The Confederate States of America claimed to be a Christian nation. They managed to succeed where today’s Christian nationalists have failed. The Confederacy had a Constitution that recognized God. (When John McCain said in 2008 that the U.S. Constitution established America as a Christian nation, perhaps he was confusing it with the Confederate Constitution.) The leaders of the Confederacy had no qualms about claiming that God had uniquely raised the South up to do His work in the world. Christianity held an exalted and powerful place in Confederate culture.
As we have seen in previous articles in this series, during the Civil War northern clergy believed that their cause was ordained by God. Part of their mission in this conflict was to punish the South for seceding from the United States, a political community that was indivisible because it was created by God. But as Northern propagandists extolled the Christian virtues of their national Union and the spiritual superiority of their society over a sinful South in need of God’s repentance, the religious and political leaders of the Confederacy were building what they perceived to be their own Christian civilization.
Read the rest here.
This is a great series. For readers interested in these readings, I would highly recommend Mark Noll's *The Civil War as a Theological Crisis* also.
Dr. Fea does a great job of covering an extremely complicated topic in short entries. Thanks!
Paging Dr. Genovese. (Either one.)
_Mind of the Master Class_ takes the cake for being both informative and irksome at the same time. 700 pages of the Southern worldview was about 600 more than I could stand.
But what's with this narrative of a war between [Christian] brothers, which seems to suggest that the North and South were alike in error in the ways that they interpreted/used scripture/religion in their conflict?
I'm thinking of one of your earlier posts which suggested that this religious dispute was the “greatest tragedy” of the Civil War for Christians.
This seems a little bit like an evangelical inversion of the sort of reconciliationist rhetoric which David Blight analyzes in _Race and Reunion_.
I think I understand your purpose. The value of pointing out that both sides considered themselves “the” Christian combatant in the conflict is, of course, to destabilize and delegitimize the whole idea that there is/can be such a thing as a “Christian nation.” But there is a tendency to false equivalency in these sorts of discussions. The North and the South were not “alike” in error.
In the 1830s, William Ellery Channing was articulating an alternative hermeneutic to the proof-texting which allowed Southern Christians to argue that “the Bible says” that slavery is a-okay. And William Lloyd Garrison articulated and lived a prophetic hermeneutic which created an entirely new trajectory for “biblical arguments” about slavery. These hermeneutical possibilities were not, as far as I can tell, articulated by any Southern thinkers in the run-up to war.
So the “tragedy” for Christians — if Christians need to find their own special tragedy in the Civil War — is that the hermeneutics of Channing the (heretical) Unitarian and Garrison the anti-establishment firebrand didn't gain a wider hearing in the North or the South.
Dead-end hermeneutics, by the way, remain a “tragedy” for Christians today.
Gregory: Thanks for reading. And yes, Noll's book is excellent. If the Patheos format would allow for footnotes I would be citing it.
LD: Great analysis. I am not sure I disagree. My purposes in my Patheos column are just a bit different.
And by the way, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese passed away a few years ago, so I am not sure if she can be “paged” (although I guess this all depends on your religious beliefs about speaking to the dead).
Yes, I knew about Elizabeth's passing. (BTW, Historiann had a review up a while back of Eugene's book about Elizabeth and their marriage.)
As far as speaking to the dead goes…if they're not on social media, they're not going to hear from me. 🙂 But if Fox-Genovese answers my page, I'll be sure and let you know.
I love Channing's argument against the Bible condoning slavery.
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/wechanning/slavery6.html
Esp the part he quotes from Wayland, an echo of Locke's argument about Romans 13, that had Jesus [or the early Christians] attempted to put the principles of Christianity into immediate effect, the message of Jesus would have been reduced to a call for war.
Wayland, via Channing:
“For if it had forbidden the EVIL, instead of subverting the PRINCIPLE, if it had proclaimed the unlawfulness of slavery, and taught slaves to RESIST the oppression of their masters, it would instantly have arrayed the two parties in deadly hostility throughout the civilized world; its announcement would have been the signal of servile war; and the very name of the Christian religion would have been forgotten amidst the agitations of universal bloodshed.”