American Civil War

The union of the churches broke before the union of the states. The Methodist Episcopal Church split north and south in 1844 over a slaveholding bishop, the Baptists followed in 1845 with the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention over whether a slaveholder could be a missionary, and the Presbyterians, who had already fractured on other lines, completed their sectional division in 1861. Each schism rehearsed the arguments the country would fight over, and each removed one more national institution that might have held the argument together.

Mark Noll has described what followed as a theological crisis. Both sides took the Bible as plain and authoritative, and on that shared ground the defenders of slavery had the easier case: the patriarchs held slaves, Paul returned Onesimus, and no verse abolishes the institution. Antislavery readers answered with the spirit of the whole against the letter of the part, with the golden rule and the Exodus, and with the argument that American slavery, racial and hereditary, was not the thing the ancient texts described. Neither side could defeat the other by exegesis, and a nation that had made scripture its common authority discovered it had no common way to read it.

What settled the question was not the argument but the war, a fact that Lincoln's second inaugural, with its two parties reading the same Bible and praying to the same God, stated more honestly than most sermons of either side.

Religion followed the armies into the field. Chaplains served on both sides, the United States Christian Commission distributed Bibles and tracts and staffed hospitals alongside the Sanitary Commission, and great camp revivals swept the winter quarters, the Confederate armies of 1863 and 1864 above all, where tens of thousands of soldiers professed conversion. George Rable's history reads these revivals less as a triumph of piety than as the response of frightened young men to a scale of death nobody had prepared them for, six hundred thousand or more in four years, dying far from home and often unidentified, which forced churches, families and the state to rebuild the practices of dying and burial around the war.

The peace redistributed religious authority. Freedpeople left the white congregations that had seated them in galleries and built their own, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the black Baptist associations expanded across the South within a decade, becoming the central institutions of black public life. In the defeated South the Lost Cause grew into a civil religion of its own, with Lee and Jackson as saints, monuments as shrines and the war remembered as a sacred and blameless cause.

In the North the war's dead were absorbed into a national liturgy of Decoration Day, the Gettysburg Address and a language of sacrifice and new birth that American public religion has drawn on ever since.