On a lazy Sunday afternoon in New Orleans, Marie St. Clare, the fictional slaveholding mistress from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, sits down to dinner after returning from church. She describes to St. Clare and Miss Ophelia, their Vermont cousin, the “splendid sermon” she had heard:

Stowe's readers, whether antislavery Northerners or proslavery Southerners, would have recognized in this passage a fundamental fact of the antebellum sectional controversy – that the Southern church was usually a bulwark of slavery. From the 1830s through the secession crisis, religion took on a major role in the proslavery crusade. When Northern abolitionists contended that slavery per se was a sin, Southern clergymen responded that the institution was a moral one. In response to this antislavery attack, Southern clerics forged an impregnable union between religion, morality, and slavery.

Proslavery Christianity occupies a pivotal place in this study. It illuminates two themes that shaped the relationship between religion and the development of Southern separatism.