Civil War Religious Event

Civil War / Religious Event

In a certain sense, the Civil War could be construed as a religious event, principally because the division of the country along the lines of slavery was also reinforced by various religious denominations. Quite simply, Christians in the north of the country vilified slavery as evil and against both God's will and the Bible, whereas Christians in the South justified slavery through God's will and various passages in the Bible. Northerners wanted to prohibit slavery; Southerners wanted to propagate it (Lincoln 2). The most important thing about the religious aspect of the Civil War is that it merely served to widen and deepen the sectarian differences between these two parts of the country, which primarily differed in their economic means of production. The North was relying on an increasingly growing industrialization that was bereft of slavery, whereas the South remained entrenched in a rural, agrarian economy that relied on slave labor to harvest and profit from tobacco and cotton.

Therefore, the issue of slavery -- which was one of the preeminent causes of the Civil War -- greatly exacerbated what had previously been a unified theology among various Christian denominations regardless of location. The subsequent quotation, which was issued about the country and its religious proclivities well before the tumultuous 19th century in which the Civil War occurred, demonstrates this fact quite effectively. "In other words, the evangelical spirit, regardless of denomination, transcended region, and the shared religious sensibilities in turn buttressed a sense of identity with the nation and fostered political cohesion" (Chapter 9 124).

This cohesion was widely eradicated by both economic concerns and the religious ones which served to emphasize the former in the 19th century, however. Some of the most active anti-slavery sentiments in the North came from various religious groups or from groups which utilized facets of religious propaganda (the Bible and other Christian teachings) to effect their political agenda of ending slavery. Similarly, proponents of slavery in the South utilized Biblical passages and Christian tenets to defend the notion of slavery. The premise for the usage of Christianity and the advocating of slavery in the South was relatively simple. Africans and African-Americans were savage (due to the lack of pigment in their skin, their African facial features and the texture and shape of their hair) and required good Christian civilizing -- in the form of forced, chattel labor in which these good Christian owners could wantonly rape and murder such 'heathens'. Such proponents claimed that "slavery was ordained by God and therefore a positive good through which Africans could see their presumably savage lives become human and civilized" (Chapter 9 125).