Importantly, Zeitz encompasses the perspective of Black Americans, who held their own views that often ran counter to the tendency to see the United States as a promised land or Canaan. Instead, they compared it to Egypt. A touching story told elsewhere tells of an African-American delegation presenting a Bible to the President in 1864 and his response: “All the good that the Savior gave to the world was transmitted through this book.”
Zeitz is less certain when he tries to argue that Lincoln staged an Oedipal drama because he “disliked” his father’s rules and his old-fashioned Baptist faith. It feels harsh to call the elder Lincoln a “hyper-Calvinist” when we know so little about his thinking. And there were ways Lincoln took lessons from his father (and certainly his mother, too). Indeed, one of the reasons the Lincolns moved from Kentucky to Indiana, as Lincoln himself wrote, was that his father opposed slavery, along with his fellow members of the Little Mount Baptist Church. This would have been fertile ground for further research.
Zeitz’s forays into earlier religious history, including that of the Puritans, also feel rushed, with terms such as “evangelical” and “Calvinist” used in passing. While many denominations are mentioned, others, such as Unitarians, are almost completely omitted. That’s a missed opportunity; one of Lincoln’s friends, Jesse Fell, wrote that Lincoln resembled abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker in his thinking. (Parker wrote about democracy in a way that preceded Gettysburg’s address.)
But Zeitz has singled out an important element of Lincoln’s life to examine, especially at a time when the virus of religious certainty is driving so much autocratic thinking, at home and abroad. Lincoln’s philosophy was anything but certain; he hoped he was right with God, and that was enough. As he put it, quoting Matthew, “Let us not judge, lest we be judged.”
His faith will never be easy to decipher, and it should be; it was, as the founders intended, a private matter. Once asked to define his religious beliefs, Lincoln quoted an old man he had heard say, “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that is my religion.”