| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lincoln's Christianity. By Michael Burkhimer. (Yardley: Westholme, 2007. xiv, 206 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-59416-053-0.)
Religion has long been part of the enigma of Abraham Lincoln. How do we reconcile the young religious skeptic with the mature president who so profoundly invested the Civil War with religious significance? Lincoln's religious views—difficult to recover, interpret, and disentangle from past and present biases—are the subject of this brief survey.	1
Young Abraham Lincoln grew up among the Separate Baptists of frontier Kentucky and Indiana. From their Calvinist doctrine of predestination, he forged a belief in the limits of human agency and free will into what he would later term "the Doctrine of Necessity." Yet evangelicalism was not the only religious discourse of the early republic. Freethought—what some in the era termed "infidelity"—also left its mark on Lincoln. He read such freethinkers as Thomas Paine and comte de Volney, and expressed occasional disdain for ministers and church services. Nonetheless, Burkhimer argues that Lincoln's religious views were actually most similar to those of the early Christian fathers.	. . .

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