IT'S THE MORALITY, SILLY:

"Lincoln's God" is partly a religious biography, partly a history of 19th-century American evangelicalism. Mr. Zeitz, who writes on political topics for Politico and holds a doctorate in American history from Brown, chronicles Lincoln's early years in the home of his Calvinist father, his rejection of the faith in which he was raised, and various attempts to sidestep questions of religious commitment during his rise to political prominence. At the same time, Mr. Zeitz contends, evangelical Protestantism in the 1840s and '50s was transforming into the sort of outward, revivalist and robustly moralistic faith that made more sense to Lincoln than the severe and doctrinally scrupulous faith of his upbringing.

Northern evangelicalism and Abe Lincoln came together, Mr. Zeitz asserts, on the question of slavery. In late 1862, with the Union's survival appearing unlikely, the president embraced abolition as the only way out of the morass in which the nation found itself. Many evangelical clergymen, too, moved from simply opposing slavery to preaching the necessity of armed conflict and abolitionism. Northern Christians of all denominations remained divided on political allegiances and war policy, Mr. Zeitz points out, but the coming of war prompted evangelical leaders to take up abolitionism the way Protestant liberals would take up civil rights a century later. The destruction of slavery became the overriding goal of evangelical religion; indeed some clergymen, writes Mr. Zeitz, "entirely blurred the line between their clerical and political commitments."

Since his early 20s--that is, after he left home in 1831 and was no longer under his father's care--Lincoln had committed to memory many passages of the King James Bible. Not until the trial of his presidency, though, did he begin to treat scriptural language as a source of hope and moral guidance in the way a believer would. The Civil War was going badly, Lincoln's critics were growing more numerous and more vicious, and in February 1862 his son Willie drank contaminated water and died an excruciating death.

Now, Mr. Zeitz argues, Lincoln began to embrace a quiet but genuine form of Christian belief. Of course, this isn't strictly knowable, inasmuch as the president, a reticent man at all times, never made any explicit attestation of faith. His widow, Mary, recalled to Herndon that "he read the Bible a good deal in 1864. He felt religious more than ever about the time he went to Gettysburg"--that is, in November 1863. The president more often accompanied his wife to church in last three years of his life.

The content of Lincoln's late public addresses, Mr. Zeitz observes furthermore, is so richly biblical that the supposition of a newfound acknowledgment of God is impossible to ignore. "Neither before nor since," Mr. Zeitz writes of the Second Inaugural Address, "has a United States president so openly infused a public speech with religious sentiment and phrasing."

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