High Infidelity

Abstract

He was a daring fellow, they all agreed. A damned daring infidel, old Tom Paine. Of course, not all would go his distance, take his risks, and reason their way into his radical deism. But at least one among them did. Young Abraham Lincoln would echo Paine to engage—maybe to impress—the company of men who gathered at New Salem’s general store in frontier Illinois. He would point out contradictions in the Bible and ridicule those passages that beggared belief. He even composed “a little book on Infidelity” modeled on Paine’s Age of Reason, and in its pages he dismissed the virgin birth, Christ’s miracles, and his resurrection. As for the clergy, he shared Paine’s contempt: a scheming bunch, bent on gaining money and power by scaring their credulous flocks. Strong words, the men of New Salem nodded, but they had to wonder: would that damned daring infidel Lincoln ever regret flapping his gums? Strictly speaking, the Lincoln of the 1830s, like Paine before him, was no infidel. He believed in a powerful, unknowable God even as he harbored a deep skepticism about the inspiration of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, and the intentions of religious leaders. But for most antebellum Americans, those deistical convictions placed Lincoln squarely in the infidel camp along with other doubters, agnostics, and downright atheists. Bad company for an aspiring politician, warned a friend—the same one who convinced him not to publish that “little book on Infidelity.” It was prudent advice: even without such an albatross in print, political opponents would hurl the charge of unbelief against Lincoln in his subsequent campaigns for the state legislature and Congress.1 An older and more politic Lincoln stopped ridiculing Christianity in public, and the events of his last years may also have leavened his skepticism. It appears that Lincoln came to regard the Bible as a repository of wisdom rather than as a book of fables and that the remote deist God of his youth had been supplanted by one that intervened directly in human history. His Second Inaugural, which Frederick Douglass described as “more like a sermon than a state paper,” refers to God 14 times and describes slavery as a sin for which