During the 19th century, Christian religious ideals were the center of American life and community. A period of intense commitment to religion began in the opening years of the century (called the Second Great Awakening) and continued with varying intensity until the CiviL War began. Evangelical Protestant denominations gained the most during this period, and by the 1840s the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian Churches, supported by a wide variety of religious newspapers and benevolent societies, played a major role in the cultural life of the nation.
The churches’ influence was broad, and many important reform-movement leaders were religiously inspired. Women, in greater numbers than men, attended and supported churches and church-related reforms. At the same time, popular ideals such as Manifest Destiny rested on the assumption that God ordained national expansion, and political orators drew heavily on the image of the United States as a nation anointed by God.
Among most Protestants there existed a broad commonality in theology, and both Northern and Southern Protestants generally supported social reform movements such as temperance, Sunday school societies, and missionary efforts at home and abroad. However, differences over slavery divided the churches. During the middle century, increasing number of Northern Protestants embraced abolition. Southerners responded in part by increasing evangelical outreach to the slave population (referred to by historians as “the mission to the slaves”) and simultaneously building a scripture-based defense of slavery (this was particularly true of rural PLANTATlON-district congregations).
During the 1840s the sectional divisions over slavery created a dramatic rift within the major Protestant churches. The Baptist split that occurred in 1845 illustrates the general contours of the denominational divisions: After more than a decade of increasing conflict between Northern and Southern Baptist leaders, tensions mounted during the early 1840s following the formation of the American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention. In its first public statement, the convention assailed slavery as “a violation of the instincts of nature,—a perversion of the first principles of justice,—and a positive transgression of the revealed will of God.”
Throughout the North, associations and individual congregations began expressing support for the convention’s principles. In response, Southerners took a defensive posture and condemned what they termed “harsh and abusive epithets heaped upon us.” Some advocated a cessation of mutual cooperation in areas such as missions until the “fanatical course” of the North changed, while others demanded assurances from the Triennial Convention (the denomination’s national body at the time) that it permitted slavery.
Despite their conviction that slavery was an appropriate civil institution and that the abolitionists were “exceedingly mistaken in the case they have undertaken,” Southern Baptists despaired of the consequences of the increasingly contentious issue. As one Georgia congregation put it, “The threatened dissolution of the fellowship betwixt the North and South would be an event which we would deeply deplore and as an evil not only highly injurious to the cause of religion in general but calculated to bring other evils of great magnitude in its train.” The preeminent Baptist leader in Georgia, Jesse Mercer, noted that the tendency of the conflict would be “to break up all our united operations [missionary societies, publishing efforts etc.], and I seriously fear our civil Union also.”
Despite such concerns and the efforts of both Northern and Southern Baptists, the conflict over slavery and abolition grew and at times was aggravated by denominational newspapers. The conflict came to a head in late 1844 when the American Baptist Home Mission Society rejected the appointment of a Georgia minister who held slaves and the Triennial Convention stated that “we can never be a party to any arrangement which would imply approbation of slavery.” By early spring 1845, Virginia and Georgia Baptists called for a meeting to create a new Baptist convention composed of Southern churches. The meeting convened May 8, 1845, and by Monday, May 12, had created a purely sectional denominational structure—the Southern Baptist Convention—based primarily on the support of slavery and its attendant cultural ideals.
That same year Southern Methodists, who had also engaged in a protracted debate with their Northern brethren over slaveholders’ rights to hold national positions within the church, issued a statement that justified their split with the Northern churches. They claimed that “the opinions and purposes of the church in the north on the subject of slavery, are in direct conflict with those of the south, and unless the south will submit to the dictation and interference of the north there is no hope of anything like union or harmony.”
By the late 1850s, the pro - and antislavery positions of the sectional churches had helped cement the idea that each side’s “peculiar society best embodied republican, Christian virtue and that the other threatened both republican liberty and Christian order.” In the South, preachers searched the Scripture to justify the institution of slavery and the hierarchical notions of society that came along with it. Northern preachers, meanwhile, penned abolitionist tracts and often celebrated the liberal culture that was emerging in the cities and towns of their section. Popularly, such images of a sanctified people helped both sides wrap themselves in the garb of holy righteousness and march to war carrying swords blessed by the cross.
While many preachers of both sections abhorred the onset of violence in 1861, their eventual support for their respective section served as a major element of national identity. Union pastors often preached political messages that overtly approved of the war effort and increasingly offered a message of “unconditional loyalty” to the state. Likewise in the South, ministers and editors blurred “the distinctions between secular and sacred” and promoted patriotism based in a close connection of civil and religious authority. Many rebel preachers argued that not only was the Confederacy the protector of civil liberty and constitutional rights but that it was also the defender of religious liberty.
At the everyday level, religion provided comfort and hope for soldiers and their families who prayed for divine favor and sought the comforts of spiritual assurance. At the same time, it served as a rallying point for “slaves reaching for freedom [who] praised God for their day of Jubilee.” In both sections, religious promoters identified a remarkable opportunity to carry out missionary work within the armies. A burgeoning Southern military press played “a dynamic role in evangelizing soldiers, articulating war aims, and building morale.” Religiously inspired agencies in the North such as the Christian Commission supported the war effort by providing both physical and spiritual comforts to the soldiers in the field. Within the armies, religion was ever present. Practiced in private by pious soldiers, promoted by regimental chaplains, and celebrated in large-scale revivals, religion provided both spiritual comfort and entertainment for soldiers looking for a change from the regular camp monotony.
Following the war in the South, the complexion of religion changed dramatically. African Americans, who had worshipped alongside white people in large biracial churches before the war, deserted en masse and created separate all-black Baptist and Methodist congregations. Defeated white Southerners created a civil religion that blended Protestant rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of an invented Confederate tradition. This form of lost cause mythology helped Southerners defend the “essentially religious and moral values” that had been defeated in war. Northern white Protestants, while faced with what they believed to be a decline in moral values, continued to play an important role in the social-political arena in the emerging Social Gospel movement. See also United States Christian Commission.
Further reading: C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American Civil War (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985); Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil
War (New York: Viking Press, 2006); Steven E. Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001).
—James Daryl Black
World History
