Abraham Lincoln's Faith

 

Another Lincoln book! 

Joshua Zeitz' Lincoln's God: How Faith transformed a President and a Nation (Viking, 2023) is indeed another book about Lincoln, but specifically it is a book about Lincoln's faith (or lack thereof) throughout his life and how the Civil War affected that presidential faith. And it is also at least as much (maybe more) about the nation's faith - and, thus, the second half of the subtitle, How Faith Transformed a Nation - and how that national experience of faith was reflected in and affected by the Civil War.

Lincon's assassination - occurring on, of all days, Good Friday - transformed Lincoln the politician and wartime president into a national (and evangelical Christian) martyr. That is the Lincoln we were all introduced to, back when we still taught history in schools and still celebrated civic holidays. While not completely wrong, that memorialized imagery has had to coexist uncomfortably with the historical Lincoln, who never joined a church. He did occasionally attend Sunday services with his Presbyterian wife, but for the most part he kept his religious beliefs (such as they were) to himself. At the same time, he did clearly come to appreciate the growing importance of evangelical Christianity in American public life and especially its interpretive function in relation to the Civil War, which he in turn effectively adopted.

Joshua Zeitz, an historian who has taught at Harvard, Princeton, and Cambridge, and has authored six books, two of them related to Lincoln, addresses this unique dilemma effectively in this book, which is really as much (maybe more) about the religious transformation of the country as of Lincoln himself.

As for Lincoln, Zeitz stresses his apparent attraction to the "greater individualism, personal agency, and self-improvement," which increasingly characterized the 19th-century U.S. (exemplified by Methodism's rise). This, Zeitz suggests, estranged Lincoln both from his father and from his father's anti-moralizing, hyper-Calvinist religiosity. "Just as Abe gradually came to reject a life of manual labor, he appears also to have rejected his family’s religious worldview."

In doing so, however, Lincoln to some extent "swam against the currents," for "America in the first half of the nineteenth century was a deeply Christian and predominantly evangelical nation." Zeitz recounts the familiar story of 18th-century colonial religious decline, dramatically reversed by the two Great Awakenings, the second of which corresponded chronologically to Lincolns childhood and youth. The author does a great job retelling this important story, so central for understanding how and why the U.S. became the most religious country in the developed world - and remains so still even if some recent trends have dented that luster. And Zeitz does not neglect the religious revivals' impacts on enslaved Africans in the U.S. and the consequence development of a distinctive Black evangelical Christianity in this country, which played its own particular part in the religious drama that accompanied the Civil War.

Lincoln, however, studiously stood apart from all this. He "determinedly avoided the wave of evangelical enthusiasm that crashed over New Salem and other parts of central Illinois." While he shared the Bible with his contemporaries as their common literary inheritance, it was not for him the same source of certain religious truth that it was for so many of those contemporaries. Indeed, it was even alleged early his career that Lincoln had written "a blasphemous essay." However, he grew "notably more circumspect in his criticism of religion, perhaps out of deference to his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who joined a Presbyterian church. More likely, as he grew into respectable adulthood, Lincoln learned to bite his tongue."

The interesting question, of course, is how much his growing circumspection, natural enough in a public person who must be respectful of his constituents' belliefs, how much did it reflect any inner change in Lincoln's real feelings and attitudes?

What cannot be denied is that, as a young and aspiring politician, Lincoln "stood deliberately aloof from the evangelical backdrop of his age, even when other men on the make might have found it easier to join a church, offer a token nod to commitment, and feign belief. For Lincoln, intelligence, sound morality, and a reverence for civil laws were the foundation of a good society."

But another unavoidable fact about American society in Lincoln's era is that "the vast majority of reformers were ardent Christians." In particular, "the vast majority of abolitionists were evangelical Christians, motivated by the same spirit of perfectionism and holiness that stirred them to participate in a broad field of other social reform movements." Indeed, one Massachusetts abolitionist characterized the movement against slavery on the eve of the Civil War as “thoroughly and emphatically a religious enterprise.”

Even so, as late as the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln "held to a strictly secular indictment of slavery. There is no doubt that Lincoln considered slavery a moral offense. He said as much on the hustings and marveled at Douglas’s unprincipled refusal to condemn or support the institution." Yet, increasingly "Lincoln’s speeches increasingly sounded the language of Christian moralism," and Lincoln grew "more attentive than in earlier years to the religious sensibilities of his audiences." Lincoln was, Zeitz observes, "acutely sensitive to the growing political importance of evangelical churches and philanthropies, which by 1860 were unqualifiedly the largest and best organized pillars of American civil society."

Then came the war, which many evangelicals affirmed "was both a holy undertaking and potentially a regenerative mission." The U.S. Civil War would claim the lives of approximately 750,000 Americans, tragedy on a monumental scale - "a scale no American had seen then or has seen since." Meanwhile, even closer to home the Lincolns lost their own dear son Willie while in the White House, which especially connected Lincoln to the larger national experience of mass death. 

By 1863, Lincoln's proclamations increasingly reflected "a markedly biblical tone and providential message." Obviously, this "reflected Lincoln’s keen sense of audience—a nation of evangelical Christians who believed in their ability to achieve redemption through repentance and faith, many of whom were anxious to know that soldiers who died as Christians would be saved." At the same time, he suggests that Lincoln "may also have come to perceive and justify his role as a central actor in a historical drama, driven by a divine, though invisible, force."

Zeitz powerfully describes the effect of the war on the American people and on their religiosity. Some 2400 clergy served as chaplains - including 70 Catholic priests. "The gap between clergy and laypeople closed quickly. The war’s evolution from a struggle to maintain the Union to a battle for the liberation of four million enslaved human beings ultimately brought the Protestant churches and their members into close alignment with the Republican Party in a way that influenced not just the next several decades of American politics, but the coming era of American Protestantism." Ironically, the one-time skeptic even came to be seen as "a sort of half way clergyman.”

In fact, Lincon won reelection in 1864 "largely on the strength of their lopsided support among native-born Protestants, particularly those in rural areas." (The anti-war Democrat carried the Catholic vote.) Lincoln's second inaugural address, on March 4, 1865, was "a wholly different style of address from anything that preceded or followed it—deeply spiritual, borrowing heavily from the style of the King James Bible, reflective of Lincoln’s personal spiritual journey and crafted to lend religious meaning to a war that would soon draw to a close, but whose aftershocks Americans would continue to feel for decades to come." For Frederich Douglas, Lincoln's last great speech was “more like a sermon than a state paper.”

Zeitz concludes that "Abraham Lincoln, who was both a lifetime iconoclast and an uncanny student of public opinion, was the first president to channel the spiritual currents of his electorate into a powerful political movement. Though he was never a conventional believer, his spiritual evolution was sincere, and it prepared him to work within the evangelical united front to help Americans understand the historic times in which they lived, and their role in that story. The strength he derived from his faith in divine intention, despite his uncertainty, to the very end, that God willed that the Union win the Civil War, enabled him to hold the Union together through violence and to initiate the death of slavery."

Perhaps the complete character of Lincoln's personal religious transformation can never be fully known. But there can be no ambiguity about the religious transformation of the nation during his lifetime, nor about how effectively Lincoln as President expressed and marshaled the developing religiosity of the country, all of which Zeitz describes and analyzes so well.

Sowing the Seed

 

A sower went out to sow. How many times have we heard this? When I was in seminary, one of my professors was fond of citing that fact to show how we have become so accustomed to hearing certain parables that, when we hear a familiar line like that, we already know what follows and how it is going to end, and so our tendency is to start to tune out – which, of course, is one of the very things the parable may be warning us not to do!

To us here in midtown Manhattan, where there hasn’t been a functioning farm now in over a century, parables about famers sowing seed sound exotic – and, in this particular case, somewhat strange. What, we efficient modern city-dwellers, want to ask, is the farmer doing? Why does he sow his seed in such a helter-skelter way? Of course, Jesus’ actual hearers – the original audience for this parable - would have understood. Israel’s rocky soil is not very farming friendly. Finding in advance the pockets of good fertile soil, with the limited technology available to traditional agriculture, would have been difficult. Throwing the seed all over the place may mean that some will be wasted, but it also guarantees that at least some will fall on good soil and take root and produce fruit. What may seem like inefficiency to us turns out to be really quite efficient indeed!

When I was a pastor, I used to take some comfort from this story’s recognition that not every effort will succeed. Jesus uses this familiar fact to say something about how God reaches out to us with extravagant generosity. He recognizes that maybe not everyone will respond – or persevere. Even so, God reveals himself as widely as possible, in many and various ways. He does that because that is who God is and how God acts. And that is how he expects his Church – all of us - to behave in imitation of him. God’s extravagant generosity towards us invites us on our part to respond in such an extravagantly faithful fashion – and hopefully, eventually, producing fruit as much as a hundred-fold.

Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, July 16, 2023.

Image: The Parable of the Sower, hand-colored woodcut, by Hans Schäufelein, 1517, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Miracle Club (The Movie)

I have been to Lourdes three times in my life, each occasion as part of a group pilgrimage, and I consider those pilgrimages to that holy shrine among my most cherished priestly memories. So it was with a mixture of eagerness (to see how a pilgrimage to Lourdes would be depicted in film) and anxiety (worry about how a pilgrimage to Lourdes would be depicted in film). The Miracle Club (directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan) captures Lourdes if not devoutly at least experientially. (One thing very accurate about the movie is how cold the water is. The first time I went to Lourdes was in November, which to me at the time seemed like sufficient explanation of the cold. The water was so cold that my teeth actually chattered as I attempted to make the required responses to the prescribed prayers.)

Set in 1967 Ireland, The Miracle Club is about an assortment of working-class Dublin women - Lily (Maggie Smith), Eileen (Kathy Bates), Dolly (Agnes O'Casey), and Chrissie (Laura Linney) - who have all known each other for decades, who for various and different reasons embark together on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Lourdes. 

The setting is a presumably typical Catholic parish of that place and time, which sponsors a pilgrimage to Lourdes as a prize at a community fundraiser talent show, at which Lily, Eileen, and Dolly perform together. Each has a moderately difficult husband and the predictably demanding kind of family situation which we are programmed to suspect in such a stereotypically patriarchal cultural and religious setting. At this parish fundraiser, suddenly appears Chrissie, the long-absent daughter of the three women's dear friend Maureen, who has just died and whose funeral will be the next day. It turns out that Chrissie has been away for 40 years and has been alienated not only from her mother but also from Lily (who turns out to have been the mother of her long-dead boyfriend) and Eileen (who is her cousin and was once her best friend). Amazingly, after 40 years, they all recognize each other immediately. The reason for the history of hostility is not immediately apparent, although the plot is simple and straightforward enough that it is fairly easy to figure out the basis for much of what went wrong in these women's lives and in their relationships with one another.

The pilgrimage to Lourdes leads them to open up about their shared history and come to terms with their mutual hurts and resentments - and their feelings of guilt. In the process they rediscover each other and rekindle long-lost friendships. The movie does not require us to believe that this itself happens as one of the shrine's miracles, but it allows us to believe that if we are so inclined. 

Two of the women did have hopes for my explicit miracles. Eileen has discovered a lump in her breast, knowledge she has so far she has kept to herself. Dolly has a 6-year old son who does not speak. Eileen does not get healed in that sense. (In fact, the experience seems to trigger a certain cynicism about religion, making her sound more like the men in these women's lives.) But the Lourdes experience proves to be one of real reconciliation - among the four women (and also among their families back at home).

Fr. Dermot, the pastor who accompanies them on their pilgrimage is played as a quaintly conventional figure. But he does get the movie's best line: "You come [to Lourdes] for the strength to go on when there is no miracle."

Operation Husky - July 10, 1943

When the leaders of the Western Allies met at Casablanca in January 1943, that was just two months after the invasion of North Africa, "Operation Torch." At that time, the Americans still clearly had a preference for planning a direct invasion of Europe, which Stalin strongly desired to provide the necessary second front to relieve the strain on the Russian front. Churchill, more moved than his American allies by memories of World War I, was eager to avoid such an adventure for as long as possible. As an alternative, he advocated invading Europe's "soft underbelly." In the end, of course, both courses would be followed. A full-scale invasion of France would come in June 1944 with the Allies' surprisingly successful landing in Normandy. But that would have to be delayed longer than either the Russians or the Americans had originally desired. Meanwhile, having successfully established Allied control of the southern coast of the Mediterranean with the defeat of the Italians and the Germans in North Africa, the Allies were ready to challenge the Axis' weakest link, Italy, with an amphibious invasion of Sicily, "Operation Husky," 80 years ago today.

The invasion of Sicily and the subsequent surrender of Italy inevitably get second billing in any history of the European war to the much more dramatic and important invasion of Normandy and the subsequent liberation of France and the Low Countries and the eventual unconditional surrender of Germany. That, of course, is as it should be. But what began 80 years ago today was no mere sideshow. Knocking Italy out of the war was a great accomplishment, a genuine political turning point, although unfortunately not the military turning point it was originally hoped to be.

After weeks of preparatory aerial bombardment, four British and Commonwealth Divisions landed on Sicily's southeast coast, near Syracuse, while three American Divisions anded slightly to the west of the British at Gala. The British were to advance toward Catania (from which my grandparents had immigrated to America decades earlier) and Messina, while the Americans would support them on their left. After their experience in North Africa, the Allies expected serious Axis resistance, but the enemy appeared to have been taken off-guard. (This may have been partly due to successful Allied disinformation which caused the Germans to expect an invasion in Sardinia or Greece.) Significantly, unlike the Germans, Italian military morale was low. The Americans, under Patton, successfully captured Palermo on July 22.

Meanwhile, the Allied bombing of Rome (while Mussolini was out of town, meeting Hitler at Feltre) had a possibly even more immediately destabilizing effect on the government. In a lengthy meeting on the night of Saturday, July 24, the Fascist Grand Council voted what was in effect a motion of no confidence in Mussolini's leadership. (Technically it was a recommendation to the King that he resume his full constitutional role as commander-in-chief.) On Sunday, July 25, Mussolini went to see the King, at which audience Vittorio Emanuele III, who had been fully briefed on the previous night's meeting and had been in on the plotting that had preceded it, told him he was no longer Prime Minister. As Mussolini left the Villa Savoia, he was arrested.  

Italy under the new government remained officially at war with the Allies until an Armistice was signed on September 3 and made public on September 8. In the interim, the Allies invaded southern Italy from Sicily on September 3. But Hitler righty distrusted the Italians, and the Germans took advantage of the Italian duplicity to move into a position to occupy northern Italy and Rome itself. Sensibly, the Royal Family and the Government fled from Rome after the the announcement of the Armistice, but did so in a way which left the defenders of Rome confused and directionless, which resulted in the immediate capture of Rome by the Germans and an effective division of the country. It took the Allies until June 4, 1944, to liberate Rome, and it wasn't until April 1945 that German control of northern Italy ended.

There were many problems along the way, but Operation Husky did detach Italy from the Axis. Militarily divided, with a puppet Italian Fascist government in the North, Italy was no longer of any actual use to Germany. While the Allies were unexpectedly bogged down fighting the Germans all the way up the peninsula, the Germans were also bogged down fighting in Italy instead of reinforcing The Atlantic Wall against the inevitable Allied invasion. In that sense, the operation was a success.

For Italy, however, what initially seemed to offer an opportunity to extricate the country from further fighting, turned into a tragic division of the peninsula and an effective civil war. The Italian government's temporizing attempt to play both sides instead of immediately surrendering to the Allies contributed to this unfortunate outcome. Italy's pre-Fascist dysfunctional politics resumed, while the Savoy dynasty was (fairly or not) ultimately held accountable after the war not just for the infamous fuga del Re of September 1943, but for the war itself and the whole political debacle that the German alliance had brought about.

In the end, it made sense for the Allies to invade Sicily and then to move from here to the rest of Italy. It had the desired effect of bringing down the Fascist government (maybe more easily even than anyone had expected). It brought about a major turning political point in the war, while militarily it served as a learning experience which further prepared the Allies for the more challenging task of invading France. 

If only the post-Mussolini Italian Government had been more realistic and less duplicitous and had quickly surrendered, then (while there likely still have been a German occupation of part of northern Italy and consequently continued conflict in the country) the capital and its environs might have remained under government control, and a less discredited government might have been better able to unite the country, minimizing the terrible sectional division which was exacerbated by the way the war ended and which continue to weaken the country during the post-war period. And, of course, if Vittorio Emmanuele III had immediately abdicated, as practically everyone wanted him to do at the time, perhaps King Umberto II would have successfully stayed on the throne reigning over a less devastated and less divided country.

From Sea to Sea

 

His dominion shall be from sea to sea [Zechariah 9:10]. So said Zechariah in today’s First Reading, foretelling the coming of the Messiah.  A mari usque ad mare (“From sea to sea”) is the motto on the Canadian Coat of Arms - a reminder of the ubiquity of the concept of manifest destiny, a concept common to Zechariah’s ancient Israel, to our neighbor to the north, and, of course, to our own country.

We hear this reminder today, just days after our national holiday, which celebrates this dominion from sea to sea with cookouts and hot dogs, parades and fireworks - our contemporary version of John Adams' famous prescription that it "be commemorated … by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty” and “solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." (Along the way, somehow the “solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty” have gotten lost among all the cookouts, hot dogs, parades, and fireworks.)

Especially coming so soon after the Fourth of July, Zechariah reminds us that, over and above all the many inter-related networks of human relationships of which we are a part and which we need to care about – family, work, country – we are also citizens of the kingdom of God, a relationship which gives added meaning and transforms all those other relationships, even while we remain thoroughly engaged in all those other relationships, in the otherwise ordinary-seeming life of our day-to-day world of family, work, and country.

Now nobody needs me to tell you that, for all the  festivity, marred this year by so many shootings, Americans are apparently a relatively unhappy lot. This is neither the place nor the time to examine those issues, except perhaps to recall that as Catholics we have a long history (going back to the Roman Empire) of thinking seriously about these matters, about how to relate our faith to civil society – a long tradition of practical wisdom concerning social and political life, a tradition we may need to take more seriously both as disciples and as citizens.

This is, however, an appropriate place and time to recall that the complexities and burdens of living in our world and taking seriously the responsibilities that come with that have not been erased or solved in some simple way by the fact of our becoming disciples of Jesus. In fact, what Jesus seems to be proposing in today’s Gospel [Matthew 11:25-30] may at first appear as if he were just adding yet another additional burden – the burden of following him – to all the complexities and burdens we already have in our lives. Yet it is precisely this added dimension – this yoke, as Jesus calls it - which is meant to put all the other complications and burdens of living in a totally new context – an insight, which (Jesus warns) is sometimes lost to the wise and the learned of the world.

As Paul put it to the Christians in Rome, Christ’s new life has become our new life too, thereby reversing the death-ward direction of our ordinary existence and empowering us to allow ourselves and our entire lives – individual and communal, private and public, social and political - to be re-shaped by the Gospel’s stirring call to a total reorientation of our lives.

So, the rest that Jesus promises us is not a release from our ties to the world and the tough realities and responsibilities of ordinary human life. It is rather a new way of living and being involved with one another in the world, a new way of making sense of our relationships and responsibilities with and for one another.

Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, New York, July 9, 2023.