I just read an anecdote about Lincoln I hadn't seen before.
Secretary of the Treasury Chase found Lincoln in his office shining his own boots.
"Gentlemen don't black their own boots," Chase said.
"Whose boots do they black?" was Lincoln's answer.
Walt
However, to call it a Protestant movement is inaccurate. The "social uplift" movement largely arose out of the Unitarian churches, which are neither Protestant nor Christian, and was also supported by other freethinkers, people whom we would now call secular humanists. Though from a Baptist background, Lincoln was not a Christian believer during most of his adult life. (There is some evidence that he converted to the Christian faith while in the White House.) This reform movement did have support in what might be labelled the "broad church," essentially proto-liberals who paid lip service to the Reformation creeds but who accepted the social engineering schemes of the reformers as a means of establishing a kingdom of God on earth. However, these people rejected, by their vain schemes to create heaven on earth, the core Christian doctrines oultined in the early ecumenical creeds as well as the Reformation distinctives.
It's quite a leap from 19th century social reform and uplift to 20th century PC. The problem is that that 19th century tradition is also more or less the environment that produced Garfield, Taft, Coolidge, Hoover, and Reagan. It was also more or less the tradition that William Jennings Bryan came out of, and for all his populist ardor, one can't imagine him supporting abortion, gay rights, or even the teaching of evolution in the public schools. It was a large part of 19th century American culture, the largest chunk in much of the country.
Today's Americans draw a firmer line between mainstream churches and evangelicals or fundamentalists than was done at the time. Unitarians and Universalists were denounced by the orthodox, and pro-slavery interests made the most of those attacks, but mainstream denominations then were far more orthodox than they have been in recent years. PC is an aberration of the moment, more a result of the decadence of that Protestant moral reform tradition than of the tradition itself.
This is a controversy that can't be resolved. We can't bring Lincoln back and can't even really imagine a 21st century Lincoln. A railroad lawyer in Springfield Illinois or a anti-slavery activist today probably wouldn't have grown up on the frontier and been shaped by it. In most states, someone who had no college or law school would not be admitted to the bar. And someone who's highest position was defeated Senatorial candidate would never be elected President today.
I'd say that Lincoln was never wholly a "country club Republican." There was something of the small town lawyer in him even as he advanced up the ladder. The atmosphere of budding frontier capitalism was very different from what came later. A Washington or Lincoln who golfed or played tennis probably wouldn't be much like the historical Washington or Lincoln. To say that a 20st century Lincoln would be Wendell Willkie or Adlai Stevenson is to say that a 20th century Lincoln probably wasn't possible.
What I do notice about Lincoln is that he never had the radical chic attitude that one can find traces of in Jefferson or FDR. For much of his life he was privately skeptical about the religious enthusiasms and orthodoxies of the day, but he was never an outright public or strident mocker, and his attitude toward religion deepened and mellowed as he grew older. Like many a provincial lawyer, he might make merry over the prejudices and foibles of his neighbors in private, without being truly hostile to them or militantly committed to urban and modernist values.
Lincoln had more in common with Edgar Lee Masters, and Masters' small town types, or with Faulkner's and Harper Lee's country lawyers than with Clarence Darrow, Alan Dershowitz or the average corporate lawyer today. Perhaps this is why Masters hated Lincoln so much: one quaint, eccentric country lawyer disliked the competition, real or imaginary, from another.
Life in 19th century Springfield was life on a smaller stage and at a smaller pace. Introduce 21st century ideas about feminism or multiculturalism or deconstruction into that environment and you destroy it. So it's hard for me to imagine Lincoln as a 21st century liberal, even though he may have been discontented with some things in his own time.
Um....no. Lincoln only wanted to keep slavery from spreading into the new territories. He never mentioned abolishing slavery in the 1860 election.
a religious free thinker...
And that makes one a Commie? If so, then Jefferson was a Bolshevik.
Lincoln might still have been a Republican today, but he would have been a country club Republican, and probably would have accepted all sorts of PC.
Key word: "might". It's impossible to extrapolate what someone might do in the future.
That sounds kinda like GWB, doesn't it?