A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era by April E. Holm

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era by April E. Holm Timothy Wesley A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era. April E. Holm. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-6771-7. 288 pp., cloth, $47.50. In A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era, April Holm offers a new twist on old-fashioned institutional church history. With her sensibilities as a twenty-first-century political historian fully on display, Holm tells the story of members and leaders within three distinct faith traditions—Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians—as they shaped and were shaped by the politics of slavery in the then-western or "border" (between slavery and freedom) region of the United States (7). Beginning her study at "the tail end of the Second Great Awakening" in the early 1830s, the author chronicles the divisions and attempted reunions that characterized mainstream evangelicalism in Delaware, Maryland, western Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, ultimately Tennessee, and parts of every adjacent state during the remainder of the nineteenth century (12). In that chronicling, Holm not only illuminates the connections between religion and politics at the regional level but also demonstrates how those connections then informed national political debates. All of this notwithstanding, this work is most successful in simply reminding us how truly omnipresent the slavery issue was in every aspect of antebellum, Civil War, and (in the legacy of schisms that the slavery issue generated) postwar American religious life. The larger nation reunited, and old wounds suffered both in the tumultuous antebellum political arena and on the battlefields of the Civil War were bound up. But alas, such reunification defied religionists. "Slavery and war divided the American Kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century," Holm concludes, "and it remained divided well into the twentieth. Politically, the nation … became one, but the imagined Christian Kingdom did not" (16). [End Page 185] In one respect, Holm's methodological approach might seem dated. She essentially looks at nineteenth-century evangelical denominationalism from the top down, privileging hierarchies of church authority populated exclusively by white men. She includes no African American clerics or traditions to speak of, nor are historically significant but smaller pacifistic traditions present. But there is more to Holm's effort than these potential limitations suggest. The author is at once interested in identifying the symbiotic ways religion was determinative in regional politics and how politics (especially relative to slavery) informed the dominant strains of religious belief in the borderland. Thus, it is reasonable that she concentrates on the region's most influential faith traditions. But in so doing, she is inventive and original, peppering her effort with a degree of contrarianism that makes A Kingdom Divided memorable. For instance, Holm criticizes the degree to which historians have conflated religion and morality in their treatments of border state politics to date. Instead, she emphasizes how "border evangelicals who remained with northern churches" leaned on such overly convenient creeds as the Doctrine of Spirituality of the Church to effectively skirt moral considerations (81). Holm's effort likewise features an innovative take on sectionalism, revealing the impact that change over time and political expediency had on regional identities and affiliations. At least in the hearts and minds of the evangelicals Holm privileges, "East" and "West" were initially more important categories of identity than were "North" and "South." The slavery question and lesser political imbroglios ultimately made the distance between slavery and freedom more significant than the distance between the Ohio River and the Appalachian Mountains, however, while postwar church alignments complicated the notion of tidy sectional labels further still. In detailing the fluctuating ways religionists in the border area aligned themselves with their countrymen, Holm reminds us that neither spiritual conviction nor denominational affiliation fundamentality negates the mercurial nature of political identity. Furthermore, Holm suggests, the ways members of the academy have monolithically considered the "border" in assessing nineteenth-century American history is very nearly ahistorical, and a less static approach is warranted. Finally, Holm's consideration of border evangelicals before and after the American Civil War explains how and why the slavery-generated sectional...