God in Inaugural Addresses

In an excellent post, Ut Unum Sint gives numerous examples of religious language in past Presidential Inaugural Addresses.

He goes back a hundred years (and then hops all the way back to George Washington).

One should also note Lincoln's second Inaugural Address, provided in full below. It has generally been hailed as the greatest of of Inaugural Addresses AND has significant sections that are not only explicitly religious but downright theological!


"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

"The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

"'Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
Abraham Lincoln, 2nd Inaugural Address (excerpt)