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How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation
https://-bet.co
Viking
May 2023
On Sale: May 16, 2023
336 pages
ISBN: 198488221X
EAN: 9781984882219
Kindle: B09ZRJFT3T
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
Lincoln’s spiritual journey from spiritual skeptic
to America's first evangelical Christian
presidentbeliever—a conversion that changed both the
Civil War and the practice of religion itself.
Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren,
kept organized Christianity at arm’s length. He never
joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services
with his wife. But as he came to appreciate the growing
political and military importance of the Christian
community, and when death touched the Lincoln household in
an awful, intimate way, the erstwhile skeptic effectively
evolved into a believer and harnessed the power of
evangelical Protestantism to rally the nation to arms. The
war, he told Americans, was divine retribution for the sin
of slavery.
This is the story of that
transformation and the ways in which religion helped
millions of Northerners interpret the carnage and political
upheaval of the 1850s and 1860s. Rather than focus on
battles and personalities, Joshua Zeitz probes ways in which
war and spiritual convictions became intertwined. Characters
include the famous—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick
Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher—as well as ordinary
soldiers and their families whose evolving understanding of
mortality, heaven, and mission motivated them to fight. Long
underestimated in accounts of the Civil War,
religion—specifically evangelical
Christianity—played an instrumental role on the
battlefield and home front, and in the corridors of
government.
More than any president before
him—or any president after, until George W.
Bush—Lincoln harnessed popular religious enthusiasm to
build broad-based support for a political party and a cause.
A master politician who was sincere about his religion,
Lincoln held beliefs that were
unconventional—and widely misunderstood then, as
now. After his death and the end of an unforgiving war,
Americans needed to memorialize Lincoln as a
Christian martyr. The truth was, of course, considerably
more complicated, as this original book explores.
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