In Honor of Lincoln's Birthday - Was he a Liberal??

So I am doing pretty well with my goal of reading 25 books this year.  I have finished, "Food Rules," "Tribes,""Primal," and have 2 others in the works!

One of those books is called "Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life."  I have read quite a bit on Lincoln, but this one is different.  This book posits the idea that both Lincoln and Darwin (who were born on the same day...a couple hours a part) revolutionized the way we think about civilization, science, and God.  I have to say that the intro is all it took to spark this blog.  I haven't finished it yet, but will soon...(I am such a nerd for this kind of stuff!)

Before Lincoln, Americans didn't think of America like we do.  We were Texans, or Virginians first.  The idea of Union, while not completely foreign, was simply not the norm.  The people of Texas couldn't and didn't sympathize with the plight of the people of Maine; they had their own plight to deal with!  Why in the world would you want to be governed by a group of people who didn't understand that it took slaves to make be successful at farming Cotton in Georgia?  These are concepts that were revolutionary in their day.  The author of this book calls the "liberal!"  These liberal ideas eventually lead to the worst war, in terms of causalities, in the history of our nation.

We are on the other side of that now and are a product of the "liberal" thinking of men like Lincoln and Darwin.  This is what Adam Gopnik says in the intro to this book...it just makes my mind churn!

"Lincoln showed, to a degree that we no longer understand, that democratic politics were compatible with long-term survival...Darwin showed that scientific reasoning could explain not only the life of matter but the matter of life; it could come up with a plausible theory of the history of life on this planet...The immediate gain of science is machines; the immediate gain of democracy is money.  Ours is a society whose two pillars - science and democracy - have given us the A-bomb, the H-bomb, mass alienation: the most peaceful and prosperous and tolerant societies that the world has ever seen, which balance on the brink of total global annihilation every day."

Now...I do not buy into Darwinism...but the more I live, the more I believe that, AS BELIEVERS IN JESUS, we shouldn't bite the "democracy" hook as quickly as we do...but that is tough to do...it is all we have known as citizens of this planet.  Maybe we should remember that we are citizens of God's Kingdom first!

Just some thoughts...enjoy.