Religious views of Abraham Lincoln

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Abraham Lincoln grew up in a highly religious Baptist family. He never joined any Church, and was a skeptic as a young man and sometimes ridiculed revivalists. He frequently referred to God and had a deep knowledge of the Bible, often quoting it. Lincoln attended Protestant church services with his wife and children. "Especially after the death of his young son Willie in 1862, Lincoln moved away from his earlier religious skepticism."^[1] Some argue that Lincoln was neither a Christian believer nor a secular freethinker.^[2]

Although Lincoln never made an unambiguous public profession of Christian belief, several people who knew him personally, such as Chaplain of the Senate Phineas Gurley and Mary Todd Lincoln, claimed that he believed in Christ in the religious sense.^[3][4][5] However, others who had known Lincoln for years, such as Ward Hill Lamon and William Herndon, rejected the idea that he was a believing Christian.^[6] During his 1846 run for the House of Representatives, in order to dispel accusations concerning his religious beliefs, Lincoln issued a handbill stating that he had "never denied the truth of the Scriptures".^[7] He seemed to believe in an all-powerful God, who shaped events and, by 1865, was expressing those beliefs in major speeches.^[8]