Today is Good Friday, one of the holiest days on the Christian calendar. It is a day traditionally devoted to grief and somber reflection.
Today is Good Friday, one of the holiest days on the Christian calendar. It is a day traditionally devoted to grief and somber reflection. On Good Friday in 1865 Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary went to the theater. To see a comedy. As we all know, he was assassinated there. The immediate reaction of some religious leaders was to claim that the assassination was God’s judgment on theater-going generally, and theater-going on Good Friday in particular. But soon that religious spin on the event was overwhelmed by an entirely different take. In the aftermath of the assassination much of the nation soon began to see Lincoln’s death on Good Friday, shortly after his Palm Sunday-like entry into Richmond, as evidence that he was a Christ-like martyr. As one Connecticut pastor put it, “It is no blasphemy against the Son of God and the Savior of men that we declare the fitness of the slaying of the Second Father of our Republic on the anniversary of the day on which he was slain. Jesus Christ ...