It is common to hear fears of Evangelical votes swaying the Republic (or the Republican Party) as if this is a new thing. A core group of voters for the Republican Party for good (abolition) or ill (Prohibition) has always been Evangelical.
The Party has always (or almost always) appealed to them for votes. The modern difference is that as Northern Evangelicals faded in numbers (though Midwest Republican Evangelicals in places like Ohio remain strong), Southern White Evangelicals (with their baggage of a history that included slavery and racism) replaced them.
Just for fun here is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address with all appeals to Christian or religious sensibilities removed. I am afraid that many of my friends who think “religion in politics” is new have never listened to the Battle Hymn of the Republic or read much first-hand Republican speech making.
I will show you what got cut and you will see that the meat of the speech, what mattered, was actually theological.
Now Mr. Lincoln:
Fellow-Countrymen:
AT this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
What I could not cut was the King James cadence and vocabulary Lincoln intentionally used to comfort the ears of his overwhelmingly Bible-reading, believing, and Christian supporters.
What got cut? It is obvious that most of parts of the speech that would be inoffensive to secularists are the warm up to the main point. Lincoln prepares to give his punch . . . which is incomprehensible without Christianity.
Here it is:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right . . .
Anybody think this makes sense without a King James saturated mind or is not an appeal to what would now be called the better angels of an Evangelical religious sensibility?
I say nothing regarding Lincoln’s own religious views. They are the subject of endless scholarly contention, though there is evidence that Lincoln’s faith grew in office as he outgrew childhood skepticism. In any case, a major constituency of his electoral support was Evangelical and he knew how to “be one of them.”
Oxford Don Richard Carwardine in his Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power clinches the case that Republican Party appeals to their Evangelical base are not new.