Taki Magazine

My New Lincoln Book

by Grant Havers on October 15, 2009

As we near the end of the Lincoln Bicentennial year, I am delighted to report that the University of Missouri Press has just published my book Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love ahead of schedule. Since the publisher’s website already offers a description of the book, I won’t reproduce it here. I would only add that my study addresses many issues of interest to contributors and readers of Takimag, particularly those who wonder how American Protestantism morphed into a right-wing version of liberation theology by promoting the cause of global democracy-building. Long before the full onset of this Protestant “Deformation,”  there had always been two types of Protestants in America:  those who believed in a tough-minded version of charity and those who believed that it is the cause of the “chosen people” to liberate the world.  It may surprise most neoconservatives and paleoconservatives, but I contend that Lincoln was an avatar of charity (Christian love), not chosenness.  As a Protestant realist, Lincoln knew that America’s fragile union could not survive while the immoral double-standard of slavery existed and even threatened to spread to the western territories.  Slavery was a defiance of biblical charity (love thy neighbor as thyself) for the simple reason that no slave-owner would ever want to be a slave. 

Lincoln’s opposition to slavery, however, did not commit him to a program of universalizing America’s ideals, since he always assumed that a Christian people is best suited to understanding and practicing, however imperfectly, the golden rule. (For this reason, he appealed to the moral conscience of Southern Christians to end slavery peacefully, in the years leading up to the Civil War.)  Lincoln never believed that every culture, Christian or otherwise, shared the same commitment to moral universalism. Despite the claims of various presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, the last project Lincoln had in mind was to launch America on the path of global chosenness, or the mission to Americanize the world under the guidance of Providence.  The president, who did not always act charitably himself in wartime, well knew that both sides to the Civil War not only “prayed to the same God” but claimed with equal conviction that they were the chosen people.  When Lincoln made occasional use of chosenness, it was always with qualification: his famous reference to the “almost chosen people” suggested that no people, American or otherwise, were so divinely favored forevermore that they can simply impose an imperialist order without taking into account the humbling force of charity.  For this reason, the president was dead against a vindictive program of Reconstruction in the South that merely reversed the roles of master and slave in the postbellum era. Charity called for healing the wounds of the nation, not a new version of “might is right.” Despite the claims of neoconservatives and leftists who created a global universalistic version of Lincoln in the 20th century, Lincoln’s “charity for all” did not entail a radical program of egalitarian leveling at home and wars for human rights abroad. Ever since America made the fateful decision to enter the slaughterhouse of World War One, the triumph of a chosenness ideology has perhaps irrevocably transformed both Protestantism and America while rewriting the Lincoln legacy of political realism as a program for democratic imperialism. We are all living in the shadow of this legacy. 

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