Book Review: Lincoln's Battle With God by Stephen Mansfield

Lincoln's Battle With God: A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America by Stephen Mansfield

Abraham Lincoln's life is an epic story that is hard to condense into one book. Choosing a theme is a way to provide focus, much like Spielberg's Lincoln film that focused on passing the 13th Amendment rather than his whole life. In this book, Mansfield focuses on Lincoln's attitude toward religion, specifically Christianity, and how that changed over his lifetime.

Lincoln grew up dirt poor, the son of fundamentalist Protestant parents. At the time, the American midwest was in the midst of a tent-meeting revival craze. As he grew up, these traveling religious programs, with their uneven mixtures of sincerity and showmanship, made the young Lincoln more skeptical about religion. Also, his father was strict but self-serving in this faith, often using Abraham for his monetary value rather than raising him to be a devote Christian. His dad discouraged Abraham's reading habit, thinking it was a symptom of laziness. Ironically, Lincoln read the Bible a lot as a child and even conducted "church meetings" for his siblings while the parents went to Sunday church.

As a teenager and young adult, Lincoln became a skeptic and anti-religious. He would argue with people about the Bible, pointing out inconsistencies and errors he found. He struggled with depression throughout his life, especially since his mother died when he was young. Other close friends were lost in his youth. He had a hard time with women, eventually convincing the socialite Mary Todd to marry him after a failed courtship. He was known as the village atheist in Springfield, Illinois, where he practiced law and served in the state government.

He experienced a turn when he started to read The Christian's Defence at his father-in-law's house. The book helped him to deal with his depression over the loss of their child Eddie. He did a lot of soul searching, especially as he ran for national offices. There's a famous story that as he sat in Ford's Theater just before he was assassinated, he was telling Mary Todd Lincoln that he'd like to go to Jerusalem after the presidency was over.

Mansfield does a fine job tracing Lincoln's religious thoughts and opinions throughout his life. He acknowledges that a lot of resources have biases either toward or against Lincoln coming to a Christian understanding by the end of his life. Mansfield pieces together an argument based on Lincoln's actions and writings. He shows both the atheistic early years and Lincoln's more faithful understand of the existence and role of God in his life. During the American Civil War, many of Lincoln's speeches show a more nuanced understanding of Divine Providence, how God does not necessarily "choose sides" and make the (self)righteous victorious. 

The writing is lively and persuasive, with plenty of footnotes to validate his argument along the way. The book ends with an appendix of Lincoln's wartime speeches, including both Inaugurals and several calls for days of prayer.

Highly recommended.