Lincoln's Sacred Effort: Defining Religion's Role in American Self-Government. (Book Reviews).

Lincoln's Sacred Effort: Defining Religion's Role in American Self-Government. By Lucas E. Morel. Applications of Political Theory. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, c. 2000. Pp. [x], 251. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-7391-0106-4; cloth, $70.00, ISBN 0-7391-0105-6.)

Tocqueville was intrigued by American religion. Unlike Europe, where religion was in league against liberal democracy, religion in America cooperated with republican liberty and, in fact, was one of the principal restraints against democracy's degeneration into riot, license, self-interest, and banality. Lucas Morel's Lincoln's Sacred Effort positions Abraham Lincoln as both an example and, in politics, a shrewd practitioner of Tocqueville's insight, although with a complexity that Tocqueville could never have anticipated.

Morel is less interested in determining what Lincoln's religion was--and just as well, considering how many truly awful books have been written in pursuit of that wild goose--than in understanding how Lincoln thought religion ought to function in a democracy. "As a successful republic requires a moral or self-controlled people," Morel begins, Lincoln "believed the moral and religious impulse of society should be nurtured. Both helped to moderate the excesses of passion and self-interest in the community" (pp. 1-2). The touchstone for this interpretation is Lincoln's 1838 Lyceum Address, a Whiggish denunciation of Democratic passion and excess in which Lincoln called on "seminaries" and "pulpits" to assist in suppressing riot and law-breaking and in creating a "political religion" of law-abidingness. Religion, properly used, would discourage moral degeneration and help keep the republic stable.

But more than simply deploying religion in such a utilitarian fashion, Lincoln as president intervened directly to interject religious observance into public life as a good in itself, in the forms of national thanksgiving proclamations, exhortations to the military to observe the Sabbath, the expansion of the military chaplaincy, and instructions to his generals on policy toward churches in the occupied Confederacy. In all this, Morel notes, Lincoln was careful to make his interventions sparingly and without any suggestion that they represented any personal religious propensities of his own. If anything, Lincoln balanced his interest in promoting "political religion" with a distaste for the excesses to which religion, as much as democracy, might be prone. Lincoln's 1842 Temperance Address and the Second Inaugural are Morel's prime illustrations of Lincoln's temperamental antipathy to religious zealots, something that distanced him not only from the temperance fanatics but also from the abolitionists. "Without moderation," Morel remarks, "the public dialogue essential to a republic becomes strident and fanatical rather than deliberate and accommodating in its pursuit of the common good" (p. 131).

In this way, Morel does not need to penetrate to the essence of Lincoln's own personal religious beliefs to make a highly persuasive case for the place Lincoln believed religions should occupy on the American public square. "Reason or prudence remains the ruling principle of the republic," Morel concludes, "but it must allow the rightful exercise and, hence, influence of religion" (p. 210). Or so Lincoln thought. In an age whose public discourse is dominated by passionate Kantian absolutes, it is a good question to ask at the close of Morel's book whether we have significant room left for either prudential reason or prudential religion--or maybe even for the example of Abraham Lincoln.

ALLEN C. GUELZO
Templeton Honors College at Eastern University