Was Lincoln Religious? The Complicated Faith of Abraham Lincoln
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Abraham Lincoln often spoke about God, especially during the darkest days of the Civil War. But what he believed, and how he arrived there, is more complex than many assume. He did not belong to a church for most of his life. He wrestled with loss, read widely, and thought deeply about providence, suffering, and the role of faith in a nation at war.
Richard Carwardine, a Lincoln Prize-winning historian, shares the story of Lincoln’s spiritual life, how it evolved over time, and how his understanding of God shaped the way he led the country through its greatest crisis. We'd like to thank the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us access to this audio.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.1 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star |
| 0:19.4 | and the American people coming to you from |
| 0:22.6 | the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Up next, the story of the complicated faith |
| 0:29.8 | of Abraham Lincoln. And here to tell it is Richard Corridine, a Lincoln Prize-winning historian |
| 0:36.9 | and Emeritus Rhodes Professor of American |
| 0:40.0 | History at Oxford University in England. Let's get into the story. |
| 0:49.5 | Lincoln's religious views before the Civil War are a matter of controversy or a matter of uncertainty. |
| 0:55.8 | He had certainly been attracted to the ideas of Tom Paine. |
| 0:59.4 | He had an inquiring mind. |
| 1:01.3 | He was an intellectual. |
| 1:02.8 | He knew his Bible, as well as any other book, with the possible exception of Shakespeare. |
| 1:07.4 | They were the two staples of his reading. |
| 1:09.7 | He attended the first Presbyterian church in Springfield with his wife Mary. They were pew holders. She was a member. He was not a member. He was an adherent. He attended. And I think probably by the late 1850s, we can say that he was broadly in tune with what we would say today in Unitarian theology. It could be summed up in |
| 1:28.8 | a belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. |
| 1:36.2 | One thing we do know is that he had no time for pro-slavery theology. And I just say a little bit |
| 1:43.6 | about that. |
| 1:44.8 | The South, in the immediate post-revolutionary early republic period, thought that slavery would |
| 1:51.0 | gradually disappear. |
| 1:52.8 | They regarded it as a necessary evil. |
| 1:55.6 | But by the 1840s and 1850s, more and more Southerners were standing up for the |
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