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10 - Religion and the Civil War

from SECTION II - RELIGIONS IN THE NEW NATION, 1790–1865

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2012

Randall Miller
Affiliation:
Saint Joseph’s University
Stephen J. Stein
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Summary

The Civil War was the central event of American history, and religion was central to the American Civil War experience. Religion did not cause the war, but it did magnify and intensify social, cultural, and political differences that contributed to sectional distrust and eventually disunion. Before the war, religious ideas informed the debates on slavery and the character and destiny of the Union; and, indeed, the divisions within religious bodies over the slavery issue both foretold secession and defined political loyalties during and after the war. When war came, religion gave Americans a rationale for fighting and dying, a means for understanding life and death, a moral compass, and institutional resources for providing relief to soldiers in the field and people suffering on the home front. Then, too, the civil religion of America as a chosen people gained greater force, if also one with regional permutations. The war also made possible African American aspirations for freedom and autonomy, which they expressed most powerfully in their own churches. Religion later helped rebuild the defeated South and explain defeat to white southerners, as it also spurred northern interest in Reconstruction, however imperfect and impermanent such interest proved to be.

From the antebellum period through the Civil War era, the United States was an overwhelmingly Protestant country, notwithstanding a growing Catholic presence almost everywhere and strong, if also numerically small, Jewish congregations in eastern seaboard cities. Protestantism largely defined the dominant American culture.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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References

Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York, 2008.
McPherson, James M.For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York, 1997.
Miller, Randall M., Stout, Harry S., and Wilson, Charles Reagan, eds. Religion and the American Civil War. New York, 1998.
Mitchell, Reid. Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences. New York, 1988.
Noll, Mark A.The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill, 2006.
Rable, George C.God's Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, 2010.
Shattuck, Gardiner H. Jr.A Shield and Hiding Place: The Religious Life of the Civil War Armies. Macon, GA, 1987.
Snay, Mitchell. Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. New York, 1993.
Stowell, Daniel W.Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877. New York, 1998.
Woodworth, Steven E.While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers. Lawrence, KS, 2001.

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