Appropriating History: Lincoln and the Evangelicals

According to biographer Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln might have believed in a divine maker, but he certainly did not believe in Jesus Christ--in a personal savior. He did not belong to a church. He believed that people were generally in charge of their own destiny and had the capacity to build a better society together.

In short, Abraham Lincoln was one of those evil, secular humanists that people in the Christian right in the U.S. constantly badger us about.

Lincoln?

Thomas Jefferson? Benjamin Franklin? Thomas Paine? How convenient that they are dead and unable to speak for themselves. These "heroes" of the American Revolution have their names invoked time and time again by Republicans, homophobes, militant evangelicals, and tv preachers, as paragons of Christian virtue and "traditional" values.

Do you believe me? Or do you want to believe Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?

You know, it’s not very difficult to find the truth in this matter. There really isn’t a controversy, like there is, say, over the efficacy of gun control or feminism or the Equal Rights Amendment. You can read the original works by these guys in any library. They were NOT—I repeat, NOT—Christians. They did not base the constitution on scripture. They did not base the Bill of Rights on scripture. They based their work on the ideas of people like John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

So when someone tells you that America needs to return to the moral virtues of the past, and to the examples of stalwart men like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine – I say, "Amen, brother!"

Well, no, I don’t, exactly. You see Jefferson owned slaves and he sired children by one of them. Benjamin Franklin had quite a reputation in Paris, when he was American ambassador. And George Washington certainly didn’t think Martha should be entitled to equal pay for work of equal value.

So there you go. You see the danger of trying to read the past into the present or, even worse, the future.

The truth is, we are here and now and we have to try to find the best answer to our various social and economic and moral problems all by ourselves. We can learn from the past, but you can’t go back, and America can’t go back.

The Founding Fathers, fearful of invasion by Britain, believed that every man should keep a gun handy. Today, 40,000 people a year a murdered at least partly because it is easier to get a gun in the U.S. than it is to get a firecracker.

Time to move on, I say.

Copyright © 1999 Bill Van Dyk  All rights reserved.