Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union

Abstract

Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union April Holm (bio) Timothy L. Wesley. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 273 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Just as Abraham Lincoln famously asserted that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the Civil War, historians of nineteenth-century American religion have reached a consensus that religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism, is somehow essential to a complete understanding of the conflict. The exact mechanism of that “somehow,” however, remains difficult to define. Over the past twenty years, historians have taken on the challenge of formulating a satisfying and complete account of the connection between the pervasive religiosity of the nineteenth-century United States and the great political and military upheaval of the era. Historians agree upon the centrality of evangelical Protestantism to nineteenth-century American culture.1 Americans North and South interpreted the traumas of war and its aftermath through this evangelical Protestant lens. The Civil War era saw a religious people using their faith to make sense of an all-consuming military, political, and interpersonal struggle. As George Rable writes in his recent synthesis, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples, “many people on both sides of the conflict turned to religious faith to help explain the war’s causes, course, and consequences.”2 Both Northerners and Southerners, Rable argues, saw Providence at work in the drama of secession, the ordeals of the battlefield, and the revolution of emancipation. Still, many questions about the war and religion remain unresolved. Historians of religion and the Civil War grapple with two categories of questions. One category seeks to identify the role religion played in the war itself, from secession to emancipation: did religion affect secular events? A second line of inquiry asks how the war affected American religion: did secular events fundamentally alter the American relationship with the divine? A subset of this latter line of inquiry concerns how the war affected the lives of people of faith—specifically clergy, active church members, and the denominations to [End Page 655] which they belonged. Timothy Wesley takes up these problems in his thought-provoking and ambitious volume, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Wesley begins with the observation that antebellum clergy could influence millions. Preachers, he writes, were “the most politically determinative force within affiliated American Christianity, the only members of the greater church family who exercised significant yet immediate authority over others” (p. 42). Patriotic civilians, church leadership, and secular authorities recognized this powerful potential influence. Consequently, ministers acquired heightened political significance during the Civil War. Observers from all three groups monitored clergy to ensure loyalty to the Union. They expected and enforced patriotic messages from the pulpit. Wesley argues that the narrative of a monolithically pro-war and pro-Union Northern clergy has obscured the number of ministers in the North who strongly opposed such “political preaching.” Supporting his argument with evidence from church records, religious periodicals, and military documents, Wesley draws three conclusions: that white Northern ministers did not uniformly support the government; that, nevertheless, the boundary between church and state was much more porous in the Civil War era than historians currently assume it was; and finally, that the censure of nonpolitical preachers constitutes an important untold part of the story of civil liberties in the era. The book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of work on religion during the crisis of the union. Wesley draws attention to an overlooked point of conflict between religion, politics, and church and state in American history. His work prompts instructive new ways of thinking about civil liberties, loyalty, and the divide between the moral and the political in the fraught atmosphere of the Civil War North. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War is structured both chronologically and thematically. Wesley begins with a discussion of the familiar political events of the 1850s and concludes with the end of the Civil War. The first two-thirds of the volume primarily concern white Northern clergy and their struggles over religion and politics in the time of war. Wesley admirably includes clergy from outside the evangelical Protestant mainstream...