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Another broadside against the feckless Cult of Abraham Lincoln.

Newsweek’s Voodoo 'Gospel'

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Are you tired of reading the Bible or one of the other Good Books? Do they not "do anything" for you any more? Well, then, read the Gettysburg Address instead, the real "American Gospel." That’s the message of a new book (The Gettysburg Gospel) by Gettysburg College’s Gabor Boritt, featured recently on the front cover of Newsweek. Never mind that Lincoln himself did not believe in God and even ridiculed those who did. The "American Gospel," as Boritt calls the Gettysburg Address, defines the "religion" of the U.S. government, the "good news of a free people," according to Boritt.

Boritt does not deny that Lincoln was a non-believer. "He would not join a church, could not embrace the Christian conception of sin and redemption, kept mostly silent about Jesus, and showed no inclination to build a personal relationship with God," he writes in Newsweek. He "rejected, even ridiculed" the Calvinism of his parents. But Lincoln was a master politician, once defined by Murray Rothbard as one who is "a masterful liar, conniver, and manipulator." There has never been anyone better at it than Lincoln.

Lincoln may have been an atheist, but he fully understood that most Americans were certainly not, that they read the Bible, and that their emotions could be rather easily swayed by references to the Bible, especially at wartime when emotion seems to overwhelm reason on the part of much of the population.

As preparation for his political career Lincoln read the Bible (which he mocked) over and over (along with Shakespeare and various books on rhetoric and speech making). He cynically used Biblical language to make political points, sometimes insinuating that his policies were the will of God, and at other times absolving himself from all responsibility for them, saying, for example, that all the death and destruction of the war was the work of God, and that he had nothing to do with it. That was the theme of his Second Inaugural Address. The war just "came," he said, and was God’s punishment of America’s sins (pretending to know what is in the mind of God). (Boritt claims that Lincoln’s speeches had "no touch" of self-righteousness!).

"Much of what Lincoln said [in the Gettysburg Address] carried the sounds of the Bible," writes Boritt. It was "the music of the ancient Hebrew turned into King James’s English." For example, "Four score seven years ago" is similar to Psalm 90: "The days of our years are three score years and ten." When he wrote that our forefathers "brought forth" a new nation, he knew that that was how the Bible announced a birth, including the birth of Jesus. The Israelites are also said to have been "brought forth" from slavery in Egypt. "Hallowed ground" is from the story of Moses, not 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The phrase "shall not perish" is from John 3:16 in the New Testament. The word "consecration" also has a biblical lineage.

So what was the purpose of Lincoln’s insincere, voodoo religion? Why did he so cleverly portray the platform of the Republican Party as literally the work of God? It was to explain "why the bloodletting must go on," says Boritt, admitting that he did not even mention slavery in the speech. Boritt gives the main reason for this in the first paragraph of his Newsweek article, where he cites an anonymous "soldier" as supposedly saying that, after the battle, it was "The Glorious Fourth [of July] and we are still a Nation . . ."

Boritt here is alluding to what Lincoln would say four months later regarding how the founders supposedly "brought forth" a "new nation" in 1776. This was part of the ongoing propaganda campaign that commenced with Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, then the Whigs, and finally the Republican Party, to rewrite the American founding as having created a consolidated "national" government, and not a compact among the sovereign states. It is patently false. The founders did not create a "nation." They created a compact among the states that agreed to delegate a few selected powers to a central government that would serve as their agent, mostly in the areas of foreign policy and war. As historian Carl Degler of Stanford University once explained, "The Civil War . . . was not a struggle to save a failed union, but to create a nation that until then had not come into being."

The word "nation" here really means a centralized government that would pursue the path of empire – precisely the kind of government the American revolutionary generation seceded from. It was instituted by the Lincoln regime not by a constitutional convention or by any other peaceful and legal means, but by killing one out of four adult males in the Southern states who resisted being part of Lincoln’s "new nation." This is why the Northern "peace Democrats," denigrated as "copperheads" (i.e., snakes in the grass) by the Lincoln regime, lived by the slogan, "the Constitution as it is; the Union as it was." Lincoln idolaters like Gabor Boritt continue to write happy-faced books cloaking this abominable mass murder in religious language because that’s how Lincoln excused himself from all responsibility for it.

What Lincoln’s "Biblical style" implies, Mel Bradford wrote in A Better Guide Than Reason (p. 190), and what it conceals, is that Lincoln was "assuming the role of a Joshua, whose authority is such that he need only speak the command of the Lord for it to be obeyed." The final result, wrote Bradford, was "sacrilege by submerged metaphor: a ‘new testament’ out of a phony ‘old,’ with dead soldiers for a bridge."

Nearly every one of Lincoln’s major claims in the Gettysburg Address is not only false, but exactly the opposite of the truth. That is no doubt why his defenders, whose books always read like a defense brief in "The War Crimes Trial of Abraham Lincoln," are still trying to cloud the public’s understanding of it with 300-page books about a 272-word speech. That’s about 300 words of excuse making, speculation, and rationalizing for every word in the actual speech.

A "new nation" was not created in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. For that matter, the Declaration was a secessionist document, declaring America’s secession from the British empire. Lincoln absurdly claimed that there was such a thing as a ‘right of revolution" but not a right of secession, a distinction without a difference if ever there was one. His idolaters continue to repeat this silly slogan to this day.