The Changing Role of Faith in the Life of the Sixteenth President of the United States How do we reconcile the young religious skeptic with the mature president who so profoundly invested the Civil War with religious significance? Lincoln s religious views difficult to recover, interpret, and disentangle from past and present biases are the subject of this brief survey. "Journal of American History" Michael Burkhimer examines the history of the president s interaction with religion accounts from those who knew him, his own letters and writings, the books he read to reveal a man who did not believe in orthodox Christian precepts (and might have had a hard time getting elected today) yet, by his example, was a person and president who most truly embodied Christian teachings."