Lincoln's religiosity

Fascinating article over at Slate. One thing that is particularly striking is how openly non-traditional was Lincoln's approach to the spiritual or sacred! No, Lincoln was not a secular person, in spite of the wishes of modern secularists who would hope to claim him. Nevertheless, his approach to God and spiritual matters seems almost radical by today's standards, for a president. His wife Mary apparently stated after his death that he was not "a technical Christian." It is almost unthinkable that a serious contender for the presidency nowadays would be so openly skeptical of traditional religion.

There are almost certainly many politicians who are closet skeptics/agnostics/atheists, but hardly any openly so. I wonder how this came to be so. Certainly, many Americans are uncomfortable with how closely the GOP aligns itself with the religious right. It is one of those factors that continues to nudge some of us in the Democratic direction, even when we're not Democrats. But it seems that overall, the American electorate expects the president to be strongly religious, but not a zealot.

Somewhere between Lincoln's time and ours, it almost seems we've become less tolerant, in some fashion. Lincoln himself had to publicly reassure detractors that he respected Christian belief, but he still didn't belong to a church. Can you imagine someone winning the presidency today with that sort of belief (non-belief?) on the public record?

In spite of all the public wailing and gnashing by conservative Christian types, I think public discourse and the political landscape clearly favors believers over non-believers, by a wide margin. Christians are hardly an oppressed minority, however much they complain. Quite the opposite.