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  • The Politics of Faith during the Civil War by Timothy L. Wesley
  • George C. Rable (bio)
The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. By Timothy L. Wesley. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Pp. 273. Cloth, $45.00.)

The title of this book is somewhat misleading because Timothy Wesley's real focus is on the role of clergy in the American Civil War with particular attention to the question of "political preaching." By studying northern, Confederate, and African American ministers, Wesley makes a strong case for the important relationship between religion and questions of loyalty and disloyalty. Despite the recent outpouring of books on various aspects of religion during the Civil War era, there are still a goodly number of topics needing fresh treatment. Scholars have tended to argue that wars co-opt churches, but this book shows how the clergy helped define the nature of the conflict while shoring up both Union and Confederate nationalism.

An introductory chapter on the debates over political preaching in the antebellum period is largely synthetic, and the author never quite gets around to dealing with exactly how the ministers addressed political questions. It is perhaps inevitable that the substance of the sermons will be shortchanged, but the author simply tries to cover too many topics in too few pages. The second chapter on the power of northern wartime ministers has much more interpretive bite. Wesley claims that the denominational clergy exerted greater influence in shaping public opinion than ever before in part because the United States had become such a religious nation. He certainly exaggerates the degree of religiosity with some questionable statistical projections, but there is no doubt that in terms of church membership and attendance, not to mention individual piety, religion loomed large in many Americans' lives. As the war began, northerners expected patriotic [End Page 129] sermons and kept an eye out for "disloyal" preachers. Partisanship led to Republican suspicion of Democratic ministers as debates erupted over the place of wartime issues and politics in the pulpit.

By the fourth chapter, Wesley really hits his stride. Church disputes spilled over into the public sphere, and there is fascinating material on the relationship between the government and religious bodies. Abraham Lincoln took the threat of subversive speech seriously, and the author believes that the president was much more willing to scrutinize church activities than previous historians have believed. War Department orders interfered with churches, and there were some arrests even in the northern states. But of equal if not greater importance, denominations monitored ministerial conduct, readily brandishing the epithet "Copperhead." Wesley makes good use of church records to show how parishioners also held the clergy accountable. As for the ministers themselves, some believed there were distinct religious and political spheres and that the clergy should avoid becoming entangled in public questions. Quakers, Mennonites, Catholics, and conservative Presbyterians, among others, adopted this position. A second group, which Wesley labels "separate-duty Christians," enthusiastically supported the Union in a general way without making specific political statements. Kentucky Presbyterian Robert J. Breckinridge along with Episcopalians and conservative Methodists fell into this category. And finally, a third group simply believed it was impossible to exclude political questions from the pulpit. Congregationalists, and especially Henry Ward Beecher, along with some Baptists and Presbyterians and a few Catholics such as Archbishop John Baptist Purcell and Orestes Brownson, dismissed charges of "political preaching" as political posturing or excuses for disloyalty. That having been said, Wesley draws the not terribly surprising conclusion that there was a range of views on political preaching in each denomination.

Although there are many common elements in the civil religion of Union and Confederate ministers, the Confederates often appeared more unified than their northern brethren, joining in defense of the nascent southern nation just as they had forthrightly defended slavery. Wesley even claims that clergy were more effective in rallying people to the cause than was the government, but this provocative interpretation is not well supported with evidence. Although the ministers preached many a wartime jeremiad, Wesley points out that their sermons seldom presented any challenging new ideas, and he downplays problems with internal discord. Instead much of the religious...

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