Review: Can faith be found in the midst of strife?

Review of: Lincoln’s Battle with God: A President’s Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America

Author: Stephen Mansfield

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: B

Americans have a strange relationship with thanksgiving. Make that, Thanksgiving, with a capital T. Prior to Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of October 3, 1863, public observances of thanksgiving were intended to mark specific events – a military victory, a good harvest, perhaps sheer survival in a new land. Lincoln’s proclamation was made in the middle of the most horrific war our country had known up to that time – and has yet known. It’s a contradiction Stephen Mansfield captures movingly in Lincoln’s Battle with God.

I listened to this relatively short book on audio. Although I usually prefer audio books read by professional voice actors, there’s an undeniable earnestness to having an author read his own words. And Mansfield, a popular speaker and author of several books on public aspects of religion, reads those words well. Better yet, after listening to Lincoln’s Battle with God, check out the print version for an appendix of Lincoln’s presidential proclamations referencing religious language, strikingly different from those of a younger Lincoln who had proclaimed himself an atheist.

It was an attitude that seems almost natural in Mansfield’s telling. In his early life on the American frontier, Lincoln had an experience of tragedy that seems shocking to a 21^st century reader. Even before the death of his adored mother Nancy when he was nine and she was only in her 30’s he had known the death of a younger brother. Soon after Nancy Lincoln’s death, her widower, Thomas, abandoned his two surviving children to the doubtful care of a young relative and disappeared for months, seeking a new wife. The children had given Thomas up for dead also before he finally reappeared, bringing them a stepmother. 

Thomas Lincoln himself belittled his son, and especially that son’s love of learning – a love Abraham would cling to more tenaciously as the legacy of his dead mother’s love of poetry, song and story. A difficult relationship between father and son, as C.S. Lewis would later note, can cause difficulties for the acceptance of Christianity, which so much stresses the role of divine fatherhood. 

In his rebellion against Thomas, Abraham Lincoln lavished affection on his own children, only to lost two of them to death – one before, and one during his presidency. Each death would send the children’s mother, Mary Todd Lincoln, into despondency from which she sought the aid of the then-current fad of spiritualism.

Struggling lifelong with his own bouts of depression, and with a nation that had split in two even before his first inauguration, and a war that brought unprecedented death to that nation, Lincoln had cause to wonder how a beneficent God could allow such things to happen.

And yet, according to Mary, her husband’s last words as they sat together in Ford’s Theater, “in the sacred seconds that remained” before an assassin’s bullet penetrated his brain, Lincoln continued a conversation he had begun with Mary earlier that day. “We will visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior. There is no place I so much desire to see as Jerusalem.”

Was Mary’s recollection, made to a minister nearly two decades after her husband’s death, true? Could a Lincoln who had never joined a church (although in later life he attended fairly regularly with his family), who most likely had never been baptized, was a believer?

Mansfield makes a case for the possibility as he charts the change in Lincoln’s behavior and his words, as he moved from avowed atheism to public words such as his Thanksgiving proclamation: “The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessing of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties. . . other have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.”

Author Stephen Mansfield has become bestselling author with books about public religion – that of George W. Bush and Barak Obama. In view of these earlier works, it seems a little odd that he chose not to trace changes in public manifestations of presidential religion. To do so, however, would in some ways detract from the intimacy of Lincoln’s Battle with God. And, as he readily admits, his premise – presumably his hope – that discerning whether Lincoln’s brand of religion included a conversion of the heart, is impossible to determine. The only person who could confirm it is now long dead.