Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and senior research scholar at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and since that time he has authored numerous award-winning publications. He’s written for outlets such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and First Things. Professor Guelzo is a distinguished historian of the American experience with his book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, enjoying eight weeks as a New York Times bestseller. That book was the topic of one of our previous conversations, but it is his most recent book, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln Democracy and the American Experiment, that is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Allen Guelzo, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Allen Guelzo:
Well, thank you very, very much, President Mohler. It’s always a pleasure to talk and especially to appear on your program.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I appreciate that. You are one of our most frequent guests over the course of more than 200 conversations. And, honestly, when you come out with a new book, I tend to think, “I didn’t think he could do it again.” But you did, and you did it again with this latest book, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln Democracy and the American Experiment. Professor, as I see it, it is both a new thing and an old thing in terms of your life work.
Allen Guelzo:
Yes, there’s a lot of ways in which this is something of a new departure: an old subject––I’ve written, as you know, a lot about Lincoln––but a new departure because most of what I’ve written about Lincoln has been written as a history person. I’m writing narrative, I’m writing description of events. This is more a set of, let’s call them essays, topical essays related to how Lincoln thought about this thing called democracy. So it is in that respect, yes, an old subject. But it is for me a new venture in terms of analyzing, defining, and offering up what Lincoln thought on these very important subjects.
Albert Mohler:
And this is the year 2024 when we’re having this conversation. No conversation takes place in a vacuum, but I think of some of your works through the years. The intellectual landscape has changed radically since you began publishing books on Lincoln. That’s at least a part of what you acknowledge in this book.
Allen Guelzo:
At the very beginning I say this is a book written in a time of shadows. It’s a book written in an atmosphere when many people are critical of the idea of democracy. When democracy, which looked 20, 25, 30 years ago as though it was on a triumphant ride to the end of history as Francis Fukuyama put it. Thirty years on, it doesn’t really look anything quite so optimistic. And now people question democracy, and they question it from all points of the political spectrum as well, as though there has been a collapse of confidence in democracy, as though there has also been a fear that democracy might, in fact, do something worse than collapse, and do it even in the backyard of the republic, which has been most closely associated with the idea of democracy, which is to say, the United States of America.
Albert Mohler:
Given some of my own current research and writing, including an upcoming book project, I have shelves of books. I have to organize things spatially in order to find them. And so, I have an entire collection of democracy is in crisis volumes and arguments. And what’s really interesting to me is that they do line up from the left and from the right. You have people on the right saying, “These people on the left ruined democratic self-government in the 1960s and ‘70s (or earlier),” and they’re plausible arguments, Wilsonian arguments, Roosevelt arguments. And then, more recently, there’s an entire market industry in the collapse of democracy and the threats of democracy. And they’re coming from the left, as in these resurgent right Christian nationalists. And, of course, they use sometimes the term “far right,” which means, more often than not, “far from them.” But you do have these two opposing libraries now.
Allen Guelzo:
And it means that when someone, like myself, decides that he wants to write about what Lincoln has to say about democracy, well, I have to get prepared to be boxed on both ears because there will be people from, let us say, from the right who will raise this question: Why should we take Lincoln as a model for democracy? Why are we listening to what Lincoln has to say on the subject of democracy? Because––and this is especially true for Christian people––Abraham Lincoln didn’t belong to a church. He’s the only president who didn’t and had nothing in the way of what we’d call the significant religious profile. What exactly is it that we have to learn from him? Is it, in fact, symptomatic of what democracy eventually gives you, that you get a leader without a significant religious profile, like Lincoln? Is that a good thing? So, there will be voices on the right who will say, “No, democracy is not going to give you the things that you really need to build the kind of society that the Bible describes, that Christian faith describes, and that God honors.”
Alright, that’s from the right. From left, you will have people who will look at Lincoln and say, “Well, Lincoln’s problem is that Lincoln came from a time when he was very confident in certain dimensions of this thing we call ‘democracy,’ which have been proved to be wrong.” Take, for instance, Lincoln and Lincoln’s ideas about economics. There are many people on the left who will look at Lincoln and who will clutch their chests and fall over on the desks when they read things that Lincoln says about economics, because the man was, quite frankly, very enthusiastic about an open market economy. He believed that people needed to bootstrap themselves up and that the purpose of government was, at the very worst, to get out of their way and maybe, at the very best, to enable them to do that bootstrapping. He had very little in what we could call ‘the idea of regulation.’ To the contrary, what he wanted to do was to encourage development as much as possible, and that had been a theme all through his political career. So many people on the left look at that and say, “Well, that’s exactly what we’re trying to control. This is what we, we’re trying to create a different kind of cooperative common society, and Lincoln is in fact offering us the worst possible example.”
Albert Mohler:
I want to tell you, I grew up hearing about Abraham Lincoln, and I grew up in the South hearing about Abraham Lincoln, and I think the stereotype would be that there’s the southern allergy to Lincoln for all kinds of historical reasons. I am going to skip over that to say that’s not really what I inherited. I think what I inherited was more the Lincoln of civic religion, and so, very much defined as the essential American of his time in the sense that George Washington was described as the essential American of his time. It was later that I discovered his lack of Christian confession and of an explicitly theological worldview. And so, when I got to college, I wrote my honors thesis on Elton Trueblood and got to know Dr. Trueblood––and a great Quaker thinker. And Dr. Trueblood had written a book entitled Abraham Lincoln, Theologian of American Anguish, and really about what you described quite well as Lincoln’s natural religion. And so, let me cut to the quick, I think the way I theologically would explain Lincoln as a Christian theologian is that he’s inexplicable apart from Christianity, like Winston Churchill, who is a very similar figure. He is the product of Christendom even though he’d had no personal confession, but I think you have done more than anyone else in recent times in this new book to demonstrate the very depths of Lincoln’s thoughtfulness on these issues.
Allen Guelzo:
Well, Lincoln surprises people today, just as he did in his own day, because the man of course did not have very much in the way of formal education, didn’t go to college, didn’t go to any kind of graduate program that we might recognize today. And if you heard him speak, goodness sakes, all the descriptions we have of people who heard Lincoln speaking in public would say that the first thing that struck them was how odd he sounded. He looked like some and sounded like some rough intelligent farmer, as one observer put it, because he spoken this very thick border state accent. You can almost hear Jeff Foxworthy doing a good Abraham Lincoln. And he, oh my goodness, he was as homely as an old post for a fence. So you would almost immediately underestimate the man when you would listen to him for five minutes, but if you to him for 15 minutes, that was when you found out something. That was when the hook got on your mouth and you found yourself being reeled in by the man’s logic.
This was a man who read tremendously. He had a voracious intellectual appetite and he read across the boards, he read theology, he read the Bible, he read philosophy, he read especially political economy. He was much, much more familiar with the major writings of his day than people at first would think. And over and over again, you get these stories about how people thought they were going to have a conversation with this humorous lawyer only to find out that in fact this humorous lawyer understood their business better than they understood it themselves. So people meet Lincoln and they come away from the encounter surprised at what they have found in this man. And, I have to admit, I continue to be surprised this way too. He is dark with hidden lights, and you find this over and over again with Lincoln.
Albert Mohler:
I want to stress and kind of press down on something here, and that is that Lincoln’s reading became so much a part of his life that literary illusions and references just float out of him at virtually every public occasion.
Allen Guelzo:
All the time, and you can never predict it. Certainly his mastery of scriptural illusions is remarkable and he could pull them out from what we think to be the most obscure sources. There was one occasion in 1864 when there was a dump Lincoln movement in the offing among the most radical wing of his party. They had a convention in Cleveland and they invited a number of like-minded people, about 400 delegates to this convention. Well, someone came and told Lincoln about this. And Lincoln thought for a moment, reached for the Bible that he kept with his desk, and opened it up and read the passage––this is about David and the cave of Adullam––“And everyone who was in debt and everyone who was in distress and everyone who was disgruntled came to him and there were about 400 of them.”
Albert Mohler:
Isn’t that amazing, yes?
Allen Guelzo:
He just pulls this kind of thing out spontaneously. So he could do that with his command of the Bible, but he could also do it with his command of poets, of Shakespeare in particular. He adored Shakespeare. He could recite chunks of Shakespeare off by heart. And not only Shakespeare but the poets. Robert Burns was a favorite of his. He could quote Byron, he could quote Alexander Pope. One British journalist came to visit him in the summer of 1864 and inspected that he was going to be talking to this corn pone homespun figure from the fields only to have Lincoln sit there and recite off by heart this big stretch from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. This journalist came away scratching his head thinking, “People didn’t tell me what this man was really like.” But this was Lincoln, and it was a curiosity fed by an extraordinarily retentive memory. He could read things, pick them up, recite them afterwards without apparently any effort.
Albert Mohler:
But that was a part of literate life in the 19th century. It was a part of public life in the 19th century and particularly important in courtrooms where lawyers had to be able to make eloquent arguments. And so, one of the historical contexts for Lincoln that is so important is that he had spent so many hours in courtrooms making arguments, and he needed eloquence to make those arguments.
Allen Guelzo:
He is a trial lawyer. He spends 24 years as a trial lawyer, and a trial lawyer out on the old eighth judicial circuit in central Illinois. That meant that twice a year you did this lengthy circuit of 14 or 15 courthouses in central Illinois. You would come in on court day, people would be ready there with cases and documents ready to take depositions. You went up into the courtroom, you were in front of a jury and you had to make the case and convince that jury right there, and quickly, or you were going to be finding another line of work to be in. Lincoln picks up this extraordinary ability to persuade people to make something that otherwise might seem to be obscure remarkably clear, and that gets sharpened with him because of how he has to function as a lawyer in front of juries in these little county courthouses where the jury is composed of 12 people who might be clerks or lawyers themselves or farmers, just ordinary people standing in the back of the courtroom, and he’s got to persuade them, and he learns how to do it. And that stands him in perfect stead when he, as president, has to speak. He doesn’t shilly-shally around. He doesn’t lapse into cliches. He persuades, and he does it with a clarity that points almost makes you grin from ear to ear, realizing not only can he explain the issue; he thoroughly understands the issue in the first place.
Albert Mohler:
I often try to make the distinction between explicit and implicit Christianity. It’s a point that has to be made in many different contexts. But when speaking about Lincoln or Churchill, as I said, I have to make the distinction between explicit Christianity, neither one of them confessionalists in the sense of any personal religious faith, but both of them overcome by an implicit Christianity. And here I’m not talking in terms of redemption, but rather the framework of the mind.
We mentioned Shakespeare. I think one of the things you’d have to say is that Western civilization was based upon this Christian understanding. It comes out in Shakespeare’s dramas and it comes out in poetry. In Lincoln, it comes out in some very interesting ways. And so I want to make an argument and see if you believe there’s validity to it. And the argument is that Lincoln had this very clear distinction between natural and revealed religion. He saw opposition to slavery in the deepest moral impulses of his life in that natural rather than supernatural realm. But by the time the Civil War reaches its apogee, he is speaking about divine involvement in human affairs. It goes far beyond natural religion. Am I overreading this or is that legitimate?
Allen Guelzo:
No. What you see in Lincoln is a movement that you could pretty well lay out in three stages. The earliest stage of that movement is his upbringing and he is brought up in a very Calvinistic devout Baptist family and he bears,
Albert Mohler:
Everything about that sounds good to me, by the way, but you keep going.
Allen Guelzo:
Yes, I’m very pleased with that because sometimes it can take a lot of explaining to an otherwise untutored audience as to what each of those terms means. For Lincoln, he grows up in this Calvinistic environment in which he understands that everything that happens, happens because of the decree of God. People do not initiate things on their own, God is the initiator of whatsoever comes to pass. And Lincoln bears the thumbprint of that all through his life. Now, he moves out of that initial stage because, like a lot of adolescents in very devout households, he grows into a rebellion against it. He does not get along with his father. His stepmother is a kind of a version of Hansel and Gretel. The stepmother is the one who provides most of the solace and encouragement for young Lincoln. He does not have a good relationship with his father and he grows up in some cases as kind of a rebel against that.
So what he emerges into his early adulthood, and this is the second phase, he really has a reputation as an infidel, as someone who doesn’t put any stock in formal Christianity. And as I say, he does not join a church. He will sometimes attend, but he will not join it. And he knows he’s got a reputation for unbelief because he has to write a hand bill when he is running for Congress, trying to explain to people how this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t vote for him, but the best he will talk about is a kind of natural religion that is very distant, it’s not very personal and it doesn’t really impinge all that deeply in his life.
Then you come to a third stage and the third stage is the civil war. Civil war is a crisis for him, not only for the nation, it’s a crisis for his expectations because good 19th century liberal democrat that he is––and those are two other terms we’ll have to parse––he has this classical confidence in progress. Well, how can you have confidence in progress when his own country, the American republic, is blowing itself to bits and doing it over the issue of slavery of all things? And this forces him to ask this question, how did this happen? This doesn’t look like progress at all. And so he sits down fairly early in the progress of the war to try to parse this out. He writes it out on paper, because that’s the way he likes to think. He gets it out on paper and he starts talking about the will of God. And he says, if God had wanted the war to end right away with the North victorious or the South victorious, he could have done that right away. All it would’ve taken was one battle. It didn’t happen. Instead, this war has been dragging on now for almost a year with terrible casualties, terrible battles. What does that mean? That God does not bring this immediately to the end? It must mean that there is another end in view that God has for this war that neither side at this point quite has awakened to, but God has a purpose and that’s why we’re going through this.
Now, just putting it in those terms was to talk about a God of personal will and personal intervention and human affairs is taking great steps away from natural religion. And you see this begin to develop more and more through his presidency as he talks about how God directs things, how we both North and South have failed to understand God’s will, and now we are beginning to see exactly where God is taking the nation. And then finally you get to his second inaugural address, and this is as close to a sermon on the divine providence of God,
Albert Mohler:
That’s right, absolutely.
Allen Guelzo:
As you get from any American politician. So you get to this third stage––and especially with the second inaugural only six weeks before his death––and he’s now talking about a God who judges, a God who directs, and he talks about our responsibility before that God, which is to show malice toward none and charity for all. That’s extraordinary to have covered.
Albert Mohler:
Well, it is, and I often find myself trying in lectures and in public conversation to define this––and I do so as a theologian unapologetically––because as you look at the argument of classical deism, you can’t say God has his purposes. All you can say is the creator had his purposes because there is no active interaction between the cosmos as it now exists and the divine will. But Lincoln’s later language is not compatible with deism, it’s not compatible with the creator having no ongoing will about his creation. And so that puts him in a very different position. And again, I’m going to draw the distinction there with those in England, who late in the 19th and early in the 20th century tried to be Deists but they couldn’t because of the moral issues at stake.
Allen Guelzo:
Well, I think that’s very true about Lincoln. When you look at those three stages, you see Lincoln constantly being pushed to conclusions. In that second stage, where he is talking about natural religion, why does he bother to talk about natural religion at all? Well, he finds himself forced to talk about it because he’s got to come up with an argument against slavery. Stephen A. Douglas––his life, almost lifelong, opponent–Stephen A. Douglas, said, look, we’re in a democracy and in a democracy a majority rules. If 51% of the people want to legalize slavery, let them legalize it. That’s what the will of the majority means. And Lincoln looked at that and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Slavery is not something that you put up to a majority vote. Slavery is inherently wrong. It is immoral. He has to say that because otherwise he would have to agree with Stephen A. Douglas, but he has to have an argument that says that, no, you can’t treat slavery that way. That is where you see most clearly, on evidence, Lincoln’s ideas about natural law, about natural religion that pushes him in that direction.
And then as I say, the war pushes him still further because he can’t understand what is going on in the war. He especially cannot understand the kinds of sacrifices that are being made on behalf of the United States without seeing that there is some very explicit divine purpose that is being worked out in the war and even through him. Now, he will say, as he said to one group of clergy, “I wish I was more devout than I am.” Now alright, you can read that and say, well, this is Lincoln the good politician, but I think he’s saying something more there. There is his old Calvinism coming back to haunt him and to saying, no, you just don’t make yourself what you want to be, you have to be what God makes you. He wishes that he was more devout. He will say, in the last weeks of his life to the journalist Noah Brooks, “There are some books I’ve wanted to read. Among them, Jonathan Edwards on Freedom of the Will.” I’m wondering if he had lived long enough to have read Edwards what conclusions he might have come to in those ensuing years.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely fascinating. On this score, going back to Lincoln again on what’s natural––and by the way, as a Christian theologian, I’ve got to say that he makes one giant category error, and that is in somehow separating revelation from nature. And so, in the Christian tradition, natural revelation is revelation. And so Lincoln will make arguments apart from revelation. I make this argument, but he’s just redefining the natural law or natural rights as he would say it.
I want to throw a question to you, and that is: Why did Lincoln not––because this is something that is a part of the conversation on both sides of the Atlantic. Why is Lincoln not more invested in making arguments for human dignity? In other words, he isolates slavery as an issue obviously has to raise questions of human dignity, but there’s no particular focus on human dignity as the shared truth of humanity that should undergird all of its politics.
Allen Guelzo:
I think part of it might lie in that ancient Calvinistic sense that what you deal with in humanity is some very crooked timber, that we are born in sin, and we live in sin, and we struggle with sin, and we do not escape into some blissful atmosphere of freedom in this life. So he has a very clear sense of that. He also is a lawyer, and he’s dealing with people who are not coming to him because their lives are perfect, they’re coming to him because their lives are a mess at various levels, and he has to straighten them out. And he will say, quite frankly, to clients, potential clients and even to other lawyers, don’t go to law, try to work things out on your own because when you go to law, when you indulge in suing each other, most of you end up as the losers, even if you’re technically the winner in a lawsuit, you still lose money from it. He had learned a great deal about the dimmer aspects of human nature. And someone who once pressed him on what it had been like in his early years growing up. This was to a Baptist minister, Noyes Miner, and he said to Miner, “I will only tell you that I have seen a great deal of the backside of the world.” He wasn’t saying that as a compliment to human nature.
But then there’s also what I think for him is dealing with human nature itself. He will talk about human nature, and he has a very clear sense that human nature is not something you just automatically trust, that people are motivated by what he constantly referred to as “self-interest.” And if you really want to understand what makes people choose what they choose, you have to understand how they respond to what he called motives, which ironically turns out to be the same vocabulary that Jonathan Edwards uses talking about freedom of the will.
Alright, we’ll set that aside for a different day. Motives explain how people respond, because how do people operate? They operate on the basis of their self-interest. Well, this taken altogether gives us a view of Lincoln’s estimate of human nature, which is not exactly shining and well-polished and admiring. You’re right. He does not have what you’d call this high view of human dignity. If anything, that he rather suspects that people tend to respond mostly to what will give them benefits and give them profit. And he says this even about the recruitment of black soldiers in the Civil War. He says, black Americans just like everyone else to motives, to self-interest. And if we expect them to enlist and serve in the Union Army, then we are going to have to provide them with the motives to do it because they respond to self-interest just like everybody else.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, I am really talking about professor, ontology. You know, not human dignity as a compliment to a human being, nor to an optimistic estimation of human behavior and reasoning, motivation. I’m talking about the baseline argument––and this is where conservatives, I want to argue, conservative Christians in many ways, have been ill-equipped to deal with so many issues, whether it’s the Cold War or Nazism or test tube babies, as they were called in the 1960s and 70s and beyond, simply because of a lack of this ontological understanding of human dignity. I think Lincoln is pointing to it when he speaks of the natural law, natural, right? I think he’s pointing to this. I think it would’ve helped him if he had had a more comprehensive way of making that argument. What the slave holder was doing in Lincoln’s estimation was morally wrong. He gave all kinds of reasons, but in terms of human chattel slavery, it’s an assault upon human dignity. That’s the argument I’m expecting that he makes––the dignity that belongs to every single human being. It’s not quite where he goes. I mean, even as I look at the course of his life, I don’t think he got there.
Allen Guelzo:
No, no. I think you’re entirely correct to see that. His structure of argument is built in large measure around the way that Jefferson talks about natural rights and the declaration. That’s what he will come back to over and over and over again: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, but especially liberty. And for him, liberty is simply one of those natural rights that’s hardwired into everyone. That you can, as Jefferson said, you can destroy people’s life and liberty, but you can’t disjoin them. And Lincoln looks at what happens in slavery and he sees a kind of debasement that occurs, a debasement that afflicts not only the slave but the master as well, because the master now has to be behave in a way which fails to recognize life and liberty in others. So, there’s a mutual debasement, there is a poisoning of every human relationship that occurs within slavery. He does not pay humanity a tremendous compliment. If anything, he––and this I think is a key in his understanding of democracy and government––he would much rather that people left each other alone, because then they would do less harm to each other. In Lincoln’s day, there were many splendid moralists, and you might say that their motive in life was to promote the idea of do justice, do justice even if the heavens fall. I’m trying to remember the Latin for it, but it won’t come to me. And Lincoln is more along the lines of the Hippocratic oath: above all other things do no harm.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, I see that and that’s where I want to press you for a moment because in retrospect, and we began by talking about Lincoln, the lawyer, so I understand that context, but in retrospect, it’s not the strength of Lincoln’s arguments that kind of strike me, but the weakness of them or the limited nature of them. For example, his most powerful argument seems to be that those who say that slavery is a good thing are not willing to take the part of the slave. In other words, you’re not willing to exchange, you’re not willing to exchange places. If you’re not willing to exchange places, then you’re agreeing that this is not a good arrangement, that this is an evil. And so I’m looking that going, okay, I can see where that’s a plausible pragmatic argument, but as a moral theologian, I’m looking for something a lot deeper than that. And I’m just wondering, was it there in Lincoln or not?
Allen Guelzo:
Well, it is. Remember here is a persuader, here is a lawyer. So, when he will say about a theologian––in this case, Frederick Augustus Ross, when Ross is writing a theological treatise defending slavery––this is when Lincoln will say, “Well, let’s ask the question. There’s Dr. Ross, he’s in his hammock and he’s in the shade of the trees, and then his slave is out there toiling in the sun. Do you think that Dr. Ross is really motivated enough by justice to take off his gloves, leave the shade, and go out and toil for himself? No. No, but he really ought to think in those terms.” Yeah, that’s a fairly shallow way of going at it. What he really should be talking about, and yet he does talk about, is that there’s something inherently wrong in what you do, morally speaking––here’s the ontological aspect of it. And he makes this argument curiously enough in an almost quasi scriptural way, and it’s one of the earliest ways he formulates this argument. He asks people to think about the ant, just like Proverbs does: consider the ant go to the slug. And he says, think about the ant. Look at the ant. The ant is dragging a crumb of bread to its nest. Another ant wants to come along and take it from it. The original ant fights back. Now that ant is not a reflective creature. The ant is responding to its own nature and the nature of things as they are, even the ant he says, knows that that’s robbery, knows that that’s wrong and will fight to resist it. There’s something that is woven into the fabric of nature itself, which has moral content. The material world is not just material. The material world is organized in a certain moral pattern, and if you want to see human flourishing occur, then human behavior is going to have to work within the parameters of that natural law.
So, for him, natural law is not just describing physics, it’s not just describing material. In fact, it even goes beyond his own invocation of self-interest. He really does see there is this natural order of things and that people ignore it at their peril. He says this curiously in a letter that he writes something like, oh, 10 days, I believe, after the second inaugural is delivered. A political operative named Thurlow Weed had written to him and complimented him and he wrote back and he said, “Oh, everyone enjoys a compliment. Thank you. Thank you for that.” He said, “I’ve said things in the inaugural world that a lot of people are not going to like about how God has judged both North and South in this war, that we have all been complicit in the evil of slavery.” But he said, “I felt that it had to be said and that I was probably the best one to say it.” What he’s talking about is an entire moral structure.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Allen Guelzo:
And that alright, yes, he talks about self-interest. Yes, he talks about you don’t want to change places; he can be pragmatic before the word. But at the same time, he also does discern this larger structure of a moral reality in the universe.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and he speaks of God’s judgment. And again, that’s not deism, not unless it’s some kind of just natural principle. He clearly sees it in personal terms. But I want to ask you another framework question here, professor, and this is where you lay out things so helpfully. I would argue that every reading of modernity has to say there was a first condition and now that we’re in a third condition and between the two was a second condition, so we can put different labels on it, but there’s a time of transition. In the first condition, you have a unitary argument in which Christian truth and public argument are basically the same. That’s the plausibility structure. We are now in a post-Christian secular context in which there’s still people of very sincere religious belief, but the plausibility arguments that are supposedly accepted in the public square are just non theological. Period. In the middle there was this period, and you look back at it now, and this is where a lot of good work is being done, and frankly a lot of your friends and mine are along with us involved in this work. And that is that in that middle period, there was an awful lot of argument according to natural law and natural right, that in one sense made Lincoln look modern, if you’re looking at this from the 15th century, but from the vantage point, the 20th century Lincoln looks absolutely antiquarian.
Allen Guelzo:
Oh, I think that that charts things very nicely and that this middle period is very much the period that Lincoln himself inhabits. It can be that way, and you can talk then about natural law in this, well, yes, middle period shall we say, from the enlightenment up through the middle of the 19th century. We can talk about natural law and Christianity reveal Christianity not as being an antagonism with each other, but as quite capable of walking side by side, sometimes hand in hand. There were some promoters of the natural way of looking at things who were in fact very distinct from religion and wanted nothing to do with the religion. Certainly you get examples of that in the Enlightenment, but you also get lots of people who look at it the other way and say, well, the arguments that the scientific revolution of the 17th century has put into our hands should not surprise us at all. These are not in any way contradictions of Christianity. We understand that there is a natural law we see in it and what we see in that will lead us to the revealed religion, to the revealed law for a long time that can work together. And I think it’s especially true when we’re talking about politics in the American environment from the time of the Declaration of Independence up until the Civil War.
Albert Mohler:
Natural rights.
Allen Guelzo:
If you talk about natural rights, yes, you could talk about them without necessary connection to religion. And yet, and yet over and over again, what you find are American thinkers who insist on connecting the two, who say, yes, you need to talk about natural rights, but you will find the content and direction of those natural rights intimately bound up with revealed religion, especially in this case of Christianity and Christian theology. Now, where does it begin to break apart? It begins to break apart in 1859, and it breaks apart in large measure because of Darwin. Now, Darwin does not get onto Lincoln’s screen because 1859 we’re on the cusp of the Civil War and Lincoln does not survive the Civil War. But as soon as you move into the post-Civil War decades, what Darwin does is to erase any notion of natural law or natural rights. There is no natural law. The only law that the world obeys or should recognize is the law of survival. And that is it development, evolution, whatever you would like to call it. It is purely a matter of randomness. This is a conclusion which Darwin himself was not always comfortable with. Darwin always tried to keep finding these little exceptions that might get purpose and meaning back into things. I don’t think he was particularly successful in doing so, but he wanted to because he recognized what had been let loose.
But the dynamic of that thinking moves you to understand the universe as merely material substances in motion and material substances which simply adapt to environments as environments change. No natural rights, nothing inherent, no built in guideposts or guideposts in the external world; merely one’s environment. And that is what brings us to the modern dilemma of trying to discover kinds of purpose only to find out that these purposes are either artificial and don’t really bear much weight or, worse than that, purposes which provide us with genocide, with disaster, with the kinds of catastrophes that have pockmarked the last century.
Albert Mohler:
I have to speak chauvinistically here for just a moment and say that 1859 is indeed the crucial turning point, not only because of the origin of species, but because the year of that publication of Darwin’s work was also the year of the establishment of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And in that sense, we were born in argument and we are still in argument. And that leads, at least in part to our conversation today, professor, I want to ask you just a couple of questions. Your understanding of Lincoln, the man, how has that changed? Because there are aspects in your book in which you acknowledge parts of Lincoln that are very difficult to talk about today. And I don’t recall much of this in your writing on Lincoln in the past. So can you just kind of tell us where this fits in terms of your understanding and where it should fit in our understanding of Lincoln?
Allen Guelzo:
I think in looking at Lincoln, you discover surprises because the man is not a simple, straightforward politician, not even a simple, straightforward lawyer. He is a man of contradictions and complexities. And when I use the two terms, there are many people of thoughtful contradiction in Lincoln’s day, but they never get beyond contradiction. They have to live with contradictions and they live with these self-defeating moments. I think that was a lot of what I discovered in the earlier book I wrote about Robert E. Lee, that Lee was an intelligent man. He was a man of contradictions. He never knew how to resolve them. In some respects, he really didn’t work hard at it. He just tried to compartmentalize his contradictions. Lincoln is different. Lincoln is complex because his complexities lead him to try to find formula that will resolve the contradictions. Is he always successful in doing it? No, but I think that the questions he asks of himself are questions that are still important to us, especially as Americans and especially in these times.
And so, I’ve been led to explore a number of these contradictions and a number of these complexities, especially on the subject, for instance, of race. I devote two chapters in our ancient faith to the question of Lincoln and race, because on the surface Lincoln is celebrated as the great emancipator. And yet, when you dig a little bit more deeply into what Lincoln has to say on the subject of race, it’s sometimes shockingly unadmirable. And yet, at the same time, he is the great emancipator. How do you resolve that? You realize that in trying to work with that contradiction, you’re actually working with something which is very central to the American experience itself: that we have done, on the one hand, terrible things when it comes to the subject of race. I think only of lynch mobs as an example, of the Ku Klux Klan as an example. We have done some terrible things, and yet we have also done some unprecedentedly marvelous things, things that no other human society has managed to do. Other human societies have teamed with racial prejudices and never rose an inch above them. But in the American experience, we have struggled and continue to struggle with these.
Lincoln’s struggle in that respect is a quintessentially American example. We will continue to struggle with it, and I think this is why it’s worth looking at Lincoln on this subject because Lincoln shows us how we can do things badly, and there are moments when he does them badly, it is true. I’m not going to try to escape that. I tell people, I’m not going to try to persuade you that Lincoln walked on the Potomac. He didn’t, but he does capture the way we struggle with these issues. Why do we struggle with them? We struggle with them because, yes, we are sinners, partly because no other society has resolved them this way, and, above all, because we are committed to a certain set of principles that are captured by the Declaration, captured by the Constitution, captured by Lincoln. We’re governed by a set of principles and guidelines that force us into confrontation with those ancient prejudices. And looking at how Lincoln works his way through them, I think, gives us inspiration, I think it gives us hope. And if it does nothing else, it gives us aspiration that he
Albert Mohler:
And some framework.
Allen Guelzo:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Some framework and vocabulary as well. A couple of things, it strikes me that if you look at Lincoln, and I go back to Churchill again and, say, add Roosevelt to the mix, you’re looking at three men. And again, I’m not getting into the politics of everything involved in Lincoln or Roosevelt or Churchill for that matter. But in the role in history, William Manchester, and honestly just one paragraph in Manchester’s first volume on Churchill just really kind of reshaped my thinking as a young man where he says that if you put Churchill and Hitler in comparison, they were both willing to do undemocratic things in the force of the crucible of war. But Hitler did it to defeat democracy, and Churchill took some actions to save democracy, to save the course of freedom and, in the context of a horrifying world war, torqued some issues that in any other time would be considered to be absolutely anti-democratic. And the same thing would later be said of Roosevelt and the things that were said at the time of Lincoln. And so, it has just kind of helped me to understand that it does matter that, even though both of those two men, Churchill and Hitler, they are both sinners, yet one of them is out to destroy human dignity and one is out in his own way to preserve it, and that makes all the difference in the world. And the next thing I just wanted to say, professor, is that if there’s one word that I used to describe myself other than as a Christian and Protestant, it would be Augustinian. And it strikes me that Lincoln is one of the most clearly Augustinian figures in world history. The light and the dark are there because as Augustine said, you’re going to expect both the light and the dark to be there. The difference is the net effect that of the light or of the darkness.
Allen Guelzo:
For Lincoln, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehends it not. For Churchill, yes, the light also shines in dark. For Hitler, darkness was what he wanted. Stalin––Stalin loved darkness. Why do men love darkness? Because their deeds are evil. That fundamental orientation says so much about these historical characters. Lincoln, in the crucible of Civil War, Lincoln made mistakes. Lincoln made arguments that afterwards you shake your head and say, “No, I don’t really think that’s particularly convincing.” And there were civil liberties violations in the conduct of the Civil War that afterwards make you shake your head. And I don’t, in Lincoln’s case, try to apologize at all for them. Yet at the same time, I also see in Lincoln someone who is trying to sort out two things. One is, we have to win this war, and we have to keep that focus on winning out ahead of us. But at the same time, we can’t worship it. We can’t make winning so absolute that we wind up crushing the very principles that we think we’re fighting for. And you see a really remarkable example of that in a letter that he writes on September 2nd, 1863. And he writes it to his Secretary of the Treasury, Salman Chase, very devout evangelical man. Chase had written to Lincoln to urge Lincoln to think about expanding the scope of the Emancipation Proclamation and to do it on his own presidential authority. And Lincoln response to Chase, and he says, “I can’t do that. I can’t do it just because I think that it would be good for me to do it, because, if I did, I would be violating and running rough shot over the Constitution, and my oath is to support and defend the Constitution. If I did otherwise, would I not be,” he said, “in the boundless field of absolutism.” He knew where the dark was, and he was trying to stay away from it as much as he could and point people towards a kind of political light that he believed had radiated from the Declaration of Independence.
So in that respect, he is a moralist. He is an Augustinian moralist. The Augustinian in him gives him that living sense of human limitations and his own limitations. One representative of the United States Christian Commission visiting him at the White House complimented Lincoln on how well the war was going––this was later on during the war. And Lincoln, Lincoln pulled him up short and he said, “I don’t deserve any credit for this. In fact, you don’t deserve any credit for the things that you have done in support of the war effort. If it had not been for those people across the river”––and he points through the window across the Potomac––“if it had not been for those people across the river, we would never have been able to do any of the things we’ve done.” He’s not pinning a badge on himself. He says to the Kentucky journalist, Albert Hodges, I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. What we’re looking at is the working out of the will of God, and he doesn’t mistake himself for God that way. In a letter he writes in July of 1862 to a Louisiana, to a Louisiana unionist, he says, “I shall do nothing in malice. What we are dealing with is too great from malicious dealing.” This remarkable statement of where he understands that the politics of the war are more than politics, they are questions of right and wrong, and that he must treat them humbly in that way. Not that he’s the arbiter of right and wrong, but that he stands in judgment under the judgment of law,
Albert Mohler:
Yes, absolutely.
Allen Guelzo:
and right and wrong.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, by the way, I am always amazed in conversation with you how you can pull out this primary source material, I think more so than just about anyone with whom I have these conversations. I stand in awe of that. In conclusion, I want to go back to where we kind of began, and that is to ask you, given all of this and your life’s work, you used the term liberal democracy, and I just want to ask you a question, because it’s so tied to your work here in this book on Lincoln: What is the current utility of that term? Just to kind of place this here again in 2024.
Allen Guelzo:
It sometimes depends on the audience you’re talking to. For a lot of my conservative friends, the very word “liberal” itself is an explosive term because it means, oh, the entire opposite of anything you would think of as conservative. And I have to explain, no, no, no, that’s not how you should be hearing this. You should be hearing this in the sense that the 19th century used it. Lincoln is a liberal, not because he looks like something from the 1960s, it’s because he understands that in a democracy, the most important political figure is the individual, the free individual, so that the term “liberal” is derived from the Latin, liber, the free man, the free citizen. For Lincoln, what we might sometimes today talk about as being individual democracy, that for him, that was what liberal democracy meant, and that was how people used the terminology in Lincoln’s day. So, what he is saying there, when he talks about liberal democracy, when I’m talking about Lincoln as an example of liberal democracy, I’m speaking of him in the term of his own day, that this is a kind of democracy which understands that the rights of the individual are the first thing politically speaking, that you need to take account of.
There are other kinds of democracy. There’s the democracy, for instance, of Jean Jacque Rousseau. Rousseau understood democracy, but he understood it as a kind of one man, one vote, one time, at one time determines what the general will is and everybody must submit to the general will. That was not Lincoln’s notion. Lincoln’s notion of liberal democracy is that, alright, we’re not going to have 100% unanimity on issues and, in that case, majorities get to rule. But majorities also understand that they can be wrong. Majorities understand that they’re not going to take the minority and put it up against a barn wall and shoot it like a lot of Bolsheviks. No, the minority might actually have the truth in its hand and just simply requires time to persuade people of that so it can become the majority and do the right thing. And Lincoln understood that fluidity, that majorities must respect the individuals who compose the minority. The minority must respect those who compose the majority by not subverting the majority. That for him is the great dynamic of liberal democracy that stands so far away from the kinds of progressive democracy that is very popular to talk about today, which is almost in my lexicon, a contradiction in terms. It also pulls us very far away from kinds of populist authoritarianism. What Lincoln was trying to find was that path that would walk between the extremes, that path that would respect the rights and the identity of the individual citizen. And for him, that is what is captured in this notion of democracy. And he’ll put it in the most basic terms as the exercise of the consent of the governed. For him, he said that was the sheet anchor of American republicanism. That, he said, was the basis of our ancient faith. That’s where I get the title from the Peoria speech of October 16th, 1854. That basic tenant, the consent of the governed, that for him, that was our ancient faith. For him, that is the light that a genuine liberal democracy steers by. So I’m conscious of the fact that there are people today who might not hear it the same way that Lincoln the term, that’s why I wrote a book to explain it.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and that’s why we’ve talked about this book today. Again, the title, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln Democracy, and the American Experiment. Reading the book was a delight and as always a conversation in which the reader and the text are having a conversation and through that to the author. The only thing better than that is an actual conversation with the author. And Professor Guelzo, once again, I thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Allen Guelzo:
Well, thank you. Thank you very much. It is always a pleasure to talk with you, and I hope we get more opportunities both in a formal setting like this, informally, and otherwise as iron sharpens iron and heart speaks to heart.
Albert Mohler:
Well amen to that. God bless you, sir.
Allen Guelzo:
Thank you.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Allen Guelzo for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you can find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking In Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For informational Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.