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Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America's Most Infamous Pilot
The narrative surrounding Charles Lindbergh’s life has been as varying and complex as the man himself. Once best known as an aviator—the first to complete a solo nonstop transatlantic flight—he has since become increasingly identified with his problematic sympathies for isolationism, eugenics, and the Nazi regime in Germany. Underexplored amid all this is Lindbergh’s spiritual life; what beliefs drove the contradictory impulses of this twentieth-century icon?
An apostle of technological progress who encountered God in the wildernesses he sought to protect, an anti-Semitic opponent of US intervention in World War II who had a Jewish scripture inscribed on his gravestone, and a critic of Christianity who admired Christ, Lindbergh defies conventional categories. But spirituality undoubtedly mattered to him a great deal. Influenced by his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh—a self-described “lapsed Presbyterian” who longed to live “in grace”—and friends like Alexis Carrel (a Nobel Prize-winning surgeon, eugenicist, and Catholic mystic) and Jim Newton (an evangelical businessman), he spent much of his adult life reflecting on mortality, divinity, and metaphysics. In this short biography, Christopher Gehrz represents Lindbergh as he was, neither an adherent nor a skeptic, a historical case study of an increasingly familiar contemporary phenomenon: the “spiritual but not religious.”
For all his earnest curiosity, Lindbergh remained unwilling throughout his life to submit to any spiritual authority beyond himself and ultimately rejected the ordering influence of church, tradition, scripture, or creed. In the end, the man who flew solo across the Atlantic insisted on charting his own spiritual path, drawing on multiple sources in such a way that satisfied his spiritual hunger but left some of his most troubling convictions unchallenged.
An apostle of technological progress who encountered God in the wildernesses he sought to protect, an anti-Semitic opponent of US intervention in World War II who had a Jewish scripture inscribed on his gravestone, and a critic of Christianity who admired Christ, Lindbergh defies conventional categories. But spirituality undoubtedly mattered to him a great deal. Influenced by his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh—a self-described “lapsed Presbyterian” who longed to live “in grace”—and friends like Alexis Carrel (a Nobel Prize-winning surgeon, eugenicist, and Catholic mystic) and Jim Newton (an evangelical businessman), he spent much of his adult life reflecting on mortality, divinity, and metaphysics. In this short biography, Christopher Gehrz represents Lindbergh as he was, neither an adherent nor a skeptic, a historical case study of an increasingly familiar contemporary phenomenon: the “spiritual but not religious.”
For all his earnest curiosity, Lindbergh remained unwilling throughout his life to submit to any spiritual authority beyond himself and ultimately rejected the ordering influence of church, tradition, scripture, or creed. In the end, the man who flew solo across the Atlantic insisted on charting his own spiritual path, drawing on multiple sources in such a way that satisfied his spiritual hunger but left some of his most troubling convictions unchallenged.
296 pages, Hardcover
Published August 17, 2021
2 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Gehrz
10 books5 followersChristopher Gehrz (PhD, Yale) is professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he also helps coordinate the Christianity and Western Culture program. He is the editor of The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education and coeditor of The Pietist Impulse in Christianity.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 18, 2021
In Charles Lindbergh, A Religious Biography of America’s Most Infamous Pilot, Chris Gehrz offers us a portrait of a man who, despite a lifetime of spiritual searching, could neither accept the traditional Christianity of his heritage nor articulate a “philosophy” that could replace it. A religious biography always faces the challenge of presenting and interpreting evidence for its subject’s spiritual views without bending them to serve some ideology, and Gehrz does a magnificent job of connecting the pieces of Lindbergh’s life and writings that reveal his religious thought without making definitive claims about it. Lindbergh’s complexity is on full display here; his shortcomings don’t disappear into the footnotes, and Gehrz does not offer easy answers. It’s a rare biographer who says of his subject “there is much about Charles Lindbergh that we just won’t understand” (181), and yet can still create a timely portrait not only of a man, but of an era in American Christianity.
Gehrz manages to present the complexities of Lindbergh’s beliefs, including his anti-Semitism, racism, and support of eugenics, without the demonization that could so easily occur. Instead, Gehrz gives us a person we recognize, because we see him in our own society now, a person who has read the Gospels but failed to internalize their demands for unconditional love and justice. The man who carried a New Testament into war as his only reading material was also able to “ignore whatever teachings of Christ he found inconvenient” (203), a statement that could be made of many American Christians today.
Reading this biography makes one start grappling with one’s own contradictions, and that is its relevance. As fascism and even Nazism grow in certain nominally Christian groups, it has never been more important for us to understand who we are in relationship to the divine and what that means. If we can’t exactly find the answers in Gehrz’s biography—and we can’t—we can find the questions we need to be asking of ourselves and our leaders before we find ourselves lost on the same dark paths that Lindbergh walked.
Gehrz manages to present the complexities of Lindbergh’s beliefs, including his anti-Semitism, racism, and support of eugenics, without the demonization that could so easily occur. Instead, Gehrz gives us a person we recognize, because we see him in our own society now, a person who has read the Gospels but failed to internalize their demands for unconditional love and justice. The man who carried a New Testament into war as his only reading material was also able to “ignore whatever teachings of Christ he found inconvenient” (203), a statement that could be made of many American Christians today.
Reading this biography makes one start grappling with one’s own contradictions, and that is its relevance. As fascism and even Nazism grow in certain nominally Christian groups, it has never been more important for us to understand who we are in relationship to the divine and what that means. If we can’t exactly find the answers in Gehrz’s biography—and we can’t—we can find the questions we need to be asking of ourselves and our leaders before we find ourselves lost on the same dark paths that Lindbergh walked.
August 29, 2021
Really stellar work. This is readable, compelling, complicated, and wrestles with big questions about spirituality, racism, and the life of an American icon. Highly recommend.
August 22, 2021
For the last several years Chris Gehrz has been working on a “spiritual biography” of Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator who first crossed the Atlantic Ocean solo in “The Spirit of St. Louis.” Lindbergh grew up in Minnesota, in the town of Little Falls, and his history, attitudes, and values, Gehrz shows, flowed out of that Swedish immigrant heritage.
Dr. Gehrz, a professor of history, brings a historian’s sensitivity to the treatment of Lindbergh’s developing sense of the spiritual. The book’s careful and thorough treatment of the influences in Lindbergh’s life, beginning in his family and spreading out through his wide circle of friends and acquaintances, is remarkable. Gehrz shows the ongoing influence of some key figures and lines of thought over the decades of Lindbergh’s life, and how his sense of life’s meaning found expression in his writing and speaking. This is no simple task: Lindbergh’s thinking is full of complications, shifts, and contradictions, and Gehrz treats his passions and his failings with candor. As I re-read some of this material a second time, I realized how much Gehrz has given us of the religious context of Lindbergh’s formative and early adult years, in which strains of “Modernism,” “Fundamentalism,” “Pentecostalism,” and semi-cult groups like “Moral Re-Armament” surrounded Ann and Charles Lindbergh.
One of the most engaging threads of this biography is that of Lindbergh’s relationship with his wife, Ann Morrow Lindbergh, who may have been a more accomplished writer than her husband, and whose influence and support Gehrz traces through their long marriage. Gehrz uses Ann’s perceptions of her husband, shown in letters, diaries, and in her own writing, to highlight her growing independence from her husband, and even a critique of his thinking, while she continues to admire and respect him.
“Boomers” like me grew up with a carefully cultivated and patriotic view of Charles Lindbergh. He was the bold aviator, the advocate for aviation, the solo hero. I can remember reading at least two biographies of him when I was in junior high and high school, and such was the temper of the times that I imagined him some legendary figure of another age. But Lindbergh, born in 1902, lived until 1974, active in public life. Why did the biographies all seem to stop with Lindbergh’s greatest triumph—the solo transatlantic flight—and his greatest tragedy, the kidnapping and murder of his infant son in 1932?
And here I think most of us hero-worshippers owe Dr. Gehrz thanks, because he digs into some of the most difficult parts of this private Minnesotan. While Lindbergh certainly developed a philosophical and ethical perspective as he went through life, Gehrz shows us that Lindbergh’s life was full of unanswered questions and a determined skepticism about offered answers. After several decades encouraging the development of aviation and technology as a means of human flourishing, for instance, Lindbergh found himself doubting the unrestricted growth of the sciences as he witnessed the carnage of Hiroshima.
Lindbergh’s vaunted philosophical and personal integrity emerges sharply stained over the years. Although this is old news to anyone familiar with Lindbergh, I sat up straight when I read of his multiple affairs with German women, beginning in the late 1950s, with several children resulting, and then his careful attempt to curate his own posthumous reputation by demanding his mistresses keep silent. His youngest daughter characterized this as “Byzantine deception,” layers upon layers of concealment.
And Gehrz treats something more shocking with honesty and candor. He provides Lindbergh’s own words, again and again, demonstrating the man’s racism, sense of racial superiority, and affiliation with the motives underlying Hitler’s treatment of Jews. Lindbergh’s support for the America First movement that sought to keep our country out of World War II, Gehrz suggests, is rooted in his belief in “competition” and “racial striving.” One electrifying passage from 1939 addresses race and democracy. I quote it in part:
“What of our ten million negroes? ….On what stock are we to build?...No system based on the equality of the strong and the weak—in mind as well as body, in character and spirit, all the qualities of life—can long endure. Democracy can succeed only as long as it embraces a relatively small number of comparatively equal people—and they must in addition be a superior people. Democracy never has and never can encompass the whole of mankind.”
Gehrz shows Lindbergh obsessed with “quality”—by which he means “superior human beings,” always white, always Northern European—as opposed to “equality.”
It is perhaps not shocking to see this in 1939, although Lindbergh kept most of these attitudes throughout his life in one form or another, even as Gehrz shows the aviator reading the New Testament more and beginning to cite biblical principles or passages in his essays and articles. What is missing in Lindbergh’s life, all of this suggests, is a central confrontation with the realities of Christianity.
Chris Gehrz’s two-page “Afterword” locates this Minnesota hero story in our complicated present. Minnesota is not just the land of tall, thin, heroic Lindbergh: it’s also the land where black men like Philando Castile and George Floyd are killed by police officers and racism still exists. Gehrz comments that while Lindbergh’s “ ‘spiritual but not religious’ journey left him free from the hypocrisies of institutional Christianity, it also left him free to ignore whatever teaching of Christ he found inconvenient.” A central one, that each human being is created in God's image, is clearly absent from Lindbergh's thinking.
Really worth reading, both for itself and as an example of how this sort of book ought to be written.
Dr. Gehrz, a professor of history, brings a historian’s sensitivity to the treatment of Lindbergh’s developing sense of the spiritual. The book’s careful and thorough treatment of the influences in Lindbergh’s life, beginning in his family and spreading out through his wide circle of friends and acquaintances, is remarkable. Gehrz shows the ongoing influence of some key figures and lines of thought over the decades of Lindbergh’s life, and how his sense of life’s meaning found expression in his writing and speaking. This is no simple task: Lindbergh’s thinking is full of complications, shifts, and contradictions, and Gehrz treats his passions and his failings with candor. As I re-read some of this material a second time, I realized how much Gehrz has given us of the religious context of Lindbergh’s formative and early adult years, in which strains of “Modernism,” “Fundamentalism,” “Pentecostalism,” and semi-cult groups like “Moral Re-Armament” surrounded Ann and Charles Lindbergh.
One of the most engaging threads of this biography is that of Lindbergh’s relationship with his wife, Ann Morrow Lindbergh, who may have been a more accomplished writer than her husband, and whose influence and support Gehrz traces through their long marriage. Gehrz uses Ann’s perceptions of her husband, shown in letters, diaries, and in her own writing, to highlight her growing independence from her husband, and even a critique of his thinking, while she continues to admire and respect him.
“Boomers” like me grew up with a carefully cultivated and patriotic view of Charles Lindbergh. He was the bold aviator, the advocate for aviation, the solo hero. I can remember reading at least two biographies of him when I was in junior high and high school, and such was the temper of the times that I imagined him some legendary figure of another age. But Lindbergh, born in 1902, lived until 1974, active in public life. Why did the biographies all seem to stop with Lindbergh’s greatest triumph—the solo transatlantic flight—and his greatest tragedy, the kidnapping and murder of his infant son in 1932?
And here I think most of us hero-worshippers owe Dr. Gehrz thanks, because he digs into some of the most difficult parts of this private Minnesotan. While Lindbergh certainly developed a philosophical and ethical perspective as he went through life, Gehrz shows us that Lindbergh’s life was full of unanswered questions and a determined skepticism about offered answers. After several decades encouraging the development of aviation and technology as a means of human flourishing, for instance, Lindbergh found himself doubting the unrestricted growth of the sciences as he witnessed the carnage of Hiroshima.
Lindbergh’s vaunted philosophical and personal integrity emerges sharply stained over the years. Although this is old news to anyone familiar with Lindbergh, I sat up straight when I read of his multiple affairs with German women, beginning in the late 1950s, with several children resulting, and then his careful attempt to curate his own posthumous reputation by demanding his mistresses keep silent. His youngest daughter characterized this as “Byzantine deception,” layers upon layers of concealment.
And Gehrz treats something more shocking with honesty and candor. He provides Lindbergh’s own words, again and again, demonstrating the man’s racism, sense of racial superiority, and affiliation with the motives underlying Hitler’s treatment of Jews. Lindbergh’s support for the America First movement that sought to keep our country out of World War II, Gehrz suggests, is rooted in his belief in “competition” and “racial striving.” One electrifying passage from 1939 addresses race and democracy. I quote it in part:
“What of our ten million negroes? ….On what stock are we to build?...No system based on the equality of the strong and the weak—in mind as well as body, in character and spirit, all the qualities of life—can long endure. Democracy can succeed only as long as it embraces a relatively small number of comparatively equal people—and they must in addition be a superior people. Democracy never has and never can encompass the whole of mankind.”
Gehrz shows Lindbergh obsessed with “quality”—by which he means “superior human beings,” always white, always Northern European—as opposed to “equality.”
It is perhaps not shocking to see this in 1939, although Lindbergh kept most of these attitudes throughout his life in one form or another, even as Gehrz shows the aviator reading the New Testament more and beginning to cite biblical principles or passages in his essays and articles. What is missing in Lindbergh’s life, all of this suggests, is a central confrontation with the realities of Christianity.
Chris Gehrz’s two-page “Afterword” locates this Minnesota hero story in our complicated present. Minnesota is not just the land of tall, thin, heroic Lindbergh: it’s also the land where black men like Philando Castile and George Floyd are killed by police officers and racism still exists. Gehrz comments that while Lindbergh’s “ ‘spiritual but not religious’ journey left him free from the hypocrisies of institutional Christianity, it also left him free to ignore whatever teaching of Christ he found inconvenient.” A central one, that each human being is created in God's image, is clearly absent from Lindbergh's thinking.
Really worth reading, both for itself and as an example of how this sort of book ought to be written.
September 1, 2021
Professor Chris Gehrz delivers a thoughtful, engaging, and often overlooked spiritual biography of Charles Lindbergh. Consistent with his other work in the field of religious history, Gehrz poses well-researched questions that ultimately reveal a thorough method and honest retelling of Lindbergh's "spiritual not religious" life. I was impressed with Gehrz's nuance in dealing with such a conflicted historical figure with an equally conflicted historiography. As a reader not well-versed with Lindbergh's biography, I found this read both engaging and accessible as Gehrz weaves together different time periods of the aviator's life from a variety of source material. Yet as academic as his approach is, Gehrz's narrative manages to reach a broader audience through his storytelling. As a middle school history teacher I found Gehrz's sensitive, careful, and honest approach to this book most refreshing in both its method and conclusions.
August 16, 2021
How does one write a religious biography of an American Icon who distanced himself from religion, especially institutional Christianity, for most of his life? Christopher Gehrz, professor of history at Bethel University in Minnesota, tackles this task by exploring the religious influences on Charles A. Lindbergh. Tracing Lindbegh's life, Gehrz explores how the flyer focused on science as being opposed to what he saw in orthodox religion. At best, Lindbergh comes to awareness of panenthesim, seeing God in all things. While appreciating Jesus' "wisdom" he can never bring himself to believe in what traditional Christianity holds as a commitment to Christ.
Why write a "religious biography" of someone who lacks a commitment to orthodox religion? As Gehrz makes very clear, Lindbergh's journey is instructive as an early model for what we know call "spiritual but not religious." Lindbergh's eclectic view of the "spiritual" allows him to build all sorts of ideas into his "religious" philosophy: a support for Western civilization and a denigration of those who weren't White Europeans, a belief in science (albeit tempered over his life), a nationalistic fear of communism, a self-confidence that ignored others, and a personal moral code that is somewhat surprising. Gehrz pulls no punches in addressing Lindbergh's support of eugenics, his "America First" stance against involvement in World War II, or his white supremacy.
Lurking just behind the narrative is an awareness of the role of White Supremacy, Christian Nationalism, Celebrity Worship, and the political power of religion; all vital topics of conversation within twenty-first century America. Looking at these topics through Lindbergh's life allows us to see the ways in which what we think of as new phenomena have actually been part of our American identity for a very long time.
Gehrz writes with a very engaging style, letting the reader know that he's along for the journey. That journey runs the length of the flyer's seven decades. While the flight over the Atlantic and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping are covered, the meat of the book involves how Lindbergh (and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who is never far from the attention) developed his "religious" thought over his lifetime. It's a well-told story, properly documented, about an eclectic faith journey that is instructive for all of us.
Why write a "religious biography" of someone who lacks a commitment to orthodox religion? As Gehrz makes very clear, Lindbergh's journey is instructive as an early model for what we know call "spiritual but not religious." Lindbergh's eclectic view of the "spiritual" allows him to build all sorts of ideas into his "religious" philosophy: a support for Western civilization and a denigration of those who weren't White Europeans, a belief in science (albeit tempered over his life), a nationalistic fear of communism, a self-confidence that ignored others, and a personal moral code that is somewhat surprising. Gehrz pulls no punches in addressing Lindbergh's support of eugenics, his "America First" stance against involvement in World War II, or his white supremacy.
Lurking just behind the narrative is an awareness of the role of White Supremacy, Christian Nationalism, Celebrity Worship, and the political power of religion; all vital topics of conversation within twenty-first century America. Looking at these topics through Lindbergh's life allows us to see the ways in which what we think of as new phenomena have actually been part of our American identity for a very long time.
Gehrz writes with a very engaging style, letting the reader know that he's along for the journey. That journey runs the length of the flyer's seven decades. While the flight over the Atlantic and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping are covered, the meat of the book involves how Lindbergh (and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who is never far from the attention) developed his "religious" thought over his lifetime. It's a well-told story, properly documented, about an eclectic faith journey that is instructive for all of us.
August 12, 2021
The Eerdmans Library of Religious Biography is one of my favorite series, yet seeing how my collection trends more towards Edwards and Whitefield, I was a little skeptical of a volume on Charles Lindbergh. However, in the hands of Christopher Gehrz, this book could not have been more timely, eye-opening, and in the end, a worthy addition to my bookshelf. This slim biography delivered (at least for me) on a different and lesser-known side to the famous pilot: the fighter missions he flew during World War II, his conservation work, his spiritual contemplation later in life, his questioning of the dehumanizing power of technology and science, and even his evolving thoughts on race.
Far from being hagiography (as the book’s subtitle hints at), Gehrz does not ignore Lindbergh’s embrace of Nazism and eugenics, his antisemitism, his “America First” isolationism, nor his more recently revealed marital infidelity, but puts them all into the context of a complex seeker whose views were ever changing. All these themes are then connected back to the more famous episodes in his life with brief vignettes, flashbacks, and excerpts from Lindbergh’s own writing. The book is, in many ways, a dual biography of Charles and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh (who pushed his spiritual exploration) and the influence of their youngest daughter Reeve is also felt throughout. Written in the shadow of George Floyd and with Philip Roth’s book & HBO miniseries “The Plot Against America” arguably being most Americans’ recent exposure to Lindbergh in pop culture, this book could not be timelier. At a time when the “nones” are the largest growing segment of religious affiliation in the United States, this “spiritual but not religious” biography is a cautionary tale and one well worth reading.
Far from being hagiography (as the book’s subtitle hints at), Gehrz does not ignore Lindbergh’s embrace of Nazism and eugenics, his antisemitism, his “America First” isolationism, nor his more recently revealed marital infidelity, but puts them all into the context of a complex seeker whose views were ever changing. All these themes are then connected back to the more famous episodes in his life with brief vignettes, flashbacks, and excerpts from Lindbergh’s own writing. The book is, in many ways, a dual biography of Charles and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh (who pushed his spiritual exploration) and the influence of their youngest daughter Reeve is also felt throughout. Written in the shadow of George Floyd and with Philip Roth’s book & HBO miniseries “The Plot Against America” arguably being most Americans’ recent exposure to Lindbergh in pop culture, this book could not be timelier. At a time when the “nones” are the largest growing segment of religious affiliation in the United States, this “spiritual but not religious” biography is a cautionary tale and one well worth reading.
August 5, 2021
Fellow Minnesotan Gehrz provides a penetrating, sensitive, and critical account of Lindbergh's religious life, set in the broader context of the celebrity pilot's contributions to aviation, politics, eugenics, and conservation. In engaging prose, the thoroughly-researched book traces the development of Lindbergh's "spiritual but not religious" views as he moderates his early single-minded faith in science and technology to a chastened search for a balance with the environment and human spirituality drawn from many traditions. Lindbergh's solitude, even secrecy, and white supremacy are clear in Gehrz's narrative and so is the tragically widespread support for the latter in the wider US culture. Lindbergh relentlessly advocated for "quality," not "equality," and unashamedly called for the disenfranchisement of Blacks and many, if not all, Jews. The courage and brilliance as well as the profound moral failures of Lindbergh are evident in a judicious assessment of a remarkably diverse and complex life.
"I have worried that even a critical appraisal of Lindbergh's life would burnish his celebrity. But at a time when "America First" is back in our discourse and Nazis are back on our streets, when Americans are again turning away asylum seekers and demonizing religious minorities, I'm convinced that the failings of Charles Lindbergh make his story more relevant, not less." (p. 6)
"I have worried that even a critical appraisal of Lindbergh's life would burnish his celebrity. But at a time when "America First" is back in our discourse and Nazis are back on our streets, when Americans are again turning away asylum seekers and demonizing religious minorities, I'm convinced that the failings of Charles Lindbergh make his story more relevant, not less." (p. 6)
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