Lincoln celebration opened with prayer... odd?

February 12, 12:19 PMAtheism ExaminerTrina Hoaks

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Does it seem odd to anyone that a Lincoln birthday celebration should be opened with a prayer?

President Obama just attended a celebration of Lincoln's birthday. It was opened by a prayer.

In light of how Abraham Lincoln felt about religion and its pageantry, it seems out of place. It almost seems like a dishonorable thing to present a prayer at a celebration of a man who was so openly against religion. Perhaps it's just me.

Abe, as he is often called, even acknowledged that religious groups were against him. He said in a letter to Martin M. Morris that "[t]here was the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose with few exceptions, got all of that Church. My wife had some relations in the Presbyterian churches, and some in the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, and was suspected of being a Deist and had talked of fighting a duel."

In the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica  it was said of Abraham Lincoln:

"The measure of his difference from most of the men who surrounded him is best gauged by his attitude toward the fundamentals of religion. For all his devotion to his cause he did not allow himself to believe that he knew the mind of God with regard to it. He was never so much the mystic as in his later days and never so far removed from the dogmatist. Here was the final flowering of that mood which appears to have lain at the back of his mind from the beginning -- his complete conviction of a reality of a supernatural world joined with a belief that it was too deep for man to fathom. His refusal to accept the 'complicated' statement of doctrines which he rejected, carried with it a refusal to predicate the purpose of the Almighty. Again, that singular characteristic, his power to devote himself wholly to a cause and yet to do so in such a detached, unviolent way that one is tempted to call it passionless. He retained nothing of the tribal forms of religion and was silent when they raged about him with a thousand tongues."
 

I suppose the important thing on this day is not to consider what President Lincoln was not, rather we should focus on all that he was. As President Obama said, it is because of the efforts of Lincoln that it is possible for Obama to be president.