‘Lincoln’s God’ Review: Abe’s Ambitious Creed

Admiring biographers have always tended to assign their own metaphysical views to their subjects, and this is especially so with Abraham Lincoln. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and later his biographer, portrayed him as indifferent to Christian belief until the day he died—about as indifferent as Herndon himself was. Most modern biographers, similarly agnostic on religious questions, have taken Herndon’s view.

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Lincoln's God

By Joshua Zeitz

Viking

336 pages

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Joshua Zeitz, in “Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation,” thinks the 16th president’s religious thought evolved in crucial ways after war broke out in 1861. Mr. Zeitz arrives at this conclusion mainly by interpreting Lincoln’s God-filled wartime rhetoric as expressions of conviction rather than conventional blather. This sort of reassessment of Lincoln’s religious commitments isn’t entirely new, but it is welcome all the same. I don’t know how many lives I’ve read in which otherwise fair and capable biographers dismiss or minimize their subject’s expressions of faith for no obvious reason. The great statesman or philosopher or composer may have said that he trusted in God or that he found solace in a scriptural text—so goes this interpretive habit—but we know he didn’t mean it.