| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 102.2

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 102.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics

By Stewart Winger

(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Pp. viii, 271. Notes, bibliography, index. $38.00.)

One of the dominant components of Lincoln studies in recent years has been the debate over the sixteenth president's religion and its expression in his public life. Now Stewart Winger enters the fray with this somewhat ponderous but deeply penetrating examination of Lincoln as public intellectual and theologian. Hardly a beginner's book, Winger's work requires of the reader considerable grounding in American intellectual history and Lincolniana. Reading it can be hard work, but the labor is well invested, for Winger's contributions to the scholarly discussion of Lincoln's religious thought are profound and provocative.

At the heart of the book is Winger's "attempt to properly contextualize Lincoln's words" (p. 7). To do this, he seeks to place Lincoln's religion in a broader intellectual and cultural framework than previous historians have employed. In their interpretations of Lincoln's religion, Winger asserts, scholars have engaged in a "false choice," treating Lincoln as either a conventional evangelical or a skeptic in the Enlightenment tradition (p. 4). What they have missed is the contribution of romanticism to the president's thought. Winger's Lincoln is, first and foremost, a romantic Protestant whose religious rhetoric reflects the poetic, moral, and deeply spiritual drive of the romanticism that arose from the American Renaissance.

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