The Effects of the Civil War on Southern Baptist Beliefs (original) (raw)
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This article gives a description of the religious experience of the ordinary Methodist soldier during the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The “holy war” rhetoric that issued from home pulpits, along with the model of the pious Christian warrior provided through Christian officers and generals, enabled him to retain a distinctively Christian character in the midst of the stresses and moral dilemmas of war. From his chaplains he heard preaching that was simple, direct, focused squarely on spiritual concerns, and called for urgent decision. His expression of religious devotion, even given the differences along this line which existed between Northern and Southern revivals, was of a less emotional type than that in evidence in earlier frontier revivals. His devotion was marked by prayerful dependence upon God and a reliance on the bonds of Christian fellowship, as brothers fought side by side against a common enemy. The battlefield tended to reduce the theological conflicts that arose out of the relative luxury of a peace-time situation. The survivors of the war would go on to face an increasingly more religiously and ethnically diverse America, in which the relative monopoly of Methodist revivalism would crumble in the religiously diverse world of the “gilded age.”
The American Civil War and its Effect on Religiosity in North Carolina
The American Civil War (1861-1865) caused many societal effects in North Carolina that are sometimes overlooked. In the absence of extensive scholarship on the war’s overall effects on religiosity in North Carolina, this study attempts to show that the Civil War did have a demonstrable influence on religious practice in the state. In the early nineteenth century, religiosity was steadily growing in the North Carolina. The demands of the war effort drew on North Carolinian manpower, leaving congregations depleted and without ministers. The war also affected North Carolina churchgoers by causing shortages of supplies, interdicting travel through hostile occupation, and bringing the destruction of church locations. However, the pre-war trend of overall growth continued throughout the war despite fluctuations and temporary decline in membership and attendance. Additionally, the war brought emancipation for African American, causing new African-American churches to be founded. The Civil War affected every church in North Carolina in some way, but it did not stop religiosity from continuing to grow in North Carolina.
\u3ci\u3e Competing ‘Isms’ among Post-War Southern Baptists \u3c/i\u3e
2009
As European empires lost political control of their colonies in the wake of World War II, evangelical Christians in the United States saw an aggressively expanding Communism become a new archenemy, and they countered by redoubling their missionary efforts. To bolster those efforts, Southern Baptists embarked on a sustained effort of missionary education dedicated to a view of Christian Universalism which promoted the "sameness" and "oneness" of all peoples around the world. That mission education, however, competed with the denomination's concurrent tendency to conflate "Christian" and "American" as they strove to inculcate in their youth a clear understanding of how and why the United States was both different from, and better than, the Communist nations of the world. Southern Baptists missionary efforts in Africa cast these competing ideas in stark relief. The staunchly anti-communist South of the Southern Baptists was also the segregated South. There, Christian nationalism and Christian universalism collided.
Competing 'Isms' among Post-War Southern Baptists
2009
As European empires lost political control of their colonies in the wake of World War II, evangelical Christians in the United States saw an aggressively expanding Communism become a new archenemy, and they countered by redoubling their missionary efforts. To bolster those efforts, Southern Baptists embarked on a sustained effort of missionary education dedicated to a view of Christian Universalism which promoted the "sameness" and "oneness" of all peoples around the world. That mission education, however, competed with the denomination's concurrent tendency to conflate "Christian" and "American" as they strove to inculcate in their youth a clear understanding of how and why the United States was both different from, and better than, the Communist nations of the world. Southern Baptists missionary efforts in Africa cast these competing ideas in stark relief. The staunchly anti-communist South of the Southern Baptists was also the segregated South. There, Christian nationalism and Christian universalism collided.
From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a minority conservative faction took over the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). This project seeks to answer the questions of how a fringe minority within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination could undertake such a feat and why they chose to do so. The framework through which this work analyzes these questions is one of competing worldviews that emerged within the SBC in response to decades of societal shifts and denominational transformations in the post-World War II era. To place the events of the Southern Baptist “crisis” within this framework, this study seeks to refute the prevailing notion put forth in earlier works that the takeover was an in-house event, driven purely by doctrinal disputes between conservative Southern Baptists and SBC leadership. Illustrating the differences between rhetoric and action on both sides of this intra-denominational conflict, this work seeks to provide perspective to the narrative of the Southern Baptist “crisis” by asserting that the worldviews guiding the opposing factions diverged not only on doctrine, but culture and politics as well. Placing the events of the “crisis” within the context of broader worldviews, this project highlights and examines the intertwined nature of religion, culture, and politics in modern American society.