ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE PULPIT: 3/8 Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union Hardcover – by Richard Carwardine (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 28 June 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
3/8 Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union Hardcover – by Richard Carwardine (Author)
1860 LINCOLN AFTER ELECTION
The first major account of the American Civil War to give full weight to the central role played by religion, reframing the conflict through Abraham Lincoln’s contentious appeals to faith-based nationalism
How did slavery figure in God’s plan? Was it the providential role of government to abolish this sin and build a righteous nation? Or did such a mission amount to “religious tyranny” and “pulpit politics,” in an effort to strip the southern states of their God-given rights? In 1861, in an already fracturing nation, the tensions surrounding this moral quandary cracked the United States in half, and even formed rifts within the North itself, where anti slavery religious nationalists butted heads with conservative religious nationalists over their visions for America’s future.
At the center of this melee stood Abraham Lincoln, who would turn to his own faith for guidance, proclaiming more days of national fasting and thanksgiving than any other president before or since.These pauses for spiritual reflection provided the inspirational rhetoric and ideological fuel that sustained the war.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Baxter. This is CBSI on the world. I'm spending time with Professor Richard |
| 0:09.4 | Cowardine in his new book, Righteous Strife, How Warring Religious Nationalist forged Lincoln's Union. |
| 0:16.6 | We've seen the fast day called by President Buchanan not succeed. |
| 0:22.9 | It is now September of 1861. |
| 0:26.6 | This is a relatively quiet period of the war, given the bloodletting that's ahead. |
| 0:32.2 | The battle that was a failure in the first meeting is behind them. And the president now has an |
| 0:40.9 | opportunity again to speak out through a fast day. And Lincoln establishes September 26th as a fast |
| 0:49.9 | day for America to heal, to come together. Again, it's important to say that the president, as the professor has said, is not a radical |
| 1:01.2 | Republican at this point. |
| 1:02.6 | There are three parts of the country. |
| 1:05.5 | They're the abolitionists, the radicals, and they're Republicans. |
| 1:09.8 | There are the barn burners, those who are pro-slavery men, |
| 1:15.1 | and antithetical to the way the Washington has conducted itself so far. |
| 1:21.9 | And then there's everything in between. |
| 1:24.1 | And we're going to begin with what success Lincoln's Fest Day has, what it can have. |
| 1:30.9 | This is about something called anti-slavery nationalism. |
| 1:34.6 | What was that, Professor? |
| 1:35.6 | How did they think of it? |
| 1:38.3 | Quite simply, anti-slavery, I would define anti-slavery nationalists as those who believe that the nation under God had a responsibility to live up to the principles there on which it was founded. |
| 1:49.8 | The Declaration of Independence and the equality of all men. |
| 1:55.7 | And, of course, they would have questions of how far men embraced women was a contested one. |
| 2:03.1 | But the belief in human equality as set out in the, in Jefferson's Declaration, Declaration of Independence, is the inspiring document for these anti-slavery nationalists. |
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