Southern Evangelicals And The Coming Of The Civil War

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When Slavery Was Called Freedom

Author : John Patrick Daly
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813158516
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis When Slavery Was Called Freedom by : John Patrick Daly

Download or read book When Slavery Was Called Freedom written by John Patrick Daly and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Slavery Was Called Freedom uncovers the cultural and ideological bonds linking the combatants in the Civil War era and boldly reinterprets the intellectual foundations of secession. John Patrick Daly dissects the evangelical defense of slavery at the heart of the nineteenth century's sectional crisis. He brings a new understanding to the role of religion in the Old South and the ways in which religion was used in the Confederacy. Southern evangelicals argued that their unique region was destined for greatness, and their rhetoric gave expression and a degree of coherence to the grassroots assumptions of the South. The North and South shared assumptions about freedom, prosperity, and morality. For a hundred years after the Civil War, politicians and historians emphasized the South's alleged departures from national ideals. Recent studies have concluded, however, that the South was firmly rooted in mainstream moral, intellectual, and socio-economic developments and sought to compete with the North in a contemporary spirit. Daly argues that antislavery and proslavery emerged from the same evangelical roots; both Northerners and Southerners interpreted the Bible and Christian moral dictates in light of individualism and free market economics. When the abolitionist's moral critique of slavery arose after 1830, Southern evangelicals answered the charges with the strident self-assurance of recent converts. They went on to articulate how slavery fit into the "genius of the American system" and how slavery was only right as part of that system.

Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War

Author : Edward R. Crowther
Publisher : Edwin Mellen Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War by : Edward R. Crowther

Download or read book Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War written by Edward R. Crowther and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the connection between evangelical religious beliefs and antebellum southern culture. Evangelical assumptions and ideas seemed not only to justify slavery and patriarchy, but these assumptions made comphrehensable life's mysteries and heartaches. Southerners thus had a moral, as well as a material, investment in their culture. As they came to believe that the Republican Party thretened that investment, the religiously-minded southerners could accept and support secession. This moral ardor underlay much southern martial ardor during the Civil War.

When Slavery Was Called Freedom

Author : John Patrick Daly
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813181658
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis When Slavery Was Called Freedom by : John Patrick Daly

Download or read book When Slavery Was Called Freedom written by John Patrick Daly and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Slavery Was Called Freedom uncovers the cultural and ideological bonds linking the combatants in the Civil War era and boldly reinterprets the intellectual foundations of secession. John Patrick Daly dissects the evangelical defense of slavery at the heart of the nineteenth century's sectional crisis. He brings a new understanding to the role of religion in the Old South and the ways in which religion was used in the Confederacy. Southern evangelicals argued that their unique region was destined for greatness, and their rhetoric gave expression and a degree of coherence to the grassroots assumptions of the South. The North and South shared assumptions about freedom, prosperity, and morality. For a hundred years after the Civil War, politicians and historians emphasized the South's alleged departures from national ideals. Recent studies have concluded, however, that the South was firmly rooted in mainstream moral, intellectual, and socio-economic developments and sought to compete with the North in a contemporary spirit. Daly argues that antislavery and proslavery emerged from the same evangelical roots; both Northerners and Southerners interpreted the Bible and Christian moral dictates in light of individualism and free market economics. When the abolitionist's moral critique of slavery arose after 1830, Southern evangelicals answered the charges with the strident self-assurance of recent converts. They went on to articulate how slavery fit into the "genius of the American system" and how slavery was only right as part of that system.

A Kingdom Divided

Author : April E. Holm
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807167738
Total Pages : 413 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis A Kingdom Divided by : April E. Holm

Download or read book A Kingdom Divided written by April E. Holm and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kingdom Divided uncovers how evangelical Christians in the border states influenced debates about slavery, morality, and politics from the 1830s to the 1890s. Using little-studied events and surprising incidents from the region, April E. Holm argues that evangelicals on the border powerfully shaped the regional structure of American religion in the Civil War era. In the decades before the Civil War, the three largest evangelical denominations diverged sharply over the sinfulness of slavery. This division generated tremendous local conflict in the border region, where individual churches had to define themselves as being either northern or southern. In response, many border evangelicals drew upon the “doctrine of spirituality,” which dictated that churches should abstain from all political debate. Proponents of this doctrine defined slavery as a purely political issue, rather than a moral one, and the wartime arrival of secular authorities who demanded loyalty to the Union only intensified this commitment to “spirituality.” Holm contends that these churches’ insistence that politics and religion were separate spheres was instrumental in the development of the ideal of the nonpolitical southern church. After the Civil War, southern churches adopted both the disaffected churches from border states and their doctrine of spirituality, claiming it as their own and using it to supply a theological basis for remaining divided after the abolition of slavery. By the late nineteenth century, evangelicals were more sectionally divided than they had been at war’s end. In A Kingdom Divided, Holm provides the first analysis of the crucial role of churches in border states in shaping antebellum divisions in the major evangelical denominations, in navigating the relationship between church and the federal government, and in rewriting denominational histories to forestall reunion in the churches. Offering a new perspective on nineteenth-century sectionalism, it highlights how religion, morality, and politics interacted—often in unexpected ways—in a time of political crisis and war.

Redeeming America

Author : Curtis D. Johnson
Publisher : Ivan R. Dee Publisher
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Redeeming America by : Curtis D. Johnson

Download or read book Redeeming America written by Curtis D. Johnson and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 1993 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the absence of a state-supported religion, the years 1820-60 saw tremendous expansion and influence of the Evangelicals in the United States. Johnson discusses the many ways in which these Evangelical sects attempted to shape American society. Generally drawn along socioeconomic lines, there were three major groups: Formalists (Congregationalists, Presbyterians), Antiformalists (Methodists, Baptists), and the African American groupings. Johnson discusses in serviceable but tedious prose how these groups varied in their beliefs on biblical authority, rebirth, the Second Coming, and Perfectionism. Slavery also divided Southern from Northern Evangelicals. By the time of the Civil War, changes in American society had altered the character and composition of the Evangelicals, and they were never again as powerful.

The Origins of Proslavery Christianity

Author : Charles F. Irons
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807888893
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Origins of Proslavery Christianity by : Charles F. Irons

Download or read book The Origins of Proslavery Christianity written by Charles F. Irons and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the colonial and antebellum South, black and white evangelicals frequently prayed, sang, and worshipped together. Even though white evangelicals claimed spiritual fellowship with those of African descent, they nonetheless emerged as the most effective defenders of race-based slavery. As Charles Irons persuasively argues, white evangelicals' ideas about slavery grew directly out of their interactions with black evangelicals. Set in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state and the hearth of the southern evangelical movement, this book draws from church records, denominational newspapers, slave narratives, and private letters and diaries to illuminate the dynamic relationship between whites and blacks within the evangelical fold. Irons reveals that when whites theorized about their moral responsibilities toward slaves, they thought first of their relationships with bondmen in their own churches. Thus, African American evangelicals inadvertently shaped the nature of the proslavery argument. When they chose which churches to join, used the procedures set up for church discipline, rejected colonization, or built quasi-independent congregations, for example, black churchgoers spurred their white coreligionists to further develop the religious defense of slavery.

Freedom's Coming

Author : Paul Harvey
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469606429
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Freedom's Coming by : Paul Harvey

Download or read book Freedom's Coming written by Paul Harvey and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.

Broken Churches, Broken Nation

Author : C. C. Goen
Publisher : Mercer University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780865541870
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (418 download)

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Book Synopsis Broken Churches, Broken Nation by : C. C. Goen

Download or read book Broken Churches, Broken Nation written by C. C. Goen and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first comprehensive treatment of the role of churches in the processes that led to the American Civil War, C.C. Goen suggests that when Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches divided along lines of North and South in the antebellum controversy over slavery, they severed an important bond of national union. The forebodings of church leaders and other contemporary observers about the probability of disastrous political consequences were well-founded. The denominational schisms, as irreversible steps along the nation's tortuous course to violence, were both portent and catalyst to the imminent national tragedy. Caught in a quagmire of conflicting purposes, church leadership failed and Christian community broke down, presaging in a scenario of secession and conflict the impending crisis of the Union. As the churches chose sides over the supremely transcendent moral issue of slavery, so did the nation. Professor Goen, an eminent historian of American religion, does not seek in these pages the "causes" of the Civil War. Rather, he establishes evangelical Christianity as "a major bond of national unity" in antebellum America. His careful analysis and critical interpretation demonstrate that antebellum American churches -- committed to institutional growth, swayed by sectional interests, and silent about racial prejudice -- could neither contain nor redirect the awesome forces of national dissension. Their failure sealed the nation's fate. - Publisher.

Rebuilding Zion

Author : Daniel W. Stowell
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199923876
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (999 download)

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Book Synopsis Rebuilding Zion by : Daniel W. Stowell

Download or read book Rebuilding Zion written by Daniel W. Stowell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-20 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both the North and the South viewed the Civil War in Christian terms. Each side believed that its fight was just, that God favored its cause. Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W. Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart of which was the fate of the freedpeople's souls and the southern effort to maintain a sense of sectional identity. Central to the southern churches' vision of the Civil War was the idea that God had not abandoned the South; defeat was a Father's stern chastisement. Secession and slavery had not been sinful; rather, it was the radicalism of the northern denominations that threatened the purity of the Gospel. Northern evangelicals, armed with a vastly different vision of the meaning of the war and their call to Christian duty, entered the post-war South intending to save white southerner and ex-slave alike. The freedpeople, however, drew their own providential meaning from the war and its outcome. The goal for blacks in the postwar period was to establish churches for themselves separate from the control of their former masters. Stowell plots the conflicts that resulted from these competing visions of the religious reconstruction of the South. By demonstrating how the southern vision eventually came to predominate over, but not eradicate, the northern and freedpeople's visions for the religious life of the South, he shows how the southern churches became one of the principal bulwarks of the New South, a region marked by intense piety and intense racism throughout the twentieth century.

Doomed Romance

Author : Christine Leigh Heyrman
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0525655581
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (256 download)

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Book Synopsis Doomed Romance by : Christine Leigh Heyrman

Download or read book Doomed Romance written by Christine Leigh Heyrman and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A thwarted love triangle of heartbreak rediscovered after almost two hundred years—two men and a woman of equal ambition—that exploded in scandal and investigation, set between America's Revolution and its Civil War, revealing an age in subtle and powerful transformation, caught between the fight for women's rights and the campaign waged by evangelical Protestants to dominate the nation's culture and politics. From the winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in History. At its center—and the center of a love triangle—Martha Parker, a gifted young New England woman, smart, pretty, ambitious, determined to make the most of her opportunities, aspiring to become an educator and a foreign missionary. Late in 1825, Martha accepted a proposal from a schoolmaster, Thomas Tenney, only to reject him several weeks later for a rival suitor, a clergyman headed for the mission field, Elnathan Gridley. Tenney's male friends, deeply resentful of the new prominence of women in academies, benevolent and reform associations, and the mission field, decided to retaliate on Tenney's behalf by sending an anonymous letter to the head of the foreign missions board impugning Martha's character. Tenney further threatened Martha with revealing even more about their relationship, thereby ruining her future prospects as a missionary. The head of the board began an inquiry into the truth of the claims about Martha, and in so doing, collected letters, diaries, depositions, and firsthand witness accounts of Martha's character. The ruin of Martha Parker's hopes provoked a resistance within evangelical ranks over womanhood, manhood, and, surprisingly, homosexuality, ultimately threatening to destroy the foreign missions enterprise.

Our Country

Author : Grant R. Brodrecht
Publisher : Fordham University Press
ISBN 13 : 0823279936
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

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Book Synopsis Our Country by : Grant R. Brodrecht

Download or read book Our Country written by Grant R. Brodrecht and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On March 4, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, Reverend Doctor George Peck put the finishing touches on a collection of his sermons that he intended to send to the president. Although the politically moderate Peck had long opposed slavery, he, along with many other northern evangelicals, was not an abolitionist. During the Civil War he had come to support emancipation, but, like Lincoln, the conflict remained first and foremost about preserving the Union. Believing their devotion to the Union was an act of faithfulness to God first and the Founding Fathers second, Our Country explores how many northern white evangelical Protestants sacrificed racial justice on behalf of four million African-American slaves (and then ex-slaves) for the Union’s persistence and continued flourishing as a Christian nation. By examining Civil War-era Protestantism in terms of the Union, author Grant Brodrecht adds to the understanding of northern motivation and the eventual "failure" of Reconstruction to provide a secure basis for African American's equal place in society. Complementing recent scholarship that gives primacy to the Union, Our Country contends that non-radical Protestants consistently subordinated concern for racial justice for what they perceived to be the greater good. Mainstream evangelicals did not enter Reconstruction with the primary aim of achieving racial justice. Rather they expected to see the emergence of a speedily restored, prosperous, and culturally homogenous Union, a Union strengthened by God through the defeat of secession and the removal of slavery as secession’s cause. Brodrecht eloquently addresses this so-called “proprietary” regard for Christian America, considered within the context of crises surrounding the Union’s existence and its nature from the Civil War to the 1880s. Including sources from major Protestant denominations, the book rests on a selection of sermons, denominational newspapers and journals, autobiographies, archival personal papers of several individuals, and the published and unpublished papers of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. The author examines these sources as they address the period’s evangelical sense of responsibility for America, while keyed to issues of national and presidential politics. Northern evangelicals’ love of the Union arguably contributed to its preservation and the slaves’ emancipation, but in subsuming the ex-slaves to their vision for Christian America, northern evangelicals contributed to a Reconstruction that failed to ensure the ex-slaves’ full freedom and equality as Americans.

America Aflame

Author : David Goldfield
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1608193748
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (81 download)

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Book Synopsis America Aflame by : David Goldfield

Download or read book America Aflame written by David Goldfield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind. Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.

Religion and Public Life in the South

Author : Charles Reagan Wilson
Publisher : Rowman Altamira
ISBN 13 : 9780759106352
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (63 download)

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Book Synopsis Religion and Public Life in the South by : Charles Reagan Wilson

Download or read book Religion and Public Life in the South written by Charles Reagan Wilson and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2005 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In July 2002 chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court had a two-ton monument of the Ten Commandments placed into the rotunda of the Montgomery state judicial building. But this action is only a recent case in the long history of religiously inspired public movements in the American South. From the Civil War to the Scopes Trial to the Moral Majority, white Southern evangelicals have taken ideas they see as drawn from the Christian Scriptures and tried to make them into public law. But blacks, women, subregions, and other religious groups too vie for power within and outside this Southern Religious Establishment. Religion and Public Life in the South gives voice to both the establishment and its dissenters and shows why more than any other region of the country, religion drives public debate in the South.

A Shield and Hiding Place

Author : Gardiner H. Shattuck
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis A Shield and Hiding Place by : Gardiner H. Shattuck

Download or read book A Shield and Hiding Place written by Gardiner H. Shattuck and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study to compare the religious life of the Union and the Confederate armies. It also offers shrewd insight into the nature of Northern and Southern society. Describes the way that military defeat helped rejuvenate the religious tradition of the South. Provides fresh evidence of the difference between Northern and Southern society. The author's analysis of the different roles religion played in the two armies shows why cultural analysis is essential to understanding both Northern victory and Southern response to defeat. "A useful beginning point for reevaluating the intellectual history of Civil War America." Illustrated.

Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860

Author : William Jason Wallace
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Press
ISBN 13 : 9780268044213
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (442 download)

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Book Synopsis Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860 by : William Jason Wallace

Download or read book Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860 written by William Jason Wallace and published by University of Notre Dame Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. Jason Wallace examines three antebellum groups and argues that the divisions among them stemmed from disagreements over the role that religious convictions played in a free society.

White Evangelical Racism

Author : Anthea Butler
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469661187
Total Pages : 175 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis White Evangelical Racism by : Anthea Butler

Download or read book White Evangelical Racism written by Anthea Butler and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power. Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.

Baptized in Blood

Author : Charles Reagan Wilson
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820306819
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Baptized in Blood by : Charles Reagan Wilson

Download or read book Baptized in Blood written by Charles Reagan Wilson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Reagan Wilson documents that for over half a century there existed not one, but two civil religions in the United States, the second not dedicated to honoring the American nation. Extensively researched in primary sources, Baptized in Blood is a significant and well-written study of the South’s civil religion, one of two public faiths in America. In his comparison, Wilson finds the Lost Cause offered defeated Southerners a sense of meaning and purpose and special identity as a precarious but distinct culture. Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a separate political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. “Civil religion” has been defined as the religious dimension of a people that enables them to understand a historical experience in transcendent terms. In this light, Wilson explores the role of religion in postbellum southern culture and argues that the profound dislocations of Confederate defeat caused southerners to think in religious terms about the meaning of their unique and tragic experience. The defeat in a war deemed by some as religious in nature threw into question the South’s relationship to God; it was interpreted in part as a God-given trial, whereby suffering and pain would lead Southerners to greater virtue and strength and even prepare them for future crusades. From this reflection upon history emerged the civil religion of the Lost Cause. While recent work in southern religious history has focused on the Old South period, Wilson’s timely study adds to our developing understanding of the South after the Civil War. The Lost Cause movement was an organized effort to preserve the memory of the Confederacy. Historians have examined its political, literary, and social aspects, but Wilson uses the concepts of anthropology, sociology, and historiography to unveil the Lost Cause as an authentic expression of religion. The Lost Cause was celebrated and perpetuated with its own rituals, mythology, and theology; as key celebrants of the religion of the Lost Cause, Southern ministers forged it into a religious movement closely related to their own churches. In examining the role of civil religion in the cult of the military, in the New South ideology, and in the spirit of the Lost Cause colleges, as well as in other aspects, Wilson demonstrates effectively how the religion of the Lost Cause became the institutional embodiment of the South’s tragic experience.