The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (original) (raw)
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The US Civil War as a Theological War: Confederate Christian Nationalism and the League of the South
Canadian Review of American Studies, 2002
IntroductionFormed in Alabama in 1994, the League of the South is a nationalist organization that advocates secession from the United States of America and the establishment of a fifteen-state Confederate States of America (CSA) – four states more than seceded during the US Civil War (1861–1865), the additional states being Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland (Southern Patriot). With over ten thousand members, the League professes a commitment to constructing this new CSA based on a reading of Christianity and the Bible that can be identified as “Christian nationalist.” This position is centred upon what we identify as the theological war thesis, an assessment that interprets the nineteenth-century CSA to be an orthodox Christian nation and understands the 1861–1865 US Civil War to have been a theological war over the future of American religiosity fought between devout Confederate and heretical Union states. In turn, this reasoning leads to claims that the “stars and bars...
Pugnacious Reformation or "Civil War"? A Reconsideration of the American Civil War
Global Journal of Human-Social Science: E Economics, Vol.15 Issue 6. (USA), 44-49, 2015
Civil war in its generic outlook implies a war between citizens of the same nation or a war within a nation. This article is a reflection on the American civil war in its origins, nature, scope and aftermath. The thesis in the paper conflicts with the label (American Civil War) given to the violent upheaval that featured between the Southern and Northern states of America in the 1860s. It posits that the label emanated from a facile outlook;that a more in-depth and critical analysis of the occurrence will occasion the birth of a healthierdepiction of the event. The paper therefore, clinches within the premises of the aforementioned that the label-American Civil War is a misnomer; it suggests that a more befitting term could be 'American Pugnacious.
Material Religion, 2022
This essay examines how the American Civil War (1861–1865) transformed the material nature of the Bible such that some copies did not operate in the ways Anglo-Americans expected them to work as the inspired words of God. According to U.S. law, Bibles shipped to the Confederate States were contraband: illegal objects that should be confiscated before reaching enemy hands. Classifying Bibles as contraband led to the widespread notion that Bibles assumed national identities in their work for God. Protestants marked and printed Bibles as war objects that worked specifically for (or against) the Confederate States or the United States. They deployed these Bibles against other Protestants as powerful weapons of God. According to some, Bibles of enemy Protestants operated as immoral books that threatened to undermine God, God’s people, and the military victory of God’s favored nation. Thus, Bibles realized multiple and, sometimes, competing material natures. Confederate and Union Protestants put Bibles to work as powerful objects that mediated God’s presence on earth, materialized debates over slavery, killed enemies, and stopped bullets. Some Bibles functioned simultaneously as God’s Word, commodities, contraband, weapons, shields, and talismans. Each side attempted to hinder the progress and agency of enemy Bibles by capturing volumes as prisoners of war, stealing copies as souvenirs, and destroying books as powerful enemy weapons. The harsh and violent realities of the Civil War initiated a crisis in the material nature of Bibles such that some copies of the Good Book transformed into the Bad Book.
Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018
The analysis that follows examines how religious citizenship evolved during the twelve years of Reconstruction (1865-1877) in the United States that followed Lincoln's injunction to his fellow Americans to act in the years ahead "with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right." The essay begins by tracing some of the divergences between postwar religious assumptions in the North and South to attitudes honed during the conflict. It takes as symbols of the contrasting views two of the opposing generals at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1862, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, the early avatar of the religion of the lost cause in the South, and Oliver Otis Howard, the future head of the Freedmen's Bureau. It then deals with how Americans made peace with the dead -- at least 620,000 of them, or two percent of the nation's population -- in ways that included Horace Bushnell's theology of vicarious sacrifice, resurgent spiritualism, and the annihilation of pain and suffering in Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health (1875). It concludes with the religious impulse to make peace with the living through reuniting the national family. However, this compassionate religious citizenship too often offered only a blinkered definition of family, for reconciliation with the white prodigal sons of the South typically entailed abandoning the newly admitted African American members of the national family.