical, theological, and political grounds, but that his own views rested upon a superior understanding of the Bible and of politics. As Fornieri concludes, “Lincoln’s invocation of the Bible did not stand alone as a literal appeal; the moral precepts of reason, revelation, and republicanism confirmed one another.”
There are other good parts to this book. Fornieri weaves together nicely Lincoln’s understanding of the moral and political principles of the Declaration of Independence and the theology that he realized those principles required. And although some of the ground he covers in describing Lincoln’s understanding and actions has been covered elsewhere, it bears repeating.
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