[noteworthy]
DeďŹ ning Lincoln’s Religion By John Helgeland
Abraham Lincoln did not join a church.
For many, whose only model of religion is built around a church or synagogue, the case is closed: Lincoln could not have been religious. Yet many who study religion in its various forms regard Lincoln as articulating original and creative religious sentiments that mark him as the most profound religious thinker in the nineteenth century. That such an understanding of religion should come from one reared in the back woods of Kentucky and Indiana with less than two years of formal education indicates that we are confronted by genius.
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