RIGHTEOUS STRIFE

A study of the battle of schools of religious nationalism surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the lingering effect of that battle today.

As Oxford historian Carwardine observes, the terms “religious nationalist” and “Christian nationalist” are “commonly synonymous with the conservative white evangelical Protestants who make up a core strength of the current Republican Party.” There is historical cause for this narrowing of terms. In the antebellum era, as Carwardine chronicles, many nationalisms emerged. The southern strain, associated with the Anglican/Episcopal Church, took it as read that God was all in for slavery and that demonic forces were assembled against them. In the North, hardcore antislavery nationalists were largely outnumbered by more mainstream ideologies, dominated by Methodism, that advocated a more conservative approach. The abolitionists were, Carwardine writes, “predominantly Protestant in faith…[and] commonly defined their purposes in biblical terms: a specially chosen people, the citizens of the young country had a duty to apply the prophetic wisdom of the Old Testament and Christ himself by expunging the nation’s greatest sin.” Interestingly, Abraham Lincoln was largely indifferent to religion when he entered office, but the “providentialist” view that found him invoking “the better angels of our nature” became more militant as the fighting ground on. As Carwardine points out, many visions of Christian nationalism—and even some nationalisms that involved those excluded from the Protestant mainstream, namely Jews and Catholics—flourished and contended in the North, even as the South dug in its heels to advocate “white-supremacist, pro-slavery, and anti-authoritarian political positions.” Those positions were articulated in the North as well, though, and after what Carwardine calls the postwar “breakup of antislavery religious nationalists’ wartime coalition,” they survived and, in the form of today’s states’ rights Christian nationalism, are much with us today.

A fresh perspective on Civil War history and its resounding reverberations.