Lincoln’s faith
Around 30 years ago there was a school of thought that humankind had arrived at, in Francis Fukuyama’s notable phrase, “the end of history.” With the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy after the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the world had evolved to where liberal democracy would ultimately become “the final form of human government.”
No totalitarian government would last. While things would still happen and there might be occasional coups and flare-ups, the theory held that the arc of the universe bends toward governance by the consent of the governed. Perhaps we hadn’t reached the shining city on the hill, but we could glimpse it on the horizon; we could believe in its attainability.
These days, that seems impressively naïve. I have neighbors who don’t believe in democracy. You could argue that Fukuyama and his followers didn’t take into account the lure of tribalism and religious fundamentalism, or the ease with which ordinary people could be convinced by opportunistic liars claiming to represent their interests. Few things seem as fragile as democracy these days.
So, in some quarters, Princeton professor Allen C. Guelzo’s new book “Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment” (Knopf, $30) will be taken as a tonic. It is a concise study presented through a series of essays-as-chapters detailing Abraham Lincoln’s ideas and intellectual progress which can be taken as lessons for modern America.
Lincoln referred to democracy as his “ancient faith,” not simply a pretty turn of phrase. He grew up in a deeply religious Calvinist household, but famously never joined a church. Still, he expressed public respect for religious attitudes—“I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office who I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion,” he told critics in 1846.
While this could be seen as a political evasion—Guelzo seems to doubt that Lincoln was as deferential to religious opinion in private as he maintained he was in public—it does indicate that he understood what it meant to have religion, to deeply believe without final proof. He told us democracy was his faith; it was America’s faith.
Faith is a gift. It is not something that can be attained through practice or desire. But if it even flickers, it can be tended, and raised into a roar.
Lincoln looked at the Civil War and noted both North and South claimed to have God on their side. Guelzo writes:
“… Lincoln did embrace natural law, and the mysterious corpus of the Civil War raised so many questions in Lincoln’s mind about the purpose and meaning of the war that he gradually began speculating more deeply on the existence of the God who ordered that law and God’s direction of human affairs. ‘The will of God prevails,’ he wrote in 1862, as though he was beginning a geometrical proof—for surely everyone had to admit that if God really is God, his will must prevail … Yet the course of the war gave no encouragement to either side to believe that God was favoring their immediate demand, for either independence or union. There remained, however, the possibility that God intended something in the war which neither side had contemplated at its beginning—and for Lincoln, that mean emancipation.”
The abolition of slavery was what Lincoln’s faith finally demanded. He had not hurried to that conclusion, but eventually reached it. And on March 4, 1865, his faith compelled him. His second inaugural address could have been read in less than five minutes. It contained these words:
“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it … Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
“… Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God … The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully … If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come … He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away …
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
No Confederate leaders would be hanged. All Americans were complicit in slavery, all had been touched by the terrible war, and the thing to do was to remind ourselves of the articles of our ancient faith laid out in the Declaration: “that Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” All men were created equal, and however economically inconvenient, an enslaved man was still a man.
Forty-one days later, John Wilkes Booth fired a .41 caliber lead ball into Lincoln’s head and dropped history into the lap of mediocre Andrew Johnson, who had neither Lincoln’s vision or abilities. In an epilogue, Guelzo speculates on what Lincoln’s Reconstruction might have looked like. Maybe he could have achieved a land with neither slaves or masters. Maybe.
“It must seem uncanny that so many of our current frustrations with democracy were actually encountered by Abraham Lincoln,” Guelzo write. “He, too, had to absorb complaints that he was using the presidential office to subvert civil and constitutional liberties. He, too, endured a political environment polarized between extremes that had little hope of reconciliation. Uncanny, yes, but also comforting that these frustrations are not novelties, however much they feel like them, and that the American democracy has endured, risen, and surmounted them once, and will do so again.”
I want to believe that, Professor Guelzo. But I know past performance is no guarantee of future results.