Religious views of Abraham Lincoln

The religious views of Abraham Lincoln are a matter of interest among scholars and the public. Lincoln grew up in a highly religious Baptist family. He never joined any Church, and was a skeptic as a young man and sometimes ridiculed revivalists. He frequently referred to God and had a deep knowledge of the Bible, often quoting it. Lincoln attended Protestant church services with his wife and children, and after two of them died he became more intensely concerned with religion.

Although Lincoln never made an unambiguous public profession of Christian belief, several people who knew him personally, such as Chaplain of the Senate Phineas Gurley and Mary Todd Lincoln, claimed that he believed in Christ in the religious sense. However, close friends who had known Lincoln for years, such as Ward Hill Lamon and William Herndon, rejected the idea that he was a believing Christian. During his 1846 run for the House of Representatives, in order to dispel accusations concerning his religious beliefs, Lincoln issued a handbill stating that he had "never denied the truth of the Scriptures". He seemed to believe in an all-powerful God, who shaped events and, by 1865, was expressing those beliefs in major speeches.

Lincoln's parents were "hard shell" Baptists, joining the Little Pigeon Baptist Church near Lincoln City, Indiana, in 1823. In 1831, Lincoln moved to New Salem, which had no churches. However, historian Mark Noll states that "Lincoln never joined a church nor ever made a clear profession of standard Christian belief." Noll quotes Lincoln's friend Jesse Fell:

that the president "seldom communicated to anyone his views" on religion, and he went on to suggest that those views were not orthodox: "on the innate depravity of man, the character and office of the great head of the Church, the Atonement, the infallibility of the written revelation, the performance of miracles, the nature and design of...future rewards and punishments...and many other subjects, he held opinions utterly at variance with what are usually taught in the church."

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