Lincoln's God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation
Joshua Zeitz
What The Reviewers Say
Positive
Riveting, sprawling ... Reveals some of the contradictions of living in a colonised, segregated society ... The psychological and emotional growth that could have fostered deeper understandings and greater revelations remains unexplored. Verghese chooses instead to reckon with biological realities ... This is a novel – a splendid, enthralling one – about the body, about what characters inherit and what makes itself felt upon them ... Contains a larger question of community and belonging, one that feels most important in these days of escalating political wars and tensions: is it possible to be fragile and wounded, and still necessary and loved? The answer is rendered with care by a writer who looks at the world with a doctor’s knowing, merciful gaze.
Zeitz weaves between the dogmas, revealing a complex thinker who deftly merged religious language with political goals ... Zeitz adds meaningful context to the story, examining the ways in which soldiers experienced religion in the field ... Importantly, Zeitz includes the perspective of Black Americans, who held views of their own that were often at odds with the tendency to see the United States as a promised land ... Zeitz’s forays into earlier religious history, including that of the Puritans, also feel rushed ... But Zeitz has chosen an important element of Lincoln’s life to explore, especially in an age when the virus of religious certainty drives so much autocratic thinking, at home and abroad.
Appealing thesis aside, Lincoln’s God is not a good book. It bears the marks of haphazard research, hasty writing and sloppy editing. This material is new to Mr. Zeitz, and it shows ... The more consequential problem for Mr. Zeitz’s argument is his laughably simplistic explanation of Calvinism, and more particularly the doctrine of predestination ... Mr. Zeitz would have been better advised to spend another year or two on research before he began writing this book.
Intriguing yet inconclusive ... Though Lincoln fades far into the background at times and Zeitz’s suggestion that the “muscular Christianity” of the Civil War helped pave the way for the emergence of the religious right in the 1970s isn’t entirely convincing, he provides valuable context on the intermingling of faith and politics in American history. The result is a fresh and thorough take on an overlooked aspect of Lincoln’s presidency.
