{"id":1726,"date":"2012-11-18T20:23:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-18T20:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/11\/abraham-lincolns-atheist-period.html"},"modified":"2012-11-18T20:23:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-18T20:23:00","slug":"abraham-lincolns-atheist-period","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/11\/abraham-lincolns-atheist-period.html","title":{"rendered":"Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s Atheist Period"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p><\/p>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: none;font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif;font-size: 13px;line-height: 20px;margin-bottom: 14px;padding: 0px\">We have heard the soaring phrases often. They are fixed in the American book of verse. Now, they sound again in Steven Spielberg\u2019s magnificent film, \u201cLincoln.\u201d<\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: none;font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif;font-size: 13px;line-height: 20px;margin-bottom: 14px;padding: 0px\">They come to us as tones of faith from Abraham Lincoln\u2019s presidential speeches: \u201ca firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land,\u201d \u201cthe Almighty has his own purposes,\u201d \u201cthat this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,\u201d and \u201cthe judgments of the Lord are true.\u201d They suggest a God who rules in the affairs of men and does so with both love and justice.<\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: none;font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif;font-size: 13px;line-height: 20px;margin-bottom: 14px;padding: 0px\">Yet this God was not always Abraham Lincoln\u2019s God. In his early years, Lincoln hated this being. It was a natural response. He was thoroughly convinced that God, in turn, hated Abraham Lincoln. It is one of the most surprising facts of Lincoln\u2019s life, a fact that makes his religious journey among the most unique in our history.<\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: none;font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif;font-size: 13px;line-height: 20px;margin-bottom: 14px;padding: 0px\">The 16th president of the United States was born on an American frontier swept by almost violent religious revivals. Men routinely responded to preaching and the \u201cSpirit\u2019s work\u201d by shouting, convulsing, passing out and even barking. Few were caught up in this excitement more eagerly than Thomas and Nancy Lincoln.<\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: none;font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif;font-size: 13px;line-height: 20px;margin-bottom: 14px;padding: 0px\">Their intelligent, sensitive son found it all too much. Young Abraham rejected his parents\u2019 loud, sweaty brand of faith and in part because he could not reconcile the weepy, religious version of his father with the man who beat him, worked him \u201clike a slave,\u201d and resented his dreams of a more meaningful life. Historian Allen Guelzo has written, \u201con no other point did Abraham Lincoln come closer to an outright repudiation of his father than on religion.\u201d<\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color: white;border: none;font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif;font-size: 13px;line-height: 20px;margin-bottom: 14px;padding: 0px\">Read the rest<a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/stephen-mansfield\/understanding-lincolns-atheist-period_b_2145340.html?utm_hp_ref=religion\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"> here<\/a><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have heard the soaring phrases often. They are fixed in the American book of verse. Now, they sound again in Steven Spielberg\u2019s magnificent film, \u201cLincoln.\u201d They come to us as tones of faith from Abraham Lincoln\u2019s presidential speeches: \u201ca firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land,\u201d \u201cthe Almighty has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Abraham Lincoln&#039;s Atheist Period<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We have heard the soaring phrases often. They are fixed in the American book of verse. 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