Abraham Lincoln & Reformed Political Theology

While for most Americans the month of November recalls the sights and sounds of Thanksgiving, for Civil War buffs it is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, delivered November 19, 1863, that resurfaces from our deep pools of memory. Between Thanksgiving, the Meditation on the Divine Will Lincoln wrote a year earlier, the Gettysburg Address, and the ongoing funerals of soldiers dying daily in Virginia and Tennessee, God was clearly on Lincoln’s mind. Mark J. Larson, in God and the Civil War: Lincoln in Moral and Theological Perspective, argues that God played more than a passing role in the political life of Abraham Lincoln. Far from the more common depiction of Lincoln as a doubter who practiced an entirely secular politics, Larson offers a compelling picture of Lincoln as a Christian statesman whose thinking was contextualized not only by the Sectional Crisis, but also by the debates over slavery and Christianity playing out in American pulpits.