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Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Regional Religion and North-South Alienation in Antebellum America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

C. C. Goen
C. C. Goen
Affiliation:
Mr. Goen is professor of church history in Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C. This is his presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, 28 December 1982.
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Extract

I have long been intrigued with the role of the American churches in dividing the nation and reinforcing the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Elsewhere I have argued that evangelical Protestantism was a major bond of unity for the United States during the first part of the nineteenth century; that the chief institutional forms of this faith were the large popular denominations—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, each with nationwide constituencies; that these denominations, increasingly agitated by disputes over slavery, sundered into northern and southern factions long before political rupture, thus opening the first major cleavage between slaveholding and free states; and that the denominational schisms portended and to some extent provoked the crisis of the Union in 1861. What I wish to pursue further in this article is how the regional religion which these schisms both exposed and augmented not only broke a primary bond of national unity but also furnished a persuasive example of sectional independence, encouraged the myth of peaceable secession, reinforced North-South alienation, and heightened the moral outrage which each section felt against the other. The “inner civil war” of the divided churches thus exacerbated the ordeal of the Union and confirmed the nation's course to unrepressed conflict.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 21 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1983

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References

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30. So reported the Central Presbyterian (Richmond), 11 May 1861, p.74.Google Scholar

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37. Report of Debates in the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, ed. Robert A. West (New York, 1855), p.95.Google Scholar