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b'Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm\\u2019s length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But over the course of his life, the erstwhile skeptic effectively evolved into the nation\\u2019s first evangelical president. The Civil War, he told Americans, was divine retribution for the sin of slavery.

\\u201cLincoln\\u2019s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation\\u201d by today\\u2019s guest Joshua Zeitz, is the story of that transformation, the role Lincoln\\u2019s conversion played in the war, and the way it in turn transformed Protestantism. Rather than focus on battles and personalities, we explore the social impact of the war on Northerners\\u2019 spiritual worldview, and the ways in which religion helped millions of Northerners interpret the carnage and political upheaval of the 1850s and 1860s. about the book. Long underestimated in accounts of the Civil War, religion\\u2014specifically evangelical Christianity\\u2014played an instrumental role on the battlefield and home front, and in the corridors of government.'