Americanism, or the religious idea called “America,” seems like a secular idea. It can and has been professed by devout atheists. Its creed, a central element of Americanism, is completely secular in tone--of course there’s no canonical version, but most people would agree that it calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind--or something on those lines.
I’ll argue that despite all this, Americanism is profoundly Christian in its inspiration and worldview.
It is in fact profoundly Puritan.
It is in fact profoundly Biblical.
It in fact emerged not just from the Bible, but especially from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible.
It’s no accident that a seventeenth century American Puritan should have written, regarding his fellow-Puritans: “We are the children of Abraham; and therefore we are under Abraham’s covenant.”
The strongly Puritan nature of Americanism and the classical Hebraic character of Puritanism are both indispensable to a clear picture of America.
I’ll discuss a third element too. Biblical origins, Puritan teaching--and finally the emergence of full-blown Americanism in the nineteenth century. This final emergence was the work of one man more than any other--the greatest religious figure in American history, the last and greatest of the founding fathers: Abraham Lincoln.
“A man of profound and intense religious feeling,” his White House secretaries Hay and Nicolay wrote in their monumental Lincoln biography. “I have been driven many times upon my knees,” Lincoln said during the war, “by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” The Bible “is the best gift God has given to man,” he once said; “But for it we could not know right from wrong.” But Lincoln was devout--intensely devout--with a difference.
He never joined a church. In fact he had real difficulties even describing himself as a Christian. But he hardly disregarded his religious faith or let it dissolve into formless uncertainty. Out of that faith he created an intensely spiritual, intensely biblical Americanism.
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That you don’t have to be a Christian or Jew or deist or anything at all to believe in America or Americanism is important--fundamental. It’s also true that you can hum the opening measures of a Bach mass without converting to Christianity.
But of course Christianity inspired the Bach Mass. And Christianity inspired the American religion, too--in a far more direct sense.
Many people describe Americanism as a civil religion, or merely a type of patriotism. But the millions of desperate people all over the world who have said, devoutly, “I believe in America”--especially in the last 100 years or so--weren’t referring to an American civil religion or American patriotism. When they said “I believe in America,” they weren’t speaking of a nation either. They were expressing belief in a religious idea of enormous, transporting power.
Jews in pogrom-ridden czarist Russia, masses of west Europeans who turned out to cheer Woodrow Wilson, Nazi victims during the war, refuseniks and dissidents in Soviet prisons over the last decades of communist rule, Polish labor Unionists in the 1970s and ‘80s, Chinese students in Tien-an-min square--obviously America didn’t always justify these beliefs, but often it did. And by “America” these believers meant a religious ideal that told absolute truths about human life which had to be accepted--ultimately--on faith.
The American religion has two parts--not only the Creed, but a doctrine about America’s duty and her special standing and responsibilities in the world--a doctrine I’ll call American Zionism.
The Creed is a standard element in nearly all discussions of Americanism. Most definitions--mine included--say basically the same thing.
American Zionism is based on another widely recognized aspect of Americanism. In earlier centuries, the analogy between America and Ancient Israel, or the European settlements in colonial America and Ancient Israel, was heard constantly. It was derived from the corresponding analogy between England or Britain and Ancient Israel. There’s nothing new in this observation.
But it seems to me that we ought to recognize that this analogy gave rise to beliefs that are tantamount to Zionism--not to the modern version, but to biblical Zionism, which is based on two ideas: a chosen people and a promised land. Both elements were understood by the biblical prophets to imply privileges and duties. The chosen people is closer to God than any other and is held to higher standards. The promised land flows with milk and honey and must be made by its inhabitants into a beacon of sanctity for the whole world--in the end of days it shall come to pass, the prophet says, “[t]hat the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established at the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and nations shall flow unto it. . . . For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. . . . Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.” (Michah 4:1-4)
In short, I’ll argue that the analogy between America and ancient Israel was no mere figure of speech. It implied a doctrine that made assertions and imposed duties. That doctrine was Zionism. Zionism, suitably adjusted, is a fundamental part of Americanism, which is another reason why the idea of Americanism as a merely secular or civil religion doesn’t hold up.
Puritanism, which is basic to my story, performed a strange historical trick. It vanished. In the early nineteenth century it seems to drop out of history. It was a powerful, robust approach to Protestant Christianity; yet the historical record shows that it simply disappears. But it might be more correct to say that it didn’t disappear, but merely changed shape.
I’ll argue that Puritanism in fact metamorphosed into Americanism. Or died and was reborn as Americanism.
Puritanism didn’t merely influence Americanism. It turned into Americanism. In a sense, the molten bronze of Puritanism became the solid metal of the American Religion.
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Lincoln’s central role in creating Americanism, its strongly Puritan nature, and the classical Hebraic character of Puritanism in turn are all indispensable to a clear picture of the American religion.
The mind of Lincoln, the nature of Puritanism, the character of classical Hebrew thought are three basic topics in the study of Americanism. Lincoln and Puritanism are connected in several ways, including symbolically.
We know that Lincoln had a recurring dream of a phantom ship rapidly making for some dark, mysterious shore. He associated the dream with Union victories, which seemed to follow in its wake.
Dreams are unpopular nowadays; few thinkers want to waste time describing much less interpreting them. But if a man takes the trouble to recite his dreams to other people--and the man happens to be Abraham Lincoln--then the dreams are worth some attention.
We do want to understand Lincoln’s thinking, and like all people, he thought not only awake but asleep. Sometimes dream thoughts are gibberish; other times (as we all realize) they’re unguarded thoughts that the dreamer chose not to think in the day time; thoughts he drove away when he was awake and on guard. Thoughts that bobbed to the surface only when he was unable to hold them down.
At any rate, Lincoln dreamed repeatedly of a ship making rapidly for mysterious shores. This dream doesn’t seem terribly obscure. The war was a kind of voyage, but no one knew just when it would end--when the ship would dock. The important thing was to keep moving and not lie becalmed--Lincoln’s nightmare experience in the early stages of the war, when he couldn’t get his generals to fight.
A ship making for the unknown shores of America was obviously a central part of Puritan experience, too. John Winthrop wrote his famous prophecy aboard the ship Arbella, underway for Massachusetts: “Wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us.” We know that the Pilgrims’ ship Mayflower was a revered symbol of American history, once--and so were Columbus’s ships.
The image of America as a ship cutting through history’s waters, bound for the promised land, is probably one reason why Longfellow’s most famous (or among his most famous) verses were, “sail on,/O Ship of State!/Sail on, O Union, strong and great!/Humanity with all its fears,/With all the hopes of future years,/Is hanging breathless on thy fate!” It is probably also one reason why Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” had such emotional resonance and used to be a center point of American devotion. I think you might catch a last, dying echo of the symbolic power of the ship on its questing voyage in the career of John Kennedy.
In any case, there are symbolic and other connections between Lincoln and the Puritans. And I want to consider one other Lincoln dream, a far more puzzling one, later on.
In slipping from early American Puritanism to the period of Lincoln, I’ll obviously bypass a lot of history, including the supremely important Revolutionary period. I’ll refer to some aspects of the Revolutionary era, but the definitive study of its religious meaning is Novak’s On Two Wings, one of few actually important books of this generation.
And a last introductory word: Why am I discussing these topics? I’m no historian. But my topic is religion more than history. And I am a citizen of the USA. And I do want to know where we are and how we got here.
The number of books and essays on Lincoln is almost stupefying, but one of the very best essays is by Edmund Wilson. He was a reader and writer by profession. I am, too. Though I can’t hope to equal Wilson, I can approach these topics in the same sort of way.
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To see what the American religion is, we have to start with Puritanism. America is the Puritan nation. Europeans have always seen that clearly enough; Americans might as well, too.
Hatred of Puritanism happens to be one of the best-established bigotries of modern times. “Puritan” has been an insult for hundreds of years. It suggests rigid, austere, censorious--exactly the kind of religion secularists love to hate. Puritans were rigid and censorious, up to a point. Most caricatures are partly true. But they were much else besides. They were creative thinkers about man’s spiritual role in the modern state and the modern world.
Puritanism was a British invention of the Elizabethan age. It reflected the unhappiness of English Protestants who saw the Church of England as not really Protestant or insufficiently Protestant; who wanted a purified church with no hierarchy or no Catholic-style hierarchy, where each Christian dealt directly with the Bible and the Lord. Puritans were Calvinists who believed in predestination, in salvation through saving grace; whose faith centered on the Covenant of Grace, as they called it, that the Lord had made with Abraham--which made a pool of grace available to the “visible saints” who were predestined by the Lord for salvation.
Queen Elizabeth tolerated the Puritans. But things changed when she died and the Stuarts came to power. James I announced that he would make the Puritans “conform themselves or I will harry them out of the land.” He meant it, and persecuted Puritans set sail in rising numbers for the New World in search of religious freedom Things were even worse for British Puritans under Charles I and Archbishop Laud; Puritan emigration to America increased. By the mid seventeenth century, many Puritan settlements were solidly established in America, especially--though not only--in New England.
American Puritanism differed in significant ways from its British parent. It usually sought to be more rigorous, and to push Puritan premises to their logical conclusions. American Puritans often described their settlements as covenant communities. The community as a whole conceived itself as having a convenant with the Lord, or a vow agreed to by both sides. John Winthop wrote, for example, that “thus stands the cause betweene God and us. Wee are entered in a covenant with him for this work.” If the community behaves well, God treats it well. If the community violates the covenant, “The Lord will surely breake out in wrath against us.”
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Americanism came to consist of a creed in the context of the “American Zionism” doctrine. Puritanism played the decisive role in shaping this doctrine.
Winthrop again wrote in 1630 that the Lord was “jealous of our love and obedience, just as He told the people of Israel, ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore will I punish you for your transgressions’” (Amos 3:2). This highly significant verse--therefore will I visit all your sins upon you” is another translation--is the verse most frequently used in traditional Jewish literature to define the idea of a “chosen people.”
In the literature of Puritanism, Britain, and even moreso America, the analogy to ancient Israel recurs constantly. After all, the experience of the American Puritans really did suggest the experience of ancient Israel. These Puritans really had fled a “house of bondage” as it seemed to them, and made a dangerous journey to a pagan land where they struggled to establish themselves. American Puritans thought of themselves as ancient Israel reborn, and said so often.
Before Winthrop and his group set out, for example, John Cotton preached them a sermon on this verse from II Samuel: “Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more” (II Sam. 7:10). As God had “planted” Israel in the promised land, He would plant the Puritans in a new promised land.
Cotton’s whole sermon likened the Puritans traveling to America to biblical Jews heading for Israel. The Puritans would inhabit their new settlements, Cotton said, “as well by gracious promise as by the common, and just, and bountiful providence of the Lord.”
On the way, Winthrop himself, in his famous essay, composed an elaborate comparison between the Puritans and Ancient Israel. “Wee shall finde,” he wrote, “that the God of Israell is among us.” And there are innumerable references to this analogy in the literature of the growing Puritan settlements in America.
The eminent New England theologian Thomas Shepard wrote: “ What shall we say of the singular providence of God bringing so many shiploads of His people through so many dangers, as upon eagles’ wings, with so much safety from year to year?”
He is echoing two Hebrew verses:
Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself.” (Exod 19:4). And, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with the wings of eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31).
And he is restating the message that the Puritans of New England are ancient Israel reborn; God’s new chosen people.
There are (as I say) countless similar references. And in later generations we hear the consequences of this doctrine of American Zionism from many thinkers on many occasions.
Including Thomas Jefferson, for example, who referred to his countrymen in his first inaugural address as “possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendents to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” And in his second inaugural, even more plainly: “I shall need,” he said, “the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.” (An updated version of “flowing with milk and honey.” Jefferson was always up-to-date.)
In the context of American Zionism, it was natural for Americans to believe that they were setting an example for the whole world; leading the whole world out of the house of bondage into--or at least, toward--the promised land of liberty.
* * *
We hear from the Puritans not only American Zionism, but premonitions of the American creed of liberty, equality, and democracy.
These don’t emerge from the Bible and Christianity only; the Puritans were Englishmen, heirs to the tradition of English liberty and law. Both were important to Puritan thinking. But what’s often neglected is the fact that liberty, equality, and democracy all had Biblical roots, so far as the Puritans understood them.
Liberty for the Puritans meant, first of all, the kind of national religious liberty Israel had won by escaping Egypt. They believed in religious freedom--for themselves. But Roger Williams was a Puritan, too, and he founded Rhode Island as a Puritan community with a startling twist--religious freedom for everyone.
Eventually the idea of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land took on a broader meaning. Thus we have a committee of the Continental Congress made up of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson--they don’t make congressional commitees like they used to--asked to design a seal for the brand new United States.
Their proposed seal shows Israel crossing the Red Sea, lit by the divine pillar of fire, with the motto, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” The seal was never adopted, but the same theme emerges repeatedly in sermons of the period, which were almost certainly more influential with the public at large than the works of British or French enlightenment philosophers.
Democracy of a sort was characteristic of several Puritan settlements. One important example: the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, of May 1638, have been described in recent decades as the “first written constitution of modern democracy.”
They were drawn up in response to a sermon by Thomas Hooker before the general assembly in Hartford. Hooker based himself on the Biblical verse in which Moses is recapitulating his instructions to Israel in the wilderness--“Take ye wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you” (Deuteronomy 1:13). By “take ye” Hooker understood, as other commentators have also, some sort of democratic choice. He interpreted the verse to mean “that the choice of public magistrate belongs unto the people, by God’s own allowance. . . . The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.”
Pastors continued to cite this verse--in connection with the powerful denunciation of monarchy in First Samuel--to mean that the Bible required democracy. Various sermons repeated this assertion up to and during the Revolution and in the years following--for example, in the 1788 sermon before the New Hampshire General Court by Samuel Langdon, former president of Harvard, called “The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States.”
Equality is the trickiest element of the Creed to trace. American Puritans were not believers, ordinarily, in the doctrine that all men are created equal. But we do find this doctrine curiously foreshadowed by Alexander Whitaker, an Anglican rather than Puritan minister, in an essay called “Good Newes from Virginia,” which he sent back to England for publication in 1613. Whitaker asserts that American Indians must be well-treated by European settlers: after all, “One God created us, they have reasonable soules and intellectuall faculties as well as wee; we all have Adam for our common parent: yea, by nature the condition of us both is all one.”
Whitaker asserts, in other words, that all men were created by the one God, have the same rational souls, and have Adam for their common parent. Thus all men are equal--“by nature the condition of us both is all one”--both Englishmen and Indians; Christians and pagans.
So it is possible to read the Bible and find the equality of man written at the very beginning of Genesis. In fact, it’s not just possible--it’s easy. The Jewish religious tradition drew this conclusion many centuries before the European settlement of America. Novak points this out. A celebrated passage in the midrash asserts that the “greatest general principle in the Torah” is the verse that reads, “these are the generations of Adam” (5:1), because it tells us that all men have the same parents. In another midrash God says to Moses, “Do I care about distinctions among people? Whether it is an Israelite or Gentile, man or woman, male slave or female slave, whoever does a good deed shall find its reward.” Another midrash notes that men treat the rich and poor differently, but “God does not act that way; all are equal before him, women, slaves, rich and poor.”
But how did Jefferson and the founding fathers actually hit on this principle that “all men are created equal”? Enlightenment philosophy was certainly one influence and the English tradition another. But Abraham Lincoln had a different interpretation, looking back, which he gave in an 1858 speech in Illinois.
After quoting from the Declaration that all men are created equal, Lincoln said:
This was their [the founding fathers’] lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity.
This is, of course, Lincoln speaking and not Jefferson. But the fact that Lincoln supplied the explicit link between the Declaration and the Bible is, I think, suggestive and significant.
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To sum up: Puritanism laid the basis for Americanism; it foreshadowed American Zionism and the American creed. It did so on the basis not of philosophical or legal argument, but of Christian belief based on the Bible. And, of course, biblical passages dealing with man and the state and the organization of a state--such as they are--are mainly located in the Hebrew Bible.
Turning then to Lincoln, last and greatest founding father--who completed the work of all the others.
Lincoln’s achievement was to complete the creation of an Americanism that was not mere patriotism nor mere philosophic doctrine, but rather a biblical, Judeo-Christian religion.
How did Lincoln transform Puritanism into Americanism? I’m not arguing that he took explicit, deliberate steps to bring this about, but merely that his career contributed heavily to the metamorphosis.
We know two things to begin with: we know that Puritanism inspired Lincoln; we know that, in the years he was moving gradually but unstoppably toward the center of American history, Puritanism itself was dying.
Let me discuss each of these briefly: how Puritanism inspired Lincoln; how it died.
We know that two of three books Lincoln doted on as a boy were the Bible and the Puritan masterpiece Pilgrim’s Progress. (The third was Aesop.) We know that Lincoln the man tended to prefer the simpler varieties of Protestant Christianity. We know that he believed in man’s obligation to deal directly, one-on-one, with the Bible and with God.
“I have felt His hand upon me in great trials,” he said in June, 1862, speaking of the Lord, “and submitted to His guidance, and I trust that as He shall further open the way I will be ready to walk therein, relying on His help and trusting in His goodness and wisdom.”
In 1863, he told one of his generals that “I locked the door, and got down on my knees before Almighty God, and prayed to him mightily for victory at Gettysburg. I told Him that this was His war, and our cause His cause.”
He was deeply attached to the Bible. He said of the Bible in 1864 to his old friend Joshua Speed: “Take all of this Book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.” Isaac Arnold writes that Lincoln “knew the Bible by heart. There was not a clergyman to be found so familiar with it as he.”
“He would sometimes correct a misquotation of Scripture,” writes Noah Brooks, “giving generally the chapter and verse where it could be found.” He “liked the Old Testament best,” Brooks adds.
This predilection for the Hebrew Bible is also a Puritan habit. Lincoln was especially attached to the book of Psalms and to Job. These things are worth saying because Lincoln grew into an intensely, profoundly religious man--although we rarely hear him described in those terms nowadays. And his religious faith became fundamental to his thinking and decision-making during the Civil War; we rarely hear that either. The historian Sidney Mead was surely right to describe Lincoln in 1954 as “the spiritual center of American history.” In truth, Lincoln should probably be remembered, as I’ve said, as the most important religious figure America has ever produced. I don’t mean he was a theologian--obviously he wasn’t--but Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah weren’t, either.
It also seems that the idea of a covenant or mutual vow between man and God was fundamental to Lincoln--increasingly so as he got older. This bears again on the ways Lincoln was inspired by Puritanism. He told a cabinet meeting on a famous occasion in late September 1862 that he was going to announce the Emancipation Proclamation because, he said, “I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.” Antietam was a Union victory that stopped Lee’s drive north, for the time being; Lincoln responded by acting on his vow.
To wrap up these observations on Lincoln and the Puritan tradition with a final comment: in describing Lincoln’s view of the Civil War, Edmund Wilson points out that “like most of the important products of the American mind at that time, it grew out of the religious tradition of the New England theology of Puritanism.”
Lincoln objected to some aspects of Puritanism. He rejected the idea of eternal punishment; he seems to have rejected the idea of predestination. He seems to have had doubts about the divinity of Jesus and the reality of the Trinity. He certainly moved toward Christianity during his lifetime. But the evidence suggests that on balance, like those ships in his dreams, he never quite arrived.
As for Puritanism itself, in the first part of the nineteenth century it was dying. This is a complex story; briefly, though, many leading Puritan churches in Boston--spiritual headquarters of American Puritanism--transferred their allegiance to Unitarianism. By 1800, every Boston church except one had a Unitarian preacher. The Harvard Divinity School was founded in 1816 essentially as a Unitarian institution. It served as headquarters for what Emerson called the “corpse-cold Unitarianism of Boston and Harvard College.”
There’s a revealing comment in Henry Adams’s autobiography. He describes his first confrontation with slavery as a teenager in the mid-nineteenth century. He writes, with reference to that period—the mid 1800s—that “[s]lavery drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism.” Of course, no one would have said a thing like that in 1630; the Puritan community had yet to wander away from its Puritanism. It didn’t have to be driven back. But in the mid-1800s, Puritanism was less a live religion than a recollected cultural attitude.
So we know that Puritanism influenced Lincoln; we know that, when Lincoln became president, Puritanism was dead or dying.
One other important thing about Lincoln: he exercised enormous moral authority, and he knew it. His authority grew, naturally, during the years of his presidency. It didn’t hold everywhere or with everyone in the Union. But the authority was real and he was aware of it. His White House secretary, John Hay, wrote that it was “absurd to call him a modest man. No great man is ever modest.”
“There was something about Abraham Lincoln that enforced respect,” Don Piatt wrote in a remarkable essay; Piatt was a Union officer and military judge in the Civil War. “No man presumed on the apparent invitation to be other than respectful.”
Marching troops called him “father Abraham,” in reference to the Biblical patriarch. On a receiving line at a public reception in the White House, a man from Buffalo told the president, “Up our way we believe in God and Abraham Lincoln.” Lincoln said, “My friend, you are more than half right.”
In fall 1863, at a time when antiwar northern Democrats were attacking the Republicans in general and the president especially--these Democrats had once supported the war but had gotten tired of it (funny how these things work--the New York Times came to the Republican president’s defense. (Some things do change after all.) “In spite of all the hard trials and the hard words to which he has been exposed,” the Times wrote, “Abraham Lincoln is today the most popular man in the Republic. All the denunciation and all the arts of the demagogue are perfectly powerless to wean the people from their faith in him.”
A letter from a town in Massachusetts summarized the state of things at the end of his presidency. It’s dated on the day of his second inauguration. It starts by telling the president “how sorry we all are that you must have four years more of this terrible toil. But remember what a triumph it is for the right, what a blessing to the country. . . . If you had been in this little speck of a village this morning, and heard the soft, sweet music of unseen bells rippling through the morning silence from every quarter of the far-off horizon, you would have better known what your name is to this nation.”
His moral authority was enormous. Yet he did not join a church. And the painter F.B. Carpenter, who became his friend, reports that Lincoln said to his long-time friend Newton Bateman, “Mr. Bateman, I am not a Christian--God knows I would be one.” Again, the question of whether or not Lincoln was a Christian is complex and subtle. But two things are clear. Although he went to church, he never joined one. Although he said nothing remotely disrespectful of Christianity--he congratulated the workers of Manchester, England, for example, for the “sublime Christian heroism” of their support for the Union cause--he never plainly and publicly called himself a Christian.
So what did he say? What did he do with his moral authority? He might have been uncertain about Christianity, but he was never uncertain about America.
We know he was drawn as a youngish man to the idea of a “political religion”--a term he used at age twenty-nine in an Illinois speech--a term by which he meant something like a “civil religion,” a purely secular Americanism.
Much later, in 1858, the year of the Douglas debates, he used the phrase “my ancient faith” to refer to the Declaration of Independence--not to Christianity or the Bible. But when he allowed his love of country and his devotion to God and the Bible to flow together, he arrived at a different kind of Americanism--a biblical, Judeo-Christian version of the American religion.
And it was Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, who said that “with Lincoln the Union rose to the sublimity of religious mysticism.”
In his first inaugural address, he concluded, “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” No doubt he himself could hear those “mystic chords.”
He saw the principles of the Creed as derived from the Bible, not merely as self-evident truths. He announced in 1858 (as I’ve mentioned) putting the pieces in place, that “equality” was a doctrine derived from the Bible. He understood democracy as the Lord’s voice speaking through the people. “I must trust in that Supreme Being,” he said, “who has never yet forsaken this favored land, through the instrumentality of this great and intelligent people.” And he made it clear many times as president that he saw liberty, too, as a gift of God. Thomas Jefferson had said that “the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” and Lincoln clearly agreed. Thus all three elements of the American creed--liberty, equality, democracy--came, for Lincoln, from the Bible.
Consider his two greatest speeches; America’s two greatest.
The Gettysburg Address of 1863 contains two kinds of statements: those that speak of the war and the great battle, and the two that restate the American Creed for all time. Those two being:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. . . . We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Thus liberty, equality and democracy.
And the speech is suffused with sanctity. The three basic elements of the Creed are lit up by the rest, which speaks of dedication, consecration, devotion, hallowing: the Creed is presented in a sacred setting, in a symbolic chapel built of suffering and sacrifice.
What Lincoln says in the second inaugural address at the end of his life is equally important to the American religion. His view of the Civil War changed as the fighting continued. At the start he insisted that the war was strictly a fight to preserve the Union. Slavery was incidental.
Of course, his opinion changed. The war, he came to believe, had been imposed by God on a sinful nation. It’s remarkable how closely the explanation he gives matches the Puritan forecasts of John Winthrop about the covenant community of America. Lincoln takes the abstract, general formulations of Puritanism and fits them to the American experience.
In 1630, Winthrop had written aboard the Arbella that:
Thus stands the cause between God and us. Wee are entered into Covenant with him for this worke… If we shall neglect the observation of these Articles. . . . The Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us, be revenged of such a perjured people and make us knowe the price of the breache of such a Covenant.
Some 250 years later, Lincoln speaks of particulars:
Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war shall speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said: “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Turning back to the earlier document, Winthrop continues:
Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke and to provide for our posterity is to followe the Counsell of Micah, to doe Justice, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God.
And Lincoln continues:
With Malice towards 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.
Thus Lincoln devotes his greatest speech, at the end of his life, to explaining that the nation as a whole was guilty before the Lord; was punished by the Lord. Must devote itself now to walking with the Lord--to doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with its God.
Of course, Lincoln doesn’t use the language of Puritanism. He does not speak of a covenant or a covenant community. He was inspired by Puritanism, but Puritanism is dead; instead he speaks the language of Americanism. In a comparison of Winthrop’s words to Lincoln’s, the transformation of Puritanism to Americanism shows up clearly.
Lincoln addressed the doctrine of American Zionism too, in his own way. Of America he said, “I must trust in that Supreme Being who has never yet forsaken this favored land.” If America is not a new promised land, it is at any rate a favored one that the Lord has never yet forsaken.
Regarding the American people, he said that he hoped to be a “humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty and of this, his almost chosen people.” If Americans were not a new chosen people they were at least--in his haunting phrase, which suggests (like a ship cutting through the water) progress toward a destination that has yet to be reached--at least an almost chosen people.
And he told America: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it”--an active version of the prophecy of the city on a hill, a view of Americanism as a world religion with global responsibilities.
Lincoln put the case for war and victory in Iraq better than anyone else ever has or ever will: let us dare to do our duty as we understand it. Or, “With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”
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When Lincoln was murdered, the American religion entered a new sphere of sanctity. After his death, the London Spectator wrote about the second inaugural address, which “we cannot read,” the Spectator said, “without a renewed conviction that it is the noblest political document known to history, and should have for the nation and the statesmen he left behind him something of a sacred and almost prophetic character. Surely, none was ever written under a stronger sense of the reality of God’s government.”
“We hear Lincoln’s words in every school-house and college,” Isaac Arnold wrote in his 1884 Lincoln biography, “in every cabin and at every public meeting. We read them in every newspaper, school-book and magazine. . . . His words, becoming some of them as familiar as the Bible, are on the tongues of all the people, shaping the national character.”
Lincoln’s martyrdom was a human catastrophe and a political one. But in religious terms, it sealed his achievement. In fact, Lincoln’s will was so powerful and his genius so towering, it’s impossible not to ask a final question: Did he foresee the possibility of his own martyrdom? Possibly (even) with equanimity?
Here we come to his most uncanny dream. He reported it only a few days before his death. He had seen a crowd hurrying to the White House. When he followed it to the East Room--he mentioned the East Room specifically--he heard voices repeating “Lincoln is dead” and found, laid out, his own corpse.
What would engender such a dream? And maybe more important, why would Lincoln bother to tell people this dream, especially given his unwillingness to change his habits, or cut back his appearances in public?
Obviously, anxiety about his own safety--suppressed anxiety. We’ve all had the experience of carefully avoiding some thought during the day only to have it emerge somehow when we’re off our guard, asleep.
Lincoln was often warned by friends not to expose himself so casually and recklessly in public, at least to take bodyguards along; he was in the habit of dismissing those warnings. We know that Lincoln often described himself as a fatalist and that Mrs Lincoln interpreted her husband’s indifference to threats on his life as an expression of his lifelong fatalism.
But the danger was so obvious in a city like Washington, and Lincoln’s refusal to deal with it seriously was so marked, it’s impossible not to wonder whether (beyond being indifferent to danger) he didn’t actually court danger, at least subliminally. Is it possible that Lincoln thought of martyrdom not merely with equanimity but with positive interest?
Especially as he led the nation ever closer to peace and reunion--to the promised land that the ship in his dreams (like Moses on the mountaintop) was destined never to reach…
On April 9, 1865, as he traveled by steamship from Grant’s headquarters back to Washington, he read out loud a passage from Macbeth. In Benjamin Thomas’s 1952 biography, the author describes these lines and Lincoln’s mood: “With peace assured,” Thomas writes, the president’s “thoughts had turned to tranquil themes.” But here are the lines Lincoln read: “Duncan is in his grave;/After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;/Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,/Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,/Can touch him further.”
The words are tranquil--and one ominous step past tranquil. They are “fatalist,” but more than fatalist. A king has been killed by a traitor, but Macbeth reflects that the dead king has recovered at last from life’s fitful fever; he sleeps peacefully at last. He used to sick; at last he is well.
Is it possible that Lincoln thought of martyrdom not merely with equanimity, not merely with positive interest, but with longing? Toward the end of his life, he told friends about a spot somewhere inside him that was exhausted past all hope of recovery. And he heard the “mystic chords” of the Union and would surely have understood--whether he pondered it actively or not—how his own martyrdom would complete the American religion. In that dream of himself laid out dead in the East Room, he might well have been telling himself and his friends and us, for more reasons than one, it would be best this way.
But this is mere speculation. Here is what’s important: Lincoln poured his whole passion for God and the Bible into Americanism. He proclaimed Americanism a world religion. His extraordinary personality made the new religion live. His martyrdom made it holy.
Americanism might seem like a secular flame above the surface, but the flame is fed from below by biblical and Judeo-Christian faith. Cut off this fuel and the flame dies, and the shining city goes dark.
The most important story in and for American history is the biblical Exodus; the verse “let my people go” became the subtext of the Puritan emigration to America in the seventeenth century, the American revolution in the eighteenth, and--in significant part by Lincoln’s own efforts--of the Civil War in the nineteenth. It became important, also, to the twentieth century Americanism of Wilson and Truman and Reagan and W. Bush--Americanism as an outward-looking religion with global responsibilities.
In conclusion, we ought to know Puritanism for what it is: a powerful, passionate worldview obsessed with the Bible and ancient Israel.
We ought to know Americanism for what it is: the form in which Puritanism still survives and still inspires peoples who are or dream of becoming free.
We ought to know Abraham Lincoln for what he was: an ancient Hebrew prophet dressed up as America’s greatest president, who told his countrymen, as if he were talking to them in the year 2006, that “[w]e have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.”
And we might remember that seventeenth century American Puritan who said of his fellow settlers, “We are the children of Abraham; and therefore we are under Abraham’s covenant.”
In the end we do need to know the real character of Americanism. The secular version is a flat, gray rendition--no color and no fizz--of this extraordinary work of religious imagination: the idea that liberty, equality, and democracy belong to all mankind because God wants them to.
America and Americans are uniquely blessed and therefore uniquely charged to stretch a strong arm out and gather the outcasts in, protect the oppressed, and send all evil tyrants scuttling off backwards--back under a rock, down a rat hill, into the nightmare past.
America needs a national religion: it’s a practical necessity, because no kind of shared descent or ethnicity binds Americans together; this was true in 1776 and is true today. Americanism is a practical requirement. But it’s something else, too--one of the most extraordinary gifts ever presented to mankind.
It’s also a gift to each one of us, to every American, from America’s founders, defenders, and prophets, to whom we ought to say, in Lincoln’s words, “[T]hanks to all. For the great republic--for the principle it lives by--for man’s vast future--thanks to all.”
David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University.
