Louisville Process Theology Network

Lincoln's Religion

What We Remember

Most of us remember that Abraham Lincoln never joined a church; although he occasionally attended church services with his family. We assume he was a religious person in some sense, who stubbornly resisted structures and formalities. We also remember that his public speeches frequently speak of God, and we remember his habit of reading and quoting from he King James Version of The Bible. Was he a believer or just a panderer?

Personally, we believe Lincoln was an optimist. His hope for the future was a hard-won victory against his lifelong struggle with depression. This gives us the feeling that he had faith in something. What was it?

With the approach of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth next February 12th, this seems like the perfect time to take another look of at Lincoln’s personal theology.

Consider the times in which Lincoln grew up. Religious revivals were popular in many parts of the country. New religious denominations were forming; most notably the Methodists and Disciples of Christ. The churches were packed on Sunday mornings and afternoons. Attitudes about religion were changing. Traditional faith and practices were being resurrected and renewed.

This new fervor seemed be a strong reaction against the secular traditions of our founders. It’s not remembered often enough that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and many others were Deists or freethinkers. Our separation of church and state tradition came directly from their very tolerant attitudes.

Thomas Paine’s famous book, The Age Reason, was an exposition of Deist thinking. His book harshly criticizes the superstitions and miracle stories of traditional Christianity and calls for rational religious principles. Years later, Thomas Jefferson wrote a more benign expression of Deism, The Life and Morality of Jesus. Where Paine criticized, Jefferson accentuated the positive. Today, the public fondly remembers Jefferson work as The Jefferson Bible.

In Lincoln’s time, Paine was castigated and many of his ideas repudiated. His memory lived only in small groups of freethinkers; among them a young man in New Salem Illinois named Lincoln.

Historians believe that one of the fairest contemporary accounts of Lincoln’s faith comes from Ward Lamon’s, Life of Lincoln, published in 1872. Lamon’s account rings true because it does not over-reach. He neither baptizes nor demonizes Lincoln. Lamon was known to be a traditional believer, who disagreed with Lincoln’s beliefs, but tolerated them out their close personal friendship.

From Lamon's Life of Lincoln

“Any analysis of Lincoln’s character would be defective that did not include his religious opinions. On such matters he thought deeply, and his opinions were positive. But perhaps no phase of his character has been more persistently misrepresented and variously misunderstood, than his religious belief ...

His extremely general expressions of religious faith called for by the grave exigencies of his public life, or indulged in on the occasions of private condolence, have often be distorted out of relation to their real significance or meaning to suit the opinion or tickle the fancies of individuals or parties.

Mr. Lincoln was never a member of any Church, nor did he believe in the divinity of Christ, or the inspiration of the Scriptures in the sense understood by evangelical Christians.

When a boy, he showed no sign of that piety which many biographers ascribe to his manhood. When he went to Church at all, he went to mock and came away to mimic.

When he came to New Salem, he consorted with Freethinkers, joined with them in deriding the gospel story of Jesus, read Volney and Paine, and then wrote a deliberate and labored essay, wherein he reached conclusions similar to theirs. The essay was burned, but he never regretted nor denied its composition.

On the contrary, he made it the subject of free and frequent conversations with his friends at Springfield, and stated with much particularity and precision, the origin, arguments, and objects of the work.

The community in which he lived was preeminently a community of Freethinkers in matters of religion; and it was no secret, nor has it been a secret since, that Mr. Lincoln agreed with of majority of his associates in denying the authority of divine revelation. It was his honest belief, a belief which was no reproach to hold in New Salem, in 1834, and one which he never thought of concealing …

He made himself thoroughly familiar with the writings of Volney and Paine, the Ruins by one and, The Age of Reason by the other. His mind was full on the subject and felt itching to write. He did write and the result was a little book …

No leaf of this volume has survived. Mr. Lincoln carried it in manuscript to the store of Samuel Hill, where it was read and discussed. Hill was himself an unbeliever, but his son considered the book ‘infamous.’ It is more than probable that Hill, being a warm and personal friend of Lincoln, feared that publication of the essay would someday interfere with the political advancement of his favorite. At all events, he snatched it out of his hand, and threw it in the fire from which not a shred escaped.

Cautious and Not Inconsistent

As he grew older, he grew more cautious; and as his New Salem associates, and the aggressive Deists with whom he originally united at Springfield, gradually dispersed, or fell away from his side, he appreciated more and more keenly the violence and extent of the religious prejudice which freedom in discussion from his standpoint would be sure to arouse against him …

Aspiring to lead religious communities, he foresaw that he must not appear as an enemy within their gates; aspiring to public honors under the auspices of a political party which persistently summoned religious people to assist in the extirpation of that which it denounced at the ‘nation’s sin,’ he foresaw that he could not ask their suffrages whilst aspersing their faith. He perceived no reason for changing his convictions, but he did perceive many good and cogent reasons for not making them public.

But he never told anyone that he accepted Jesus as Christ, or performed a single one of the acts which necessarily follow upon such conviction. At Springfield and Washington he was beset by political priests, and honest prayerful Christians. He despised the former, respected the latter, and had use for both …

Indefinite expressions about ‘Divine Providence,’ and ‘Justice of God’, and ‘favor of the Most High,’ were easy and not inconsistent with his religious notions. In this, accordingly, he indulged freely; but never in all that time did he let fall from his lips or his pen an expression which remotely implied the slightest faith in Jesus as the son of God.”



Lamon’s book was not very popular and it did not sell well partly because religious groups boycotted it. The idea that Lincoln was not a traditional Christian was not acceptable to many. Today, it appears that Lincoln probably was a Christian Deist or religious Theist in the same sense as Franklin, Jefferson, Washington and other founders of our country. 

Lincoln's own words 

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