Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia during the Civil War by Bruce T. Gourley (review)

Baptist historian Bruce Gourley has written a microhistory detailing how Baptists in Middle Georgia related to the Civil War. He organizes his study around six themes: views of providence, the blurring of the lines separating church and state, efforts to evangelize Confederate soldiers, the experiences of soldiers affiliated with these churches, the war's effect on race and gender in these assemblies, and the varying degrees of patriotism expressed by local congregations. He discovers shades of diversity in the positions taken by these churches, generally traceable to several factors—differing beliefs held by Primitive Baptists and Southern Baptists; unique conditions resulting from rural or urban settings; and congregational makeup ranging from a church dominated by planters but containing numerous slave members to a more racially homogeneous body composed primarily of yeoman farmers. Gourley ultimately concludes that sustained, energetic support for the Confederacy among Baptists in Middle Georgia was the exception; instead, specific circumstances and local conditions shaped the form and extent of a congregation's patriotism.

The narrow scope of Gourley's work will limit its interest to specialists in Civil War religion or Baptist historians. Some might even question, with good reason, the choice of such a restricted focus. As a revised dissertation that relies almost exclusively on unpublished church records housed at the Special Collections of Mercer University and the religious newspaper the Christian Index, this monograph was an obvious fit for the Baptist studies series published by Mercer University Press. However, unpublished primary sources abound that Gourley might have drawn upon had he chosen to widen the focus. The Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville houses an extensive collection of church records. A quick perusal of their online holdings reveals at least a dozen Civil War-era church records from Alabama and Mississippi, and too many to count from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. By making use of these sources, he could have examined Baptist opinions throughout Georgia or Baptist views throughout the Deep South. He then could have compared these findings with records of Baptist churches in the Upper South. Broadening his geographic range would have enabled him to include other periodicals, such as the Confederate Baptist of Columbia, South Carolina. If he had desired, Gourley could have produced a fairly comprehensive survey of Baptist life and thought throughout the Confederacy, a work of immeasurably more value and appeal.

He instead went to great lengths to explain minor variations in Baptist opinions and practices that he claims undermine the impression of united support for the Confederacy among Middle Georgia Baptists. For instance, he shows how some churches engaged in missions to soldiers, while others seemed disinterested in evangelizing. Some churches observed days of fasting and thanksgiving, either following a directive of the state convention or complying with a proclamation of Jefferson Davis, while others completely ignored these public displays of patriotism. Some individuals wavered in their initially unquestioned belief in providential victory as prospects of Confederate success waned. Although some of these small distinctions and nuanced changes in thinking over time are worth noting, they in no way signal any revelatory breakthroughs. Gourley uncovered no unionist voices among Baptists in Middle Georgia and only one mild complaint from a church that urged the government to promote observance of the Sabbath, a far cry from criticizing a specific government policy or questioning the Confederate cause in general. Indeed, these Baptists were loyal citizens of the Confederacy, even if some of them were not as overtly patriotic as some of their neighbors might have wished.

Because the book offers no new significant interpretations and addresses such a limited subject, the material might have been better suited for dissemination in a few articles. Nevertheless, the chapter detailing the struggles of these Baptists to reconcile their tradition of advocating for the separation of church and state with the increased politicization of...