The Politics of Faith during the Civil War

Introduction

Introduction We find many clergymen again taking to politics, vainly imagining they can sway the public mind. Henry Ward Beecher has made a noise in the world, and others are at work to imitate him. These clergymen are made of and flattered. The women say soft things to them, and they are petted to death, and their heads cannot stand the fire. The result is, that all the labor of disinterested parties, who work and build a church edifice and society, and their labor lost and unproductive because the minister refuses to conform to the enlightened age in which we live, but must needs become a sensationist or political preacher. —Boston Investigator, December 4, 1861 Can the church be rightfully indifferent to the question of loyalty or disloyalty? If it can—on what grounds? [New York Presbyterian] Dr. [N. L.] Rice’s answer is: “That ministers and churches, as such, cannot settle those moral questions, which depend upon secular, civil, and political questions.” And as they cannot “settle” them, he implies that they have nothing to do with them. But the principle is false, and the conclusion pernicious. . . . It was just so in the time of the Revolution. Ought ministers and churches to have kept silent then? If not, why now? —American Theological Review, January 1862 P olitical preachers were at the heart of the debate over the separation of church and state during the American Civil War.1 American ministers and laypeople alike held various opinions about clerics who preached on political topics. The war brought to the forefront a controversy that had grown up in the prewar North over whether ministers had the right to exhort congregations to adopt political positions. While the antebellum question revolved around the issue of slavery, in the wartime context questions of loyalty and disloyalty became more important. Northern ministers did not constitute a monolithic group of cheerleaders for the nation, a position still dominant in historical scholarship. Nor did ministers 2 the politics of faith during the civil war abandon en masse their long-held religious ideas about the need to keep the pulpit separate from secular affairs. While numerous preachers saw the war in religious terms and as a result imagined for themselves a pronounced political role in its successful execution, other patriotic men of faith struggled to meet the demands of a people at war while honoring the apolitical dictates of their creed. And plainly, some northern preachers were patently disloyal. No matter their motives, scores of ministers drew the punitive attention of national, state, and local authorities through their perceived unpatriotic declarations in sermons and other forms of worship. And the story doesn’t end with government intervention. Disloyal or otherwise politically discordant ministers also found themselves squarely in the sights of denominational leaders and members of their own congregations. Of course, the story changes when looking at the Confederate South. There, slavery’s clerical champions never came under fire—although most southern clerics inveighed against political preaching even as they engaged in the act. But over the course of decades southern preachers effectively rendered the South’s central political concern, slavery, a domestic affair. The enslavement of four million people became a way of life, a “peculiar” but familial institution that ministers during the Civil War were obliged to defend from northern assault. Consequently, members of the Confederate clergy became wartime agents of southern nationalism, monitoring southern allegiance and often overseeing the proper wartime participation of their denominational memberships. And as their churches became targets for Union soldiers who occupied enemy territory, Confederate ministers actively fomented various kinds of political defiance. The historical record supports three primary conclusions. First, America’s largest denominations were not somehow co-opted by the state during the Civil War. Many church members and religious leaders were ardent flag wavers, but in most cases their zeal did not represent the compromise of their religious principles. To the contrary, Christians imagined themselves patriots because of—and not in defiance of—their religious beliefs. The recognition of such self-determination within America’s churches requires an acknowledgment that the same kind of devout sincerity prompted other loyal Americans to nevertheless resist the politicization of their church, including many in mainstream traditions and not just those in peace churches and pacifist sects. Second, by the time of the Civil War the separation of church and state was introduction 3 less pronounced than we imagine...