Compare Lincoln's religiosity with the hypocrite who presently occupies the
White House.
The President Who Died for Us
By RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX
Published: April 14, 2006
Worcester, Mass.
THIS year, Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ's crucifixion, falls on
April 14, as it did in 1865. On that evening, in the balcony box of Ford's
Theater in Washington, John Wilkes Booth fired a handmade .41-caliber
derringer ball into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head.
In the days that followed Lincoln's death, his mourning compatriots rushed
to compare him to Jesus, Moses and George Washington.
Despite the Good Friday coincidence, the Jesus parallel was not an obvious
one for 19th-century Americans to make. The Protestant population, then as
now, included a vigilant evangelical minority who thought that Jesus,
sinless on earth, was defamed every time ordinary sinners presumed to
imitate him. No mere mortal could be put beside Jesus on a moral balance
scale.
But Honest Abe overwhelmed the usual evangelical reticence - by April 1865
the majority of Northerners and Southern blacks took him as no ordinary
person. He had been offering his body and soul all through the war and his
final sacrifice, providentially appointed for Good Friday, showed that God
had surely marked him for sacred service.
At a mass assembly in Manhattan five hours after Lincoln's death, James A.
Garfield - the Ohio congressman who would become the second assassinated
president 16 years later - voiced the common hesitancy, then went on to
claim the analogy: "It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem
that Lincoln's death parallels that of the Son of God."
Jesus had saved humanity, or at least some portion of it, from eternal
damnation. Lincoln had saved the nation from the civic equivalent of
damnation: the dissolution that had always bedeviled republics. "Jesus
Christ died for the world," said the Rev. C. B. Crane in Hartford. "Abraham
Lincoln died for his country."
The small minority of Jews and Catholics, equally awed by Lincoln's bodily
sacrifice, joined Protestants in hailing the president's uncommon virtues:
forgiveness, mercy, defense of the poor and the oppressed. Catholics joined
Protestants in noting his Christ-like habits of brooding in private and
keeping his own counsel.
Nearly everyone joined in heralding Lincoln's phrase "with malice toward
none, with charity for all," which Christian mourners hailed as the heart of
the Gospel. Those words from his second inaugural address, delivered just
six weeks before his death, turned up on hand-scrawled banners all over the
Union. People mounted them, along with black-bordered flags and photographs
of Lincoln, in the windows of their homes and shops.
Thomas Nast's 1866 painting "President Lincoln Entering Richmond"
(commemorating his surprise stroll into the capital of the Confederacy on
April 4, 1865, shortly after Robert E. Lee's retreat) reinforced the
sentiment: Lincoln shepherded his people just as Jesus did. The president
walked into Richmond before Holy Week the way Jesus rode into Jerusalem
before Passover: humbly, not triumphantly. Both men were enveloped by
exuberant admirers.
Most American Christians turned to the Jesus analogy because they realized
how much they loved Lincoln. They took his loss as personal, often comparing
it to a death in the family. Many felt attached to Lincoln almost as they
felt attached to Jesus. The striving rail-splitter from Illinois and the
simple carpenter from Nazareth resembled them, the people. In contrast,
while still heroic, Washington seemed more distant, even aloof.
Yet calculation as well as veneration entered the campaign to sanctify
Lincoln. Radical Republicans revealed a political reason for comparing
Lincoln to Jesus. Trying to explain why a rational Providence had permitted
Lincoln to die, they decided that the savior of the nation had proved
himself too Christ-like, too softhearted, too "womanly," for the necessarily
punitive job of "reconstructing" the postwar South. God in his wisdom had
put Andrew Johnson in place for the messy task of enacting justice.
Many Protestants also displayed a religious motive for emphasizing the
resemblance between Lincoln and Christ. They made the president a virtual
holy man because they wished retroactively to make him a morally impeccable
and believing Christian. They considered theater-going, a favorite pastime
of the president, as morally dubious; his choice of the stage for recreation
on this day of crucifixion made them sick at heart.
And Lincoln, who after 1862 had spoken repeatedly of his dependence on God
and Providence, had never referred much to Jesus. The barrage of Jesus
comparisons offered a camouflaging aura of piety for a man who had enjoyed
lowbrow, off-color humor as much as play-acting.
Seven score and one years have passed since Good Friday 1865, and Lincoln
has always remained his own man. In his final years, he had set his own
course by balancing a pressing sense of the rule of Providence with a
persistent belief in the power of reason. Still, he can - and should - stand
as historic demonstration that a republican hero's sacrifice for the people
comes very close to Christ's ideals of self-denial and self-giving.
Richard Wightman Fox, the author of "Jesus in America: Personal Savior,
Cultural Hero, National Obsession," is writing a book about the aftermath of
Lincoln's assassination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/opinion/14fox.html?ex=1145160000&en=900225
e2ec073001&ei=5087%0A
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