Abraham Lincoln's faith, from his pew

Next year is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, and all kinds of festivities are in the works. For religion writers, the celebration will provide an occasion to revisit one of the enduring debates about one of American's most popular presidents -- was he a Christian believer, a skeptic, or something else?

During the just-completed convention of the Religion Newswriters Association, we had an opportunity to visit the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in downtown Washington. That's the church where the Lincolns rented a pew (yes, church pews used to be rented) in the 1860s, until Lincoln's assassination, and the Lincoln pew (in the second row) is still there, available for visitors to sit in.

Dewey Wallace, a religious studies professor at George Washington University and a historian of NY Avenue Presbyterian, told us that "Lincoln is iconic, and as a consequence he's been claimed by people of all directions -- there are those who want to make him out as a conventional evangelical, a skeptic, a deist, or even an atheist.'' Wallace said Lincoln's religiosity has been up for debate because, in part, "on religion, Lincoln was reticent, and he was also, in some of his remarks, rather inscrutable.''

Wallace gave us a brief overview of Lincoln's religious affiliation: he was born in Kentucky to a family of so-called hard-shell Baptists, who were so strongly predestinarian that they rejected missionary activity; although Lincoln came to reject that strain of Baptist faith, his upbringing gave him a strong familiarity with the Bible, and as an adult he was able to quote large portions of the King James Bible from memory. In Illinois, Wallace said, Lincoln was hostile to "the emotional revivalism that was going around,'' and was viewed by friends as a religious skeptic. He married Mary Todd in an Episcopal Church; she went on to join First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Illinois, and then, in Washington, New York Avenue Presbyterian. Lincoln never joined either church, but he attended periodically with his family, and, in Washington, he befriended the pastor, the Rev. Phineas D. Gurley, who played a particularly important role when the Lincolns' son, Willie, died in 1862.

Wallace cautioned against reading too much into Lincoln's decision not to become a church member, saying that "lots of men in the 19th Century did not join churches, although frequently their wives did.''

Ronald C. White Jr., a Lincoln historian whose new book, "A. Lincoln: A Biography,'' is scheduled for publication in January, also told us that "way too much has been made out of the fact that Lincoln did not join a church." White led us through a reading of Lincoln's famous Second Inaugural Address, which the historian called "Lincoln's Sermon on the Mount.'' In that speech, delivered near the end of the Civil War, Lincoln said of the two sides of the divided nation, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.'' He used the Bible to condemn slavery, but also to caution against triumphalism, saying, "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.''

White clearly sees in the address evidence of Lincoln's genuine interest in faith, asking us, "Are these the words of someone who was in tow with his wife, and didn't want to attend, or someone who was grappling, at a very deep and profound level...There's something very profound in Abraham Lincoln which I hope can be fleshed out in this bicentennial.''

An interesting aside: White said that the quote attributed to Lincoln by Sarah Palin during her interview with Charlie Gibson, "Let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side,'' may not have been said by Lincoln at all. He said that there are many quotes mistakenly attributed to Lincoln, and that that may be one of them.

And one other related item: the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission last year held a session in Miami on "Lincoln and the Jews,'' exploring the little-known details of Lincoln's relationship with the American Jewish population. David Early, the commission's spokesman, called Lincoln a "hero" to the Jewish community because Lincoln had overturned an order by General Ulysses S. Grant expellling Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. The Miami panel was so packed that the commission is now planning to take the session on the road.