A
retired US Marine officer with whom I corresponded
asked, "What type of crisis do you think will
cause the intellectual right to form a critical
mass - if that is even possible?" I wrote back,
"Lincoln's Second Inaugural is chiseled on the
wall of his monument, and he said all that needs
to be said. If they won't take it from Lincoln,
why would they take it from us?" But it's
Lincoln's birthday, and it's time for another try.
Abraham Lincoln is America's least popular
president. It seems odd to say this given the
near-deification of a man who was born
in a log cabin but whose
image resides in a mock-up of the Temple of Zeus
at Olympus. But Americans remain horrified at what
he actually said, namely that we do not control
our own destinies, but are subject to a providence
that is "just and righteous altogether", even if
it makes terrible demands upon us.
We
Americans in general do not want to be an "almost
chosen people", as Lincoln characterized us. We
would rather believe that we are exceptional in
the same way that the Greeks or British think they
are exceptional, in Barack Obama's notorious
putdown, or that our exceptionalism can be
freeze-dried and exported through nation-building.
Lincoln appears in the popular literature
as a paternal figure preaching "charity towards
all and malice towards none", ignoring the proviso
that the charity would apply only after
unconditional surrender. In the middlebrow
account, Lincoln is a national Rorschach Test,
from whom every strand of American thinking can
take comfort. Andrew Ferguson, for example, argued
in a 2008 First Things essay
that Lincoln's speeches ...
... are not merely works of
statecraft but homilies in a civil religion of
his own devising, steeped in the cadences and
rhetoric of the King James Bible. They were the
consequence of Lincoln's deepest contemplation
and belief, arrived at with some care and (we
may suppose) discomfort.
Lincoln's
religion is indecipherable, claims Ferguson, who
thinks that is a good thing:
But perhaps the country has
benefited from not knowing. The uncertainty has
made Lincoln our common property, whoever we
are, from Robert Ingersoll to Cardinal Mundelein
to Nettie Maynard. It may be indeed that
Lincoln's is the only kind of religious
expression that will travel in a free country
like ours. His religion has lasted a century and
a half and has appealed to believers of all
kinds, and to skeptics too, exactly because of
its generality. Yet it still means something
definable and concrete: The country, Lincoln
believed, is the carrier of a precious cargo, a
proposition that is the timeless human truth,
and the survival of this principle will always
be of providential importance. We assent to
Lincoln's creed, wide open as it is, when we
think of ourselves as Americans.
The
best academic research, though, shows that it is
willfully fuzzy-minded to portray Lincoln as the
political equivalent of Lil' Abner's Shmoo, which
tasted like whatever one wanted it to eat.
Lincoln's religion - the theology that informed
his almost prophetic utterances toward the end of
the Civil War - was a form of Calvinism in direct
succession to the Puritan founders of New England.
Hardly a "civil religion" of his own invention, it
recognized the righteousness of the biblical God
of the time of the Exodus.
As the
distinguished Lincoln scholar Douglas L Wilson put
it, "Lincoln seems to have resisted the religious
beliefs of his parents, [but] he retained
throughout his life a fatalism that one may
believe was fostered by the Calvinist bent of his
Baptist upbringing." Observes historian James
Takach, "Indeed, more than one Lincoln scholar has
connected Lincoln’s belief in the Doctrine of
Necessity to the Calvinist doctrine of
predestination. ... He retained the fatalistic
premise at its core: that man does not control his
own destiny." Similarly, David Herbert Donald
observes that Lincoln, from his earliest days,
"had a sense that his destiny was controlled by a
larger force, some Higher Power". [1] And Alonzo C
Guelzo says the Second Inaugural Address "contains
the most radically metaphysical question ever
posed by an American president. Lincoln had come,
by the circle of a lifetime and the disasters of
war, to confront once again the Calvinist God ...
who possessed a conscious will to intervene,
challenge and reshape human destinies". [2]
"Fondly do we hope - fervently do we pray
- that this mighty scourge of war may 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," Lincoln said
in his Second Inaugural address.
Lincoln
knew that his views would not be popular. In a
famous March 15, 1865, letter to Thurlow Weed,
Lincoln explained that his just-delivered speech
would not be "immediately popular", because "men
are not flattered by being shown that there is a
difference of purpose between the Almighty and
them. To deny it, though, in this case would be to
deny that there is a God governing the world."
Lincoln’s celebrated statement that God
held both sides in the Civil War to strict account
for their transgressions echoes John Winthrop’s
warning that God would hold America to stricter
account "because he would sanctify those who come
near him". What applied to ancient Israel applied
also to the almost chosen people of America. The
Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world
because of offenses; for it must needs be that
offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the
offense cometh."
Americans chiseled the
text of the Second Inaugural address onto
Lincoln’s Memorial: "If we shall suppose that
American slavery is one of those offenses which,
in the providence of God, must needs come, but
which, having continued through His appointed
time, He now wills to remove, and that 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?" The Biblical faith of
Israel refracted through Calvin acknowledges the
divine attribute of justice along with the
attribute of mercy.
As the evangelical
historian Mark Noll observes in America’s God,
that is not always a source of comfort. "Views of
providence," Noll writes, "provide the sharpest
contrast between Lincoln and the professional
theologians of his day." He adds that "the
American God may have been working too well for
the Protestant theologians who, even as they
exploited Scripture and pious experience so
successfully, yet found it easy to equate
America’s moral government of God with
Christianity itself. Their tragedy - and the
greater the theologian, the greater the tragedy -
was to rest content with a God defined by the
American conventions God’s own loyal servants had
exploited so well." [3]
Americans have
locked Lincoln up in a marble box on the National
Mall - a mock-Greek temple imitating the temple of
Zeus at Olympus - and hoped he would stay put in
it. Calvinism died with the Civil War: Americans
decided that they would rather not have a God who
demanded sacrifice from them on this scale.
They did not want to be a Chosen People
held accountable for their transgressions. Instead
they wanted a reticent God who withheld his wrath
while they set out to make the world amenable to
their own purposes. The New England elite went to
war as convinced abolitionists singing of the
coming of God who trampled out the vintage of the
grapes of wrath, as in the prophetic vision of
Isaiah 63, and wielded a terrible swift word. They
came back convinced that no idea could be so
righteous or so certain as to merit the
unspeakable sacrifices of their generation.
In his book The Metaphysical Club,
Louis Menand argues that the horrors of the Civil
War desanguinated the idealism of such young New
Englanders as the future Supreme Court Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and the psychologist
William James. The war purged them of their
Puritan convictions and left in its place the
vapid pragmatism that has reigned since then in
American elite culture.
In place of the
paternal God of The Battle Hymn of the
Republic, Americans got the avuncular God of
Social Gospel, the ebullient Anglo-Saxon
pretention of Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilsonian
"Idealism". America’s reaction to the Civil War,
the costliest conflict between the Thirty Years’
War in Germany and the Second World War on the
Russian front, recalls Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye the
Carpenter: "God of mercy, choose another people".
The terrible sacrifice of the Civil War
had soured Americans on their covenant with the
God of the Bible. Americans did not want to be the
instrument of a Divine Providence that would hold
them to account for their transgressions, in the
vision of Winthrop and Lincoln. They no longer
wanted Puritan election - certainly not at the
price level of the Civil War.
American
Calvinism - specifically the belief that God's
purposes transcended our knowledge and might
conflict with our wishes - had remained the
decisive residual influence on Lincoln and his
generation. After the Civil War, it was replaced
by the conceit that political tinkering and social
engineering could remake the world in America’s
image - an underhanded way of stating that there
is nothing really special about America, and that
America’s unique character as a country whose
citizens selected themselves from out of the other
nations does not really distinguish it from
nations defined by blood, tradition, and
geography. From this muddy well came both the
naive universalism of the Southern Baptist Jimmy
Carter and the Wilsonian optimism of George W
Bush.
When will the intellectual right
form a critical mass? Just as it was in 1861 -
when it absolutely must, and there is no more
wiggle-room for self-consoling illusions about our
ability to master our own destiny.
Notes: 1. Lincoln's
Moral Vision: The Second Inaugural Address, by
James Takach (University of Mississippi Press,
2002), p 62. 2. Takach, p 92. 3.
America’s God, by Mark Noll (Oxford
University Press, 2002),
438pp.
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