On Bicentennial, Lincoln's Faith Still Puzzling

Abraham Lincoln stood on the steps of the Capitol more than 144 years ago and said North and South alike must suffer for the sin of slavery.

"If God wills that [the war] continue until . . . every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, so it still must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,' " Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, quoting the Psalms.

Called "Lincoln's Sermon on the Mount," his 1865 address has been deemed the most religiously sophisticated presidential speech in American history. It was delivered by a backwoods lawyer with just one year of formal schooling who never joined a church.

As the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth approaches Thursday, the 16th president and his unconventional faith continue to inspire and to confound. Churches, community centers and colleges across the country are celebrating the bicentennial by pondering the Great Emancipator's words and mounting exhibits exploring his dealings with various faiths.

Meanwhile, a raft of recent books attempt to restore religion to historical accounts of Lincoln's life after a generation of scholars shrugged off his spiritual side.

"I call it 'the presence of an absence,' said Ronald C. White Jr., author of "A. Lincoln," a biography published in January that aims to restore the missing pieces of Lincoln's "spiritual odyssey."

"People don't deal with his religion. It is the great hole in our study," White said in an interview.

Lincoln didn't make things easy for historians. He was reticent and often inscrutable about his faith. Moreover, his ideas changed over time, as he dealt with the deaths of two sons and the pressure of the presidency amid the Civil War.

Most historians agree on this much: Lincoln never was baptized, never joined a church, and rarely, if ever, talked about Jesus.

"He was a religious man always," Lincoln's widow, Mary, said after his death, "but he was not a technical Christian."

That hasn't stopped every stripe of believer -- including Christians -- from claiming honest Abe as one of their own. Spiritualists, atheists and even Jews have all tried to cast Lincoln as a member of their tribe.

"Sometimes the battles over these things are rather sharp, very sharp, as a matter of fact," Dewey Wallace, a professor of religious history at George Washington University, told a conference of religion reporters last fall. Like the Jesus Seminar, the academic search for the "historical Jesus," scholars endlessly sift through each chapter of Lincoln lore, Wallace said.