If you saw the movie “Lincoln” you may have been impressed by the portrayal of one of America’s best presidents during one of her worst times—the Civil War between the states. What you didn’t see about Abraham Lincoln was his love for the Bible.

The “Lincoln Bible” is the label given a family Bible that Abraham Lincoln used in his 1861 inauguration ceremony as the 16th President of the United States. That same Bible was the one used by current U.S. President at his 2008 inauguration—but that’s not the Bible this article is about!

I’m writing about the Bible that Abraham Lincoln’s mother recited to him because she couldn’t read—the same Bible that his father and stepmother read from to him and his sister when they could finally afford one. This is about the Bible—or Bibles—that Lincoln later personally owned and read like the average person reads a cherished text or story book. We’re talking about the Bible that Abraham Lincoln constantly cited, referred or alluded to during conversations, political speeches and debates and in issuing his famous, practical wisdom.

President Lincoln was not an active member of any denomination in his day, but he personally read the Bible—no doubt the commonly available King James or Authorized Version—regularly. Mr. Lincoln’s sense of the scope and value of the Bible was recorded by many of his contemporaries even as in his statements like this:

“In regard to this Great book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it” (Herbert Mitgang, editor,Washington, D.C., in Lincoln's Time: A Memoir of the Civil War Era by the Newspaperman Who Knew Lincoln Best, Noah Brooks, p. 252).

Biographer William E. Barton penned that Mr. Lincoln "read the Bible, honored it, quoted it freely, and it became so much a part of him as visibly and permanently to give shape to his literary style and to his habits of thought" (William E. Barton,The Soul of Abraham Lincoln, p. 275).

• The President’s famous “house divided against itself” analogy in his 1858 Republican senate nomination speech drew on the imagery used by Jesus Christ in Matthew 12:22-30.
• He included in his second inaugural “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether” comes directly from Psalm 19:9 and Revelation 16:7.
• Lincoln referred to the principle of Psalm 91:1 in the Gettysburg Address that this “Nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom.”

In Lincoln scholar Earl Schwartz’s words, “Lincoln's Collected Works are, in fact, peppered with biblical references, including several dozen direct quotations. These are taken, for the most part, from Hebrew Bible narratives, the Psalms, Wisdom texts, and the Gospels. The Bible was the common coin of literate nineteenth-century Americans, and Lincoln made good use of its currency” (“‘A Poor Hand to Quote Scripture’: Lincoln and Genesis 3:19,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 2002, p. 38).

Abraham Lincoln read the Bible, talked about the Bible, referred to the Bible and recited the Bible. Though he didn’t understand the fullness of God’s plan, the President read and reread His Book!

So why didn’t the screenplay writers emphasize the Bible in of the movie “Lincoln”?!

Of course we know. It’s the modern, secular mindset that saturates our culture. For those of that mindset “God” is an obstacle to the evolution and development of pure human government. And perhaps the very mention of Lincoln’s Bible—the one he read, thought about and quoted, the true Bible—makes such people feel guilty about breaking the law of God recorded in it! After all, human nature hates to feel guilty.

Noted sources:  

abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org