Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
Clarissa Moll
Abraham Lincoln’s words to a divided nation still ring true today.
On March 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln stood on the east portico of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, to offer his second inaugural address. Wearied by four years of bloody conflict, Mr. Lincoln held in his hand only 700 words, cut and pasted onto a single piece of paper.
That day, Lincoln named the evil of slavery, acknowledged the war’s deep divisions, and called the nation to work toward repair. The final words of his speech, carved in Indiana limestone on the national memorial that bears his name, still echo 160 years later.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wound, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphans; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
As he stood before the crowd that day, Lincoln knew just how far-fetched his exhortation might seem. Bitter strife and loss had torn the country apart not only in Washington’s halls of power but also in clapboard homes across the North and small farms laid out like patchwork across the South. In the face of such deep and expansive division and loss, what healing could a country reasonably expect?
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On a smaller scale, Lincoln was no stranger to this kind of tension and sorrow. Only three years prior, grief had burst the president’s heart open when his 11-year-old son, Willie, died in a bedroom of the White House from typhoid fever. Willie’s death carved a giant chasm in Lincoln’s marriage, an isolating division that touched every aspect of his life and work. In this microcosm of sorrow, the president knew what arduous work lay ahead.
The truth was, to bind a country’s wounds would require more than reparative compromise in Congress and the surrender of arms in communities still bound up in conflict. To achieve a lasting peace, Americans would need to gather not only at the podium but also in the funeral parlor, not only with the gavel but also at the graveside. True healing would begin only when the nation acknowledged and engaged with grief.
When people ask me in curiosity, discouragement, or frustration how to heal our country from polarization, I’m often drawn to Lincoln’s second inaugural address and these words from the heart of a grieving man to his grieving country. More than a century apart, Lincoln and I both long for a lasting peace. Partisan divides still threaten the fabric of our nation and the voice of our democracy around the world. What would Lincoln prescribe for a country such as ours? I suspect his answer would be the same.
The work to which Lincoln called his country in 1865 remains relevant and necessary for Americans because it is rooted in the timeless truth of the Judeo-Christian tradition. To heal our country’s deep divisions, we do not need a new plan or policy. Instead, we must grasp Holy Scripture’s exhortation to weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15). It is only in the work of grief that true healing begins, and our greatest growth as a nation can follow.
Although contemporary Americans have lost much of a cultural vocabulary for grief and death, bereavement research confirms that we can reacquire the skills we need for grief that leads to healing. Like all wounds, the divisions we have suffered because of politics may carry tenderness for years to come, but they need not remain raw and open. Instead, we can answer Lincoln’s call to integrate these griefs into productive discourse and action.
In his address, Lincoln relied on Holy Scripture to model the honest and hopeful grieving that repairs individuals, communities, and nations. Echoing the words of Jesus in his address, Lincoln lamented, “Woe unto the world because of offences. … Woe to that man by whom the offence cometh” (Matt. 18:7, KJV). In a modern psalm of lament, the president guided the nation into what psychologist J. William Worden would years later identify as the first “task” of bereavement, accepting the reality of pain and loss. Rather than avoiding conversation about conflict, Lincoln identified the pain of polarization. He named the cause of the division that had brought so much pain. In doing so, he invited the nation to grieve with him.
To break free from our cultural, religious, and political echo chambers, we too need this invitation to vulnerable lament. Rather than avoiding conflict or running headlong into it, we must thoughtfully give language to the hard feelings that come with lost elections, failed endeavors, and shifting cultural changes. We must mourn together in community spaces where we share our stories of loss—lost jobs, lost local economies, lost loved ones to addiction—with the goal of not fixing but forging. We forge new brotherhoods in the valley of the shadow that so often feels like the loneliest place to exist. We must acknowledge that polarization has left us not winners but walking wounded. We must turn to our pain together and “care for him who shall have borne the battle.”
Lincoln knew that talking about grief was only the first step toward repairing national division. Thus, he suggested concrete acts of mercy to make material the solidarity articulated in vulnerable sharing. Without qualification he instructed the people: Care for the soldier with post-traumatic stress, employ and empower the widow, raise up the generation birthed in trauma and marked by loss. Lincoln called the people to work out their nation’s salvation with fear and trembling. Those once considered enemies could be made friends through grief and, arm in arm, chart a new course in the face of loss.
As we seek to heal polarization, this dimension of grief expression is vital too. Our losses, while unique, are woven together with universal threads. Our desire for agency is one of the strongest threads. While polarization might encourage us to circle the wagons and care for our own, Lincoln leaned into scriptural allusion in the story of the Good Samaritan: “He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine” (Luke 10:34). Men once enemies could find intimate friendship at the intersection of sorrow and action. Naming grief can break down barriers, but loving neighbor in word and deed might be the most powerful healing balm of all.
What would this mean for our local communities suffering from division? For those who experienced various COVID-19 losses, informal community groups could encourage listening and receiving others’ stories of grief. For communities strangled by economic decline, physical actions of repair could help unlikely partners channel anger and disappointment into fruitful endeavors. While we may always mourn for what is past, healthy engagement with grief reminds us that we are not prisoners of fate. Together, we can heal a country’s wounds slowly, patiently, and intentionally. We can shape a new tomorrow with the wisdom and clarity that only sorrow can bring.
Lincoln understood that the responsibilities of life pull us forward, that we rarely have discreet space in which to grieve. Yet if we wish to diminish polarization, we must commit to the long, relational work of walking side by side toward that goal. The spirit of our politics is not an angry or divisive one. It is a grieving one. When we face and embrace this brokenness, good things can begin.
After Lincoln’s death and the end of the Civil War, communities across the United States erected memorials on town greens in memory of the soldiers they’d lost. In the South, granite sculptures of Confederate generals and soldiers expressed a distinct interpretations of grief—the “War of Northern Aggression.” In the North, statues of Yankee soldiers rose honoring losses in the “Great Rebellion.” It would seem that even in our nation’s grief, it could not do as Lincoln had hoped. Its citizens could not bind themselves to their warring brothers or sisters in sorrow and reconciling love.
But in a little town buried in Kentucky, just an hour’s drive from Lincoln’s humble birthplace in a neighboring county, one community longed for more. Acknowledging their shared and unique griefs, honestly naming the division that had severed relationships in their town, the citizens of Morgantown, Kentucky, offered a different path forward. To heal their country’s wounds, they build a single monument to both Union and Confederate soldiers. Seeing the grief of the other brought humanity that dismantled polarization. Working together to remember offered space for opposing sides to lay down their swords in favor of plowshares.
Lincoln never lived to see that monument erected, but his vision still calls us toward that great goal. “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,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg. As we seek to bind our country’s wounds, may we take up the task and invite grief to heal our nation.
This piece originally appeared in the Journal of Ideas for the Center for Christianity and Public Life. Clarissa Moll is a 2025 public life fellow and the executive editor of news at Christianity Today.
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