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He soared after the adulation resulting from his famous flight over the Atlantic. He won the world’s sympathy after the killing of his infant son. And his reputation took serious hits after his opposition to American involvement in World War II, his anti-Semitic statements, and his stands on controversial issues like eugenics and racial inequality.

As his sister-in-law Constance Morrow Morgan once said, looking back on the tumultuous time from the Roaring ’20s to the war, “In just fifteen years he had gone from Jesus to Judas!”

Christopher Gehrz’s new examination of Lindbergh’s life and times touches on all of those high and low points, but it does so in a particular context — Lindbergh’s views and beliefs regarding religion. As the subtitle says, this is a “Religious Biography of America’s Most Infamous Pilot,” with all of the facets that subject involves.

Lindbergh’s relationship with religion varies over the course of his life, but his views on the quality of life versus the equality of every human being, particularly minorities, remain pretty constant. Gehrz sums up the continuum this way:

“While his ‘spiritual but not religious’ journey left him free from the hypocrisies of institutional Christianity, it also left him free to ignore whatever teachings of Christ he found inconvenient. Grace, humility, and unqualified love of neighbor simply did not fit within a worldview that took racial difference for granted and turned racial competition into a divine imperative. Having made God in his own image, Charles Lindbergh saw no image of God in people who didn’t resemble him.”

Gehrz does a good job in tracing the contradictions in Lindbergh’s life, with themes and attitudes that remained constant even as the world’s opinion of him shifted. In a keen analysis, he notes how the adored pilot gave way to the man whose image was tarnished because he expressed positive feelings toward the Nazi regime and what it stood for.

“If we have any appreciation for his historic achievements,” Gehrz writes, “any admiration for his courage and modesty, any compassion for the tragedies he endured, or if we simply nod along with the honest questions he asked about God, science, and morality, we don’t want to accept that he believed what he said about Jews. He didn’t make things easy for us.”

In 1944, as Lindbergh prepared to enter the fight against America’s enemies in World War II, he wrote in his diary about the sole reading material he was taking with him: the New Testament.

“Since I can only carry one book — and a very small one — that is my choice. It would not have been a decade ago, but the more I learn and the more I read, the less competition it has.”

Yet decades later, as he designed his funeral, he read more widely, from Christian hymns and Jewish writings to Native American poetry and the words of Gandhi.

Gehrz’ biography is part of a series of religious-oriented life stories, with a wide-ranging list of subjects including Winston Churchill, Emily Dickinson, Billy Graham, Thomas Jefferson and H.L. Mencken. He takes an even-handed approach to Lindbergh, touching only briefly on the pilot’s time in St. Louis but representing the city well with his frequent mentions of the Spirit of St. Louis, the famous plane that took Lindbergh to Paris.

He notes that St. Louis was “named for a legendarily pious French king” and quotes an admirer at the time of the flight that it “brought as from on high a new spiritual message of peace and good will.”

Another historian put Lindbergh’s fame this way:

“He was literally worshipped and adored. People sought relics from his person and his plane as if he were some new god.”

But Gehrz concludes that while the pilot was hardly a god himself, he had a very keen sense of a power greater than himself:

“Lindbergh’s God did not dwell in any particular religious house; his God was everywhere.”

Dale Singer retired in 2017 after a 45-year career in journalism in St. Louis. He lives in west St. Louis County.