Lincoln: The Movie

Director Stephen Spielberg delivered a mixed bag with his hit movie Lincoln (PG-13). AFA staffers who saw the movie were stunned by the proliferation of profane and obscene language.

Ted Baehr’s MovieGuide said the film included a “moral worldview against slavery but with only some light, infrequently uplifting references to God … and some strong politically correct revisionist history that obliterates many of the nuances about the history of President Lincoln.” Baehr tallied 13 or 14 strong profanities, all but two of them GDs. The film covers the years of the Civil War, so some graphic violence is also included. One scene depicts an unmarried couple in bed together. American Family Association Journal, February 2013

Gettysburg Address

NOTE: When I Googled the Gettysburg Address, I found only 2 links on the first page which contained the actual text of this short and powerful speech. From all the videos, interpretations, and spins on it, I prefer to keep and preserve the actual words. Our nation is faced with similar challenges today, and if we alter or undermine this great document, we will again fail to learn from history. Slavery was defeated in the 19^th century, but now we are engaged in a new war over slavery. This time we the people are facing enslavement by an out-of-control federal government and its minions in a lying media. Let’s not give up; “—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. ~C.A. Davidson

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Strengthen Judeo-Christian values in your family—Free Download for Lincoln’s Birthday

Lincoln’s  Religious Beliefs

Compiled by Matthew Brown, Deseret News

Published: Friday, Nov. 16 2012 4:45 p.m. MST

In advance of Steven Speilburg’s new movie “Lincoln,” a few religion websites are examining the faith of the nation’s 16th president and one of its greatest leaders.

historian Mark Noll in a 1998 piece highlighted from the archives of Christianity Today. “Both groups seem to feel that if only Lincoln could be enlisted on their side — whether of evangelical faith or naturalistic rationalism — it would amount to a great victory for them.”

Noll lists several documented facts and myths about Lincoln’s life that show while the president did pray, read the Bible and turn to Presbyterian ministers for comfort, he shunned organized religion and didn’t live the “Christian lifestyle.”

“So, what was Lincoln’s religion? When the solid have been separated from the spurious, the stories show Lincoln’s respect for God, his own personal sense of living under the authority of divine providence, and his eagerness to commit the Civil War to divine rule,” Noll wrote.

Lincoln was just the second president to quote from the Bible when he delivered his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, some 41 days before he was assassinated, wrote Ronald C. White, in another repurposed piece published by Christianity Today.

White calls a speech the model for melding faith and politics.

“In a total of 701 words, Lincoln mentioned God 14 times, quoted scripture four times, and invoked prayer three times,” White wrote. “Lincoln’s address provides a model for how Christians can speak of faith and politics together. First, he began by expressing respect for the positions of each side, even those whom his audience would deem the enemy. Second, he grounded his thinking in the Bible, using the Bible not simply as an illustration but as a foundation for his political arguments. Third, he affirmed that God acts in history.”

Best-selling author Stephen Mansfield called Lincoln’s second inaugural address “the greatest of American political sermons.”

Read more

From Wikipedia

Abraham Lincoln ⁱ/ˈeɪbrəhæm ˈlɪŋkən/ (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln successfully led the United States through its greatest constitutional, military, and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union while ending slavery and promoting economic and financial modernization. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated, and became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator during the 1830s, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives during the 1840s.

After a series of debates in 1858 that gave national visibility to his opposition to the expansion of slavery, Lincoln lost a Senate race to his arch-rival, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln, a moderate from a swing state, secured the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1860. With almost no support in the South, Lincoln swept the North and was elected president in 1860. His election was the signal for seven southern slave states to declare their secession from the Union and form the Confederacy. The departure of the Southerners gave Lincoln’s party firm control of Congress, but no formula for compromise or reconciliation was found. Lincoln explained in his second inaugural address: “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the Nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

When the North enthusiastically rallied behind the national flag after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Lincoln concentrated on the military and political dimensions of the war effort. His goal was now to reunite the nation. As the South was in a state of insurrection, Lincoln exercised his authority to suspend habeas corpus, arresting and temporarily detaining thousands of suspected secessionists without trial. Lincoln averted British recognition of the Confederacy by skillfully handling the Trent affair in late 1861. His efforts toward the abolition of slavery include issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, encouraging the border states to outlaw slavery, and helping push through Congress the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which finally freed all the slaves nationwide in December 1865. Lincoln closely supervised the war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including commanding general Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln brought leaders of the major factions of his party into his cabinet and pressured them to cooperate. Under Lincoln’s leadership, the Union set up a naval blockade that shut down the South’s normal trade, took control of the border slave states at the start of the war, gained control of communications with gunboats on the southern river systems, and tried repeatedly to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. Each time a general failed, Lincoln substituted another until finally Grant succeeded in 1865.

An exceptionally astute politician deeply involved with power issues in each state, Lincoln reached out to War Democrats and managed his own re-election in the 1864 presidential election. As the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican party, Lincoln found his policies and personality were “blasted from all sides”: Radical Republicans demanded harsher treatment of the South, War Democrats desired more compromise, Copperheads despised him, and irreconcilable secessionists plotted his death.^[1] Politically, Lincoln fought back with patronage, by pitting his opponents against each other, and by appealing to the American people with his powers of oratory.^[2] His Gettysburg Address of 1863 became the most quoted speech in American history.^[3] It was an iconic statement of America’s dedication to the principles of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy. At the close of the war, Lincoln held a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to reunite the nation speedily through a policy of generous reconciliation in the face of lingering and bitter divisiveness. Six days after the surrender of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, however, Lincoln was assassinated by actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln’s death was the first assassination of a U.S. president and sent the nation into mourning. Lincoln has been consistently ranked by scholars and the public as one of the three greatest U.S. presidents, the others being George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt.^[4][5]

Continued in Wikipedia