Was President Lincoln an Infidel?

Historians have not been able to agree as to President Abraham Lincoln's religious beliefs. He has been characterized as everything from a God-fearing Christian to an atheistic rationalist.

It seems clear that Lincoln, while raised by Baptist parents, did not often attend church services and took issue with some of the dogma, doctrine, and methods of orthodox Christianity. And, yet, he emerges as one of our most spiritual presidents.

"Moderate, frank, truthful, gentle, forgiving, loving, just, Mr. Lincoln will always be remembered as a Christian President; and the almost immeasurably great results which he had the privilege of achieving, were due to the fact that he was a Christian President," Dr. Josiah G. Holland, the editor of Scribner's Monthly, wrote some five years after the death of our 16^th president, although he also wrote that Lincoln was not professedly a Christian and subscribed to no particular creed.  

According to William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, Lincoln wrote a short manuscript attacking Christianity in 1835.  After he finished the book, he showed it to his friend, Samuel Hill, who persuaded him not to publish it because of the damage it would do to his promising career.  "When Mr. Lincoln left this city for Washington, I knew he had undergone no change in his religious opinions or views," Herndon wrote in an 1870 article.  "He held many of the Christian ideas in abhorrence..."  Apparently, Lincoln particularly took issue with the atonement doctrine, which holds that man's sins are forgiven if they simply accept Christ as their Savior.

Colonel James H. Matheny, who served as Lincoln's political manager for a time, wrote that the Lincoln he knew was an "infidel," mentioning that he had known him as early as 1834-37.  "He and W. D. Herndon used to talk infidelity in the Clerk's office in this city, about the years 1837-40.  Lincoln attacked the Bible and the New Testament on two grounds; first, from the inherent or apparent contradictions under its lids; second from the grounds for reason."

One of Lincoln's early biographers, Colonel Ward H. Lamon, a personal friend of Lincoln, offered considerable testimony suggesting that Lincoln was indeed a religious man in spite of the issues he had with certain Christian dogma and doctrine.  "On such [religious] matters, he thought deeply, and his opinions were positive," Lamon wrote, adding that no phase of his character has been more persistently misrepresented or misunderstood than that of his religious beliefs.

An article in Positive Atheist Magazine, an Internet publication, details Lincoln's anti-Christian sentiments and suggests that he did not strongly express them for obvious political reasons.  "Had Abraham Lincoln died as an obscure Springfield lawyer and politician; had he advanced no further in political preferment than his one term in Congress, nothing would have ever been said about his being a believer in orthodox religion," the article concludes.  "But when a man becomes prominent, and reaches the highest place in the gift of the nation, and in addition becomes a hero and a martyr, he is idealized. His virtues are exaggerated and his faults extenuated. Regardless of his real religious views, the ministers laud him as an orthodox believer and shining exemplar of Christianity. In time this passes as history, unless it is vigorously contradicted. If a man is a good man, they hold that he must have been a Christian. They likewise say that no bad man can possibly be one."

Lincoln was seen by many who knew him as a somber man with a gloomy disposition, manifesting as a "perplexing melancholy."   This disposition was apparently shaped by a number of events, including his mother's death when he was nine, a strict and distant father, the death of a sister when he was 18, the death of his beloved Ann Rutledge when he was 26, and the deaths of his second son, Eddie, and his third son, Willie.

Academy member Susan Martinez, Ph.D., whose book, The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln, is soon to be released by Career Press, examines Lincoln's inner turmoil and his attempts to reconcile all of his hardships and the vindictive God of the Old Testament with his evolving ideas of justice, mercy, and goodness, concluding that these experiences molded Lincoln's psyche in a way that made him more accepting of life's hardships and allowed him to see them as great lessons.   

Many of Lincoln's biographers have taken note of claims that Lincoln attended séances arranged by his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and received guidance from spirits who communicated through mediums. Martinez points out that the claims are usually dismissed as beneath the dignity of such a great man, even though many other celebrated names, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Carlyle, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Horace Greeley, Sir William Crookes, Edgar Allen Poe, Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Queen Victoria, and W. B. Yeats, became investigators and in varying degrees proponents of the new "Spiritual Science" of that era.  

Wallace, co-originator with Charles Darwin of the natural selection theory of evolution, wrote that after many years of investigation he felt that the proof for spirit communication was as good as the proof in any other area of science, including, apparently, evolution.   Stowe said that Uncle Tom's Cabin came to her "inner ear by a spirit voice" and that she did not plan the book as it turned out.    

 Martinez has dug deeply into biographies and articles about Lincoln and his involvement with mediums, and sets forth a preponderance of evidence suggesting that the séance stories are true and that he was indeed guided by benevolent spirits communicating through credible mediums in his most crucial decisions and creative works, including the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address.

According to Martinez's research, Mary Todd Lincoln began exploring Washington's spirit circles by visiting mediums and sitting in groups after the death of their son, Willie. The president took a passing interest in the phenomena and, although initially very skeptical, joined in on a more regular basis. At one sitting, after Nettie Colburn, the medium, went into a trance, it is said that the spirits speaking through her lectured the president about his duty to emancipate the slaves.

Colonel S. P., Kase, a wealthy railroad builder from Philadelphia and a friend of the Lincolns as well as an advisor to the Secretary of War, later wrote that he was present at that séance.  He described Colburn as a young girl who spoke with her eyes closed.  "Sir, you were called to the position you occupy for a very great purpose," Kase recalled the beginning of the lecture that lasted for an hour and a half.  "The President listened with the greatest attention throughout her discourse.  It was a scene that would never be erased from the memory, bringing to mind the passage in Scriptures where the head of the nation was being taught wisdom from babes and sucklings."

Years later, Colburn, who was in her early 20s at the time of the Lincoln séances, wrote that she had been "told" by her spirit controls that she must go to Washington and deliver an important message from a "Congress of Spirits" to the President.

 A number of other people who knew Lincoln or came in contact with him attested to his association with "spiritualists" and the influence they had on him and his important decisions during the Civil War.  Still others who knew him denied such an association, or of at least knowing of any.  Martinez points out that the president was discreet and did not discuss the séances with those not involved with them. She says that Lincoln moved from being an agnostic to a believer as a result of the communicating spirits, one of which was Daniel Webster.

"But a believer in what?  No earthly power, no organized religion, no man-made God," Martinez concludes, "but faith - a new faith - in the outworkings of the Unseen world of intelligent design."

Joshua F. Speed, Lincoln's lifelong friend, quoted Lincoln: "I have had so many evidences of God's direction, so many instances when I have been controlled by some other power than my own will, that I cannot doubt that this power comes from above...I am satisfied that when the Almighty wants me to do or not to do a particular thing, He finds a way of letting me know it."

We often hear people these days saying that they are not religious but are spiritual.  That seems to have been the case with President Lincoln long before it became a cliché.