Abraham Lincoln- not gay!!! (oh but he IS Christian)

[Guinastasia]

@Lathe of Heaven

<hijack>
Mary Todd Lincoln might have been odd, but she also suffered from having a bit of a bad rap. She, like Abe, was from the Midwest, which was the barbaric frontier back then. She didn’t fit into the Washington old-money crowd; she knew it, and they knew it, and she was quite insecure about her place.
</hijack>

Mary may have been from Kentucky originally, but her parents were very prominent in their town of Lexington, and by all accounts, she tended to be rather extravagant. Poor Mary Todd most likely suffered from bipolar disorder.
So basically, it sounds like Lincoln may have been raised a Christian, but he was only a sort of cafeteria Christian, and not very devout.

[furt]

@gobear

Dio beat me to it, but, yes, Lincoln was not a believing Christian. I don’t think he was an atheist, but he certainly denied the standard tenets of Christian faith.

And he wasn’t gay, either. The claim itself is ahistorical–the idea of sexuality as personal identity didn’t exist in 19th century America.

I almost think the reasoning of the second can even be extended to the first.

“Christian” in 1865 was as liable to mean “of good ethical repute” or simply “not an athiest” as to refer to positive agreement with a specific religious doctrine.

[Clark_K]

I haven’t read it, but I understand that Allen Guelzo’s prize-winning “Redeemer President” is the most authoritative analysis of Lincoln’s religious views and their impact on his policies. Here’s an excerpt from the Journal of Religion & Society summarizing Guelzo’s conclusions:

Guelzo argues that Lincoln took religious ideas seriously and combined religion and policy more than any other American president, but that he was not a Christian in the traditional sense of the word. Lincoln admitted as much and never joined a church. Guelzo establishes Lincoln as a Deist, but in doing so shows that Lincoln’s religious views are much more complex than that single term implies.

If Lincoln came close to being associated with any particular denomination, it was the Old School Presbyterians, in whose Calvinist thought he found some common ground. Beyond that, Guelzo shows, Lincoln’s religious views were shifting and not always consistent, but nevertheless comprehensible.

Here’s a reviewer’s comment on the conclusions in Stewart Winger’s “Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics”:

To Lincoln, rather, Christianity and the United States were analogous—in both cases, the outer casing (organized churches and constituted nation) were not nearly so important as the inner spiritual core

Here’s a portion of an essay on the topic by Michael Nelson, published in The Virginia Quarterly Review. He concludes Lincoln’s kind words toward Christianity were not just public posturing:

It becomes harder, however, to discount Lincoln’s public remarks when one considers the entirely private visit of his closest friend, Joshua Speed, in the summer of 1864. Lincoln was staying at the Soldiers’ Home, a kind of former-day Camp David on the outskirts of Washington. Speed found Lincoln reading the Bible. “Well,” Speed told his friend, “if you have recovered from your skepticism, I am sorry to say that I have not.” By Speed’s account, Lincoln looked him "earnestly in the face and, placing his hand on my shoulder, he said, ‘You are wrong, Speed; take all of this Book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man.’ "

My impression is that it’s fair to say he was not an orthodox Christian but did have strong religious feelings grounded in the Christian tradition.

[Captain_Amazing]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Don’t miss the fact that Lincoln wrote a book debunking Christianity which was burned by a friend to prevent its ppublication.

Or at least, Herndon said (he was the friend, and he said this after Lincoln’s death) that Lincoln wrote the book. It’s hard to know what Lincoln actually believed about a lot of things, because

1. He didn’t tend to write much about himself
2. He was almost deified after his death, so pretty much every interest group or group with an agenda recruited the posthumous Lincoln, so Lincoln was at the same time a Christian, a non Christian, a supporter of equal rights for blacks, a supporter for limited rights for blacks, a believer that the south should be treated harshly, a believer that the south should be treated leniently, a socialist, a capitalist, a supporter of tight money, a supporter of loose money, a protectionist, a free trader, a supporter of open immigration and a nativist.

[Wolfian]

What? No link to the version of Electric Six’s “Gay Bar” featuring gay Lincolns? That’s the only reason I opened this thread.

[Dangerosa]

Based on what I’m reading here, I’m seeing a man who had, like many of us, different levels of faith and belief at different times, but was primarily private about it.

And, its possible that, like many of us, his sexuality wasn’t permanently etched in stone either, although even LESS record of that has been left.