God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War

George C. Rable's God's Almost Chosen Peoples, A Religious History of the American Civil War, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010, is a scholarly religious history examining how both Union and Confederate Americans understood the war in explicitly providential and theological terms. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Rable's extensive use of period religious sources, sermons, diaries and denominational publications, from both sides of the conflict. Its strength is taking seriously how central religious interpretation actually was to how contemporaries experienced and justified the war, a dimension some purely political or military histories treat as secondary. Its limit is scope: it is a religious history of the war specifically, not a comprehensive military or political history, so those other dimensions need their own dedicated sources.