Yesterday was President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, a holiday in Illinois, The Land of Lincoln, where I’m from.  Lincoln was an unlikely man to become president. He grew up in poverty, had no formal education, served one term in congress, and then lost every election he stood for until he was elected President.

Lincoln’s religious views are an enigma. He was probably not a Christian as we understand Christianity. He never belonged to a church and was never baptized. Nor did he ever make an unambiguous claim to be a Christian.

I suspect Lincoln was a skeptic, maybe an atheist, as a young man. But Lincoln changed his views about many things over the course of his life. I think as his political career went on, he became careful not to appear to be anti-religious. I sense the outbreak of the Civil War and the death of his son Willie moved Lincoln to hold beliefs about God something like Deism. He wrote in his 1863 proclamation for Thanksgiving: “No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”

I see in Lincoln a man who struggled with great moral issues, whose own views on slavery and race evolved over a lifetime. It is an irony to me that Lincoln took a position against slavery while many Christian preachers were defending it.

I admire Lincoln even as I puzzle over his faith.

(In the past, I have always closed with a reference to Scripture. This time I’m ending with the last sentence of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.)

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Wayne