REVIEW: Righteous Strife By Richard Carwardine (Tom Peebles, February 1, 2026, Washington Independent Review of Books)
As a rising political star and presidential candidate in the newly formed Republican Party, Lincoln appeared to entertain a broad and bland view of God as the creative presence behind the universe but not an entity actively involved in human affairs — a perspective at odds with most religious nationalists on both sides. As wartime president, however, his theological perspective took what Carwardine terms a “providentialist turn,” in which he acknowledged a “God who intervened in the life of the nation for his own mysterious purposes.” This shift brought Lincoln ever closer to the “historic Calvinism that colored much of Northern Protestantism,” and thus into broad theological alignment with both anti-slavery and conservative religious nationalists.
But Lincoln’s spiritual metamorphosis was intertwined with his evolution regarding the slavery question. The pre-presidential Lincoln had advocated for the containment of slavery in locations where it already existed. Yet as war president, his anti-slavery convictions deepened. A “more capacious moral framework,” Carwardine argues, led Lincoln to “embrace emancipation…and equality of civic opportunity for both black and white.” As the war progressed, Lincoln’s thinking on these intertwined issues came to align with anti-slavery religious nationalists, although for a remarkably long period, he was able maintain the support of both sides.
Lincoln did not lose substantial support among conservative religious nationalists until, fortified by a series of battlefield successes, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863, the “most important presidential edict since the foundation of the republic” in Carwardine’s words.