We need a Lincoln right now

July 29, Dallas Gingles, assistant dean of hybrid education and associate professor in the Perkins School of Theology at SMU Dallas, for a commentary positing that the country needs a leader today with the wisdom and religious guideposts of Abraham Lincoln. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading We need a Lincoln right now: https://tinyurl.com/mtyt7tjd

I teach ethics and theology at Southern Methodist University, and this fall I’m offering a course on Presidential Rhetoric and Political Theology. Beginning with Lincoln’s second inaugural address, we’ll examine the ways presidents have used theological themes as a way of helping explain the nation to itself.

I’ve been thinking about this topic for at least the past decade, but listening to this year’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, I was struck by how important this tradition is to our shared self-understanding as a country, and about how impoverished we are because neither Biden nor Trump truly inhabits it. Whether Vice President Kamala Harris better embodies the Lincoln paradigm remains to be seen.

But would America reject him and his God talk?

By Dallas Gingles

I’ve been rereading the second inaugural almost weekly for months, thinking about its awe-inspiring claims. In a few brief paragraphs Lincoln weaves together arguments about divine providence and the possibility that God is punishing the nation for the sin of slavery. And all of this is paired with the juxtaposition between “firmness in the right”— which required waging a horrific war between families — and deep humility about only knowing the right “as God gives us” to see it.

Lincoln’s idiosyncratic theology along with his political and moral courage are on full display in Allen Guelzo’s Our Ancient Faith and Jon Meacham’s And There Was Light — both excellent recent books on Lincoln and what he offers to our time.

Lincoln sees America as what some thinkers have called “an almost-chosen people.” We have a sense of purpose, of destiny. We quote the words “all men are created equal” with the confidence that street-evangelists use to quote John 3:16. But more than anything, we have a sense of moral aspiration that is most provocatively reflected in our sense of our moral failure. To put it bluntly, one of the most exceptional things in American exceptionalism is our deeply held conviction that we can be guilty. Other nations may confess their guilt in political gestures many years after a moral atrocity. We fought a war as an act of atonement.

While a large contingent of contemporary thinkers on the left are very concerned with what is vaguely termed Christian nationalism, it is Lincoln who justifies a Civil War by appealing to divine providence. That argument alone would compel today’s liberal organizations to back away from him.

The problem with warnings from the left about Christian nationalism is that they give up on the possibility that Lincoln’s vision was one we should share. I’m not claiming that we should claim divine warrant to pursue a civil war. Rather, we should be open to Lincoln’s vision in which our everyday concerns are both imbued with a sense of transcendence — what we do with and for and to each other matters in an eternal sort of way — and that such transcendence requires a deep humility on our part — we never perfectly know how to be with and for each other.

This is the other side of Lincoln’s argument. He knew that his vision could be wrong. He was willing to take the risk of both interpreting the nation and leading it, even into war.

That sense of moral risk means that his arguments would not endear him to today’s ostensible Christian nationalists either. By codifying, defending and extending the institution of slavery, America had failed to live up to its own moral demands — demands that it claimed came in some way from God.

The problem with theological talk on the right today is not that it is theological talk about America, but that it is theological talk about America as an answer rather than as a question. It lacks humility. That kind of talk does not see either the country or itself as morally risky, only morally correct.

By pairing moral confidence with a sense of moral risk, Lincoln provides the paradigm for presidential political theology, but he has inheritors. Think about recent presidents — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. In different ways — sometimes startlingly different ways — each one of these paired a sense of divinely inspired national moral aspiration with a weighty sense that such aspiration meant that we answer to the divine for our moral failures.

In the worst iterations of our contemporary rhetoric, that give-and-take between aspiration and accountability has been pried apart and parceled out to the liberal and conservative poles. The liberal pole fixates on national guilt — the sense of perpetual moral failure, from 1619 to the present. The conservative pole has traded moral aspiration for moral superiority — a conviction that America is a chosen people, full stop.

The forces of partisan rancor, cable news, social media and all of the rapid social changes of the past several years have left us all with an atrophied ability to think theologically. It isn’t just that we’re functionally illiterate about political and theological history, although that’s a genuine problem. Rather, it is that we are so certain that our present partisan talking points are something close to divine teaching that we could not hear a theological voice of self-correction even if we had one on offer. It is not only Trump, Biden and Harris who fail to inhabit America’s best theological tradition; it is us as a people. Not only do we not have a Lincoln to elect, but we wouldn’t recognize him even if he emerged.

I do not think that a mass influx into worship services and a recovery of religious literacy would save our democracy, though it probably wouldn’t hurt. I do think that our political leaders need to be more daring in their attempt to interpret the country to itself. I want leaders with enough vision to see our national life as enchanted, meaningful and theologically profound, and with enough rhetorical gravitas to help us see it too. But also, I want them to have the moral courage to say that their vision is limited, and only sees as far as God has given them to see.

We may be a people who no longer know to look for such a leader, nor to recognize one if he or she should come calling from the backwoods of Illinois. We may not deserve a Lincoln. But for that reason, we desperately need a leader whose final call is not to war but to “malice toward none and … to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

Dallas Gingles is assistant dean of hybrid education and associate professor of practice in systematic theology and Christian ethics in the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.