Allen C. Guelzo. Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Pp. xii + 516. $29.00 (Cloth).

Abstract

"Allen Guelzo drew his title for this book from a question raised by the poet Walt Whitman in the Brooklyn Eagle during the presidential election of 1856: "When are we going to get a redeemer president?" Both Whitman and Guelzo, indeed the nation, soon found their "redeemer president" in Abraham Lincoln. [2] The volume of literature on Lincoln exceeds that published in the United States on any other American figure. Guelzo, professor of history at Eastern College, has added to that literature an excellent intellectual biography. It is not limited to Lincoln's religious views, as the title suggests. Rather, it provides as comprehensive a study of the man and his ideas, religious and secular, as has ever been written - all properly contextualized in nineteenth-century America. Guelzo dedicated Redeemer President to Jack Kemp, who wishes the Republican party to recover the tradition of Lincoln. It won Gettysburg College's prestigious Lincoln Prize. [3] Lincoln is best known for pouring public policy into the molds of religious thought, thereby earning him in death the title "the Christian president." Guelzo argues that Lincoln took religious ideas seriously and combined religion and policy more than any other American president, but that he was not a Christian in the traditional sense of the word. Lincoln admitted as much and never joined a church. Guelzo establishes Lincoln as a Deist, but in doing so shows that Lincoln's religious views are much more complex than that single term implies. [4] Lincoln was born into a Separatist Baptist family, but he rebelled against that influence and turned toward the Enlightenment as his intellectual guide, toward "infidelity" and "atheism" in religion. Nevertheless, Guelzo argues, Lincoln inherited from his childhood Baptist experience a predestinarian instinct or belief in necessity, that caused him to become a fatalist and to reject the idea of free will. If Lincoln came close to being associated with any particular denomination, it was the Old School Presbyterians, in whose Calvinist thought he found some common ground. Beyond that, Guelzo shows, Lincoln's religious views were shifting and not always consistent, but nevertheless comprehensible." (pg 1)