Lincoln and Political Religion

Abraham Lincoln is the only president never to have joined a religious body. Although he was raised in a Christian home, he was more nearly identifiable as a deist, and considered himself a man of reason rather than faith. The civil war, however, presented him with conundrums in understanding how the war had come and why it was progressing so poorly, and he began slowly to incorporate more language into his thinking which looked for religious answers to his questions. His second inaugural address captures that questioning at its most famous length. Even then, his use of religious ideas is idiosyncratic, and cannot be easily identified with any formal religious confession.