No one seemed less well-cast for the role of reformer, in an age of reform, than Abraham Lincoln. To begin with, he was a stranger, emotionally and intellectually, to evangelical Christianity, the great engine of reform in the nineteenth century. Raised in a household of uncompromisingly Calvinistic Baptists who abhorred slavery, the young Lincoln rejected the authority of any religion and never joined any religious congregation. His stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, remembered that her stepson “had no particular religion,” and when pressed on the subject, Lincoln himself would only say that “when he did good he felt good, when he did bad he felt bad.” That, said Lincoln, “is my religion.”More »
