Mr. Lincoln was a Christian it seems & a wise one. If he were stupid he would have embraced religion.
"Lincoln's parents were fundamentalist Hard-shell Baptists. However, historian Dr. Mark Noll states that "Lincoln never joined a church nor ever made a clear profession of standard Christian belief." During the White House years, however, he often did attend the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where the family pew he rented is marked by a plaque.
Noll agrees with biographer Jesse Fell that Lincoln rejected orthodox views on the innate depravity of man, the character and office of Jesus, the Atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, miracles, and heaven and hell. Noll argues Lincoln was turned against organized Christianity by his experiences as a young man who saw how excessive emotion and bitter sectarian quarrels marked yearly camp meetings and the ministry of travelling preachers.[5]
The one aspect of his parents' Calvinist religion that Lincoln apparently embraced wholeheartedly throughout his life was the "doctrine of necessity," also known as predestination, determinism, or fatalism.[6] It was almost always through these lenses that Lincoln assessed the meaning of the Civil War.
Lincoln was often perplexed by the attacks on his character by way of his religious choices. In a letter written to Martin M. Morris in 1843, Lincoln wrote:
There was the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose with few exceptions, got all of that Church. My wife had some relations in the Presbyterian churches, and some in the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, and was suspected of being a Deist and had talked of fighting a duel.[7]
In 1846, when Lincoln ran for congress against Peter Cartwright, the noted evangelist, Cartwright tried to make Lincoln's religion or lack of it a major issue of the campaign. Responding to accusations that he was an "infidel", Lincoln defended himself, without denying that specific charge, by publishing a hand-bill in which he stated:
That I am not a member of any Christian church is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular... I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of, or scoffer at, religion.[8]
As Carl Sandburg recounts in Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, Lincoln attended one of Cartwright's revival meetings. At the conclusion of the service, the fiery pulpiteer called for all who intended to go to heaven to please rise. Naturally, the response was heartening. Then he called for all those who wished to go to hell to stand. Not many takers. Lincoln had responded to neither option. Cartwright closed in. "Mr. Lincoln, you have not expressed an interest in going to either heaven or hell. May I enquire as to where you do plan to go?" Lincoln replied: "I did not come here with the idea of being singled out, but since you ask, I will reply with equal candor. I intend to go to Congress."
