The two books that Abraham Lincoln read often and loved the most throughout his life were the King James Bible, published in 1611, and William Shakespeare’s works, first published as the First Folio in 1623, both the best of English literary works.

There were some—including his law partner in Springfield, Illinois, Billy Herndon— who were convinced that Lincoln displayed little religious faith whatsoever, that he was a skeptic, a thinker who scoffed at organized religion.

Hence, Lincoln’s appreciation of Shakespeare’s works. At times Lincoln was a thinker.

Yet, there were others who knew Lincoln, who chose to believe that he was a believer, that he was a Christian martyr, who accomplished an immense amount of good—the obliteration of American Slavery—through his political achievements.

Hence, his appreciation for the King James Bible. At times Lincoln was a believer.

“No sooner was Lincoln dead than some of his countrymen began to fight about his soul,” wrote Richard Current in his 1958 book The Lincoln Nobody Knows.

Where can anyone position the sixteenth president? As a free-thinking skeptic, or as a Christian believer? He was unique because he stood taller than two easy categories.

Current wrote, “Lincoln read the Bible and prayed, but still belonged to no church.”

Lincoln himself wrote, “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.

“It is true that in early life I was inclined to believe in what I understand is called the ‘Doctrine of Necessity.’ The habit of arguing thus, however, I have, entirely left off from [for] more than five years.”

Scholars now see that Lincoln’s faith changed as he grew older. In the White House, trying to preserve the Union, living with his irascible wife Mary Todd, and working to win a war with a great slaughter on both sides, Lincoln sought direction from the Bible.

In the summer of 1864, Lincoln’s friend Joshua Speed happened to catch Lincoln reading his Bible. Lincoln told Speed, “Take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.”

The death of Lincoln’s 12-year-old son Willie, drove Lincoln to find solace in the Bible.

The writer Joshua Zeitz just released his newest book, Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation. A review of Zeitz’s book appeared in the New York Times on July 9, 2023.

Ted Widmer, the reviewer, wrote, “Lincoln’s philosophy was anything but certain; he hoped that he was right with God, and that was enough. His faith will never be simple to decipher, and that’s as it should be; it was, as the founders intended, a private matter.

“Zeitz weaves between the [two] dogmas, revealing a complex thinker who deftly merged religious language with political goals, and underwent a spiritual renewal during the Civil War.”

On March 4, 1865, six weeks before John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, the president delivered his Second Inaugural Address. “One scholar estimated that ‘266 of its 702 words were quoted verbatim from the King James Bible.’”

In it, he tried find a divine purpose as to why the war had lasted for four years.

He said, “The Almighty has his own purposes. Every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass listened as Lincoln spoke that day, and later remarked that the Address sounded, “more like a sermon than a state paper.”

Yet, Lincoln also quoted from Shakespeare. From Hamlet, Lincoln would often recite, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.”

King James and William Shakespeare. Lincoln loved the two books’ language the best.

Two trials in American history stand out above the others, the Salem Witch Trials and the Scopes Monkey Trial. Both were of a religious nature.

The two serve as bookends on America’s history, the first in 1693, in the years after New England’s founding, and the second in 1925, early in the twentieth century.

The trial at Salem Village, Massachusetts sought to identify and then execute those unseen spiritual forces, the witches, who, the village’s officials believed, went about in secret performing evil deeds in and around their community.

At Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692-1693, the Court of Oyer and Terminer included at least three judges: John Hathorne, Samuel Sewall, and William Stoughton.

The judges made a mistake by allowing into court the admission of what was called “spectral evidence,” testimony given by witnesses who claimed that the accused appeared to them in a dream or vision and caused them harm.

The witnesses were less-than-reliable pre-teen and teen-aged girls, capable of making up stories, dramatic acting, and outrageous lying. The judges believed the girls.

Based upon their testimonies, fourteen women and five men were hung. Another man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death. At least five others died when in prison.

The trial at Dayton, Tennessee sought to uproot and eradicate Darwinian evolution from Dayton’s high school biology class, a counter theory to the Genesis account. John T. Scopes had taught evolution and in so doing had broken Tennessee’s Butler Act.

The trial convened between July 10 and July 21, 1925, ninety-eight years ago.

William Jennings Bryan, a politician and Fundamentalist, joined the prosecution’s team, and Clarence Darrow, a well-known and vocal skeptic, joined the defense’s team.

H. L. Mencken, also a noted sceptic, wrote a series of scathing articles from Dayton, Tennessee, for The Baltimore Sun, that were critical of Bryan’s Fundamentalist beliefs.

In the trial’s final moments, Darrow called Bryan to the witness stand and asked him a series of questions that demonstrated Bryan’s lack of knowledge about scientific ideas.

A jury declared Scopes guilty, and the judge fined him $100.

Yet, two other trials stand out, but are lesser known. The first is Roger Williams’s trial in October of 1635, 58 years before the Salem Witch Trials, and the second is Jim Bakker’s trial in August of 1989, 64 years after the Scopes Monkey Trail.

Both these two trials were of a religious nature.

The Puritans labeled Roger’s “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions,” as “seditious and heresy.” He was convicted on four accounts and was forced to flee into the wilderness, where he found refuge in a smoke-filled tent with the Native Americans.

Jim Bakker was brought to trial on 24 counts for wire and mail fraud, for selling lifetime partnerships on television, on the PTL Club, and through the mail, but then he diverted the donations to pay for his television programs and his own use.

A jury convicted him on all counts, but unlike Roger Williams, he could not flee west to find sanctuary among Native Americans. Judge Robert Potter sentenced Jim Bakker to 45 years in federal prison and stuck him with a $500,000 fine, a most harsh sentence.

Instead, he served almost five years in a federal prison first at Rochester, Minnesota, and then at Jesup, Georgia. He also lived in a half-way house in North Carolina.

Roger Williams was trained as an Anglican clergyman at Pembroke College in Cambridge, in England. Jim Bakker was trained as an Assembly of God pastor and evangelist. Both were brought to trial, but for different reasons. Both were convicted.

What can we conclude? Perhaps, in the future, as in the past, the courts will bring other pastors to trial, and that future historians will rank as most important those trials that concern religion.

Edward Muir is president of the American Historical Association. In the May issue of that non-profit’s magazine, “Perspectives on History,” he wrote a column he entitled, “The United States Needs Historians.”

Muir states in his thesis, “Our culture needs historians who can look behind today’s headlines and the latest ‘fake news’ to think about longer patterns in the past, even as they engage in current struggles.”

Yet, Muir begins with a two-minute scene from the Ukrainian television series, “Servants of the People.” Yes, the series is fiction, but the scene makes a clear point.

The lead character is Vasily Holoborodko, a divorced high-school history teacher.

In Episode 1 of Season 1, he is standing in a classroom teaching his high-school students, when the principal interrupts his class, and orders all the students to leave and help construct voting booths outside for the upcoming election.

The students obey and leave, but Vasily turns on the principal and demands to know, “Why do you not pull the students from the math class?” The principal offers a flimsy answer that indicates his preference for math over history.

This upsets Vasily and launches him into a rant. He shouts,

“Mathematics is valued as a science, and that is all very fine! Then we wonder why our politicians make the same mistakes when they enter the halls of power. Because they are great mathematicians. They know how to divide and subtract. That’s all!

“They force kids to assemble voting booths. Why is it a hard knock life? Because our choice begins in a voting booth, when we vote for the lesser of two (poor candidates.)”

Through a window, one of Vasily’s students records this rant on a phone and posts it on the internet. It goes viral. Voters elect Vasily Holoborodko President of Ukraine.

This is fiction, from a 2016 television series, but the actor who played Vasily was Volodymyr Zelenzkyy, who in real life, in 2019, was elected President of Ukraine, which proves that, on occasion, fact does follow fiction.

Muir states, “In the United States, critics of honest history are coming for history teachers, as they already have in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland.

“There are still those willing to exploit the paranoid style and blind ignorance of the [John] Birchers and the like for their own purposes, but that those who fought them in word and deed had to keep at it.”

I agree. The U. S. needs historians to beat back the lies, distortions, and foolish challenges that others throw at them, but the profession has fallen on tough times.

Last August, the American Historical Association issued a “Jobs Report” that stated that “the average number of available new ‘tenure track’ university jobs was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.”

It also stated that “only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later.”

Daniel Bessner, a history professor, stated in “The New York Times,” last January,  “It’s the end of history, and the consequences will be significant. Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them.”

Last month’s crop of high school graduates will decide this summer what subject she or he will study at college in August: a form of math or science, or a form of the humanities, including history and English. That choice will have life-long consequences.

I say, “choose wisely, but if you can, study both,” history for the wisdom received from reading thick history textbooks, and numbers fluency for a better paying job. Let no one say about you, that the only thing you know is “how to divide and subtract.”

This last week I watched the new Lionsgate film, “Jesus Revolution.” The film did better than expected, grossing $50 million in the first months after its release in February.

The screenplay is based upon a memoir that Greg Laurie, and co-writer Ellen Vaughn, published in 2018, “Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How He Can Do It Again Today.”

I knew nothing of Greg Laurie when I watched the movie, but since then, I have learned that he is a long-time pastor, fifty years now, at a megachurch called Harvest Christian Fellowship in both Riverside and Irvine, California.

The screenplay includes four people: Greg, his girlfriend Cathe, a charismatic bearded hippy named Lonnie Frisbee, and a former Foursquare pastor named Chuck Smith.

In the early 1970s, Greg was in high school and lived with his alcoholic mother in a trailer house parked at Newport Beach. Throughout the film, he struggles to find his way, to re-create a more stable home and family, and find a career.

He heads down the wrong path for a short time, but other people, including Cathe, Lonnie, and Chuck, redirect him.

Lonnie and Chuck agree to conduct a mass baptism on a Saturday at Pirate’s Cove, at Newport Beach. Over the next several weeks, the two men baptize hundreds and then thousands of young people in the Pacific Ocean, including Cathe and Greg.

A break between Lonnie and Chuck over the appropriate style of worship at Calvary Chapel forces Greg to choose between them. Lonnie heads to Florida.

It is the film’s final scene that resonated with me. It is that of Explo ‘72, in Dallas, Texas, a gathering sponsored by Bill Bright’s organization “Campus Crusade for Christ.”

High school and college-aged students from across America showed up from June 12 to June 17, 1972, for a week of training in mission work, fifty-one years ago this month.

Three weeks after I graduated from Sterling High School, in May, I made the trek to Dallas. My ride dropped me off at Dallas Baptist College, and I checked into a dorm.

Days we attended seminars on campus, where instructors tried to teach us how to minister door-to-door, by passing out tracts. Afternoons we knocked on doors.

Towards evening, city buses would haul us to the Cotton Bowl, where we listened to a series of vocalists, bands, and sermons, including Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Andre Crouch. Billy Graham spoke mid-week.

The final scene of “Jesus Revolution” shows a clip of Billy speaking to a crowd of almost 80,000 students, in the Cotton Bowl. He wore a powder blue suit, white shirt, and tie.

In that clip, he says, “This is a demonstration of the love of God by tens of thousands of young people, saying to the world that God loves you. It’s the Jesus revolution that is going on in this country.” Pictures of the actual Greg, Cathe, Lonnie, and Chuck follow.

At Explo ‘72, I did not see many, if any, hippies or flower children, like those seen at Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. Those who attended were typical high school and college-aged students, who wore normal clothes, shoes, and sported no beards.

I think the film makes a mistake by conflating as the same two distinct organizations, Chuck and Lonnie’s “Jesus Movement” in southern California, and Bill Bright’s “Campus Crusade for Christ,” a college-oriented ministry spread across the fifty states.

In all, I thought the movie was worth watching. Kathy Schiffer, a journalist, said, “If you’re old enough to remember the 1960s and ’70s, you’ll find Lionsgate’s upbeat new film ‘Jesus Revolution’ to be a walk down memory lane.” Indeed, it was, especially the music.

I might mention that Kelsey Grammer, of “Cheers” and “Frasier,” plays Chuck Smith, and that Jonathan Roumie, of “The Chosen” television series, plays Lonnie Frisbee.

In “National Geographic’s” May edition, the writer Suzette Brewer, member of the Cherokee Nation, wrote an article about “the some 500 federally funded boarding schools for Native children opened in the U.S and Canada in the 1800s.”

Catholic or Protestant missionaries, intent on converting the students to Christianity and to white men’s culture, oversaw many of these schools, all designed to indoctrinate the students in the missionaries’ specific theology.

Brewer calls these schools “places of horror and shame.”

The children were separated from their homes, brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. They were beat if they spoke their native languages. Their hair and braids were cut. They were told to dress in white people’s clothes.

They were forced to work for long hours for little, if any, pay, in local homes.

Many of the older ones gave up and ran away, but professional trackers tracked them down and brought them back. Thousands died at the schools over the decades due to disease, poor nutrition, suicide, or under mysterious circumstances.

Eugene Herrod attended Carter Seminary in Oklahoma, and says now that, “Corporal punishment was rampant, but the emotional isolation was the hardest.”

“The familial dysfunction that was occurring in our communities and in our families was a result of this government obliterating a well-conceived and well-built tribal society that had lasted and endured for centuries.”

The educational results out of these boarding schools “were abysmal.”

At Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Suzette Brewer declared, “Only a few hundred students of the many thousands who were enrolled during the school’s 39-year history received high school diplomas.”

Carlisle’s founder Richard Pratt stated his school’s mission: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” There is little evidence he achieved either goal for most of his students.

The most famous alumni out of Carlisle was Jim Thorpe, a gifted athlete with talents in football, baseball, and track and field. He attended Carlisle off and on from 1904 until 1913, but it is questionable if he received a diploma.

One Native American boy who avoided the boarding school route was Sherman Alexie, who was born on the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1966, just three years before Lyndon Johnson’s administration shut down the boarding school program.

Sherman was smart. He read books. In an essay entitled, “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” he says, “I learned to read with a Superman comic book. A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed.

“We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom but subverted them outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing dozens of powwow songs.

“As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the night.”

Sherman chose to attend high school off the reservation, and there he succeeded. He became a writer and a poet. Today, he speaks to students in classes on the reservations, and he challenges them to read and to write, to try to succeed with books.

He says that “some students look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen.”

The boarding school program joined government to church, with the loftiest and noblest of intentions, but the Indian boys and girls who were shoved through that program suffered incalculable damage: isolation, violence, and crushed spirits.