Religious Causes, Changes, And Comparisons In The American Civil War -- By: Kaley Middlebrooks Carpenter

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 64:2 (Fall 2002)
Article: Religious Causes, Changes, And Comparisons In The American Civil War
Author: Kaley Middlebrooks Carpenter


Religious Causes, Changes, And Comparisons In The American Civil War1

Kaley Middlebrooks Carpenter*

[Kaley Middlebrooks Carpenter is a Ph.D. student in American church history at Princeton Theological Seminary.]

In The Story of Religion in America, church historian William W. Sweet reflected upon one of the its saddest chapters—that of the Civil War—in this way: “There are good arguments to support the claim that the split in the churches was not only the first break between the sections, but the chief cause of the final break.”2

When Sweet penned these words in 1950, Perry Miller’s groundbreaking works on Puritan New England had already led a legion of scholars to study the Christian influences and character of the colonial period. In similar fashion, other historians began to turn their attention to the Civil War era and religion’s role in the sectional crisis. Sweet’s own The Methodist Episcopal Church and The Civil War, Joseph Blount Cheshire’s The Church in the Confederate States, Chester Forrester Dunham’s The Attitude of the Northern Clergy Toward the South, 1860–1865, and Benjamin J. Blied’s Catholics and the Civil War were some of the first books to examine the responses of religious leaders and their followers during the war.3 Over the next four decades even more writings appeared on subjects as diverse as Civil War chaplains, churches, dioceses, missionaries, prayer books, Sanitary Commissions, synagogues, and even religiously motivated conscientious objectors.4

By the late 1980s, bibliographies documenting this growing collection of scholarship on religion during theWar Between the States began to appear. Yet they often referred to early classics that remained unsurpassed in setting the period’s historiographical standard. For instance, James W. Silver’s Confederate Morale and Church Propaganda (1957) was still considered “the best study of religion as a bulwark to the Confederacy” in 1987, a full thirty years after its publication.5 And while the scholarship on religion and the Civil War was significant, it was neither sizable nor unassailable in its assumptions. In the words of Sydney Ahlstrom...

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