God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (review)

"I think as much of religion as any man," a Confederate soldier said while tippling some apple brandy, "but there's such a thing as having too damn much of it" (100). Religious faith was omnipresent in the Civil War era, George Rable makes clear. At the same time, religious faith provided no solution to the dilemmas of slavery leading up to the war, and it probably lengthened and worsened the war once it came. There was, in that sense, too much of it.

Too little of it served as something other than consoler, rationalizer, and cheerleader. "Recognizing the hand of God in human history," Rable concludes, "fostered neither humility nor even an appreciation for the majesty of inscrutable providence" (88). As a result, "divine purpose, national deliverance, personal salvation, and even millennial hope had all become entangled in a war that had become more destructive than even sinful human beings ever could have imagined" (277). This sober message dominates most of this careful, detailed, measured work.

"Rather than the word becoming flesh," Rable writes, "it seemed as if the flesh—of northerners and southerners, of blacks and whites—had become words, an endless stream of words." Amid this "flood" of religious rhetoric, moreover, there was a "failure of moral imagination" (22). Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who could put himself in the shoes of a slaveholder, most Americans could not morally imagine themselves in the place of another; instead, religion justified their views and sacralized their distrusts and hatreds.

Rable surveys religious interpretations of the conflict from secession to the "Good Friday" of April 14, 1865, quoting myriad sources from all parts of society, including Catholics, Jews, and Mormons. Evangelical Protestants dominate, as might be expected. The frequently millennial, apocalyptic voices of the era failed to "consider the limits of human achievements or ambition," and even the "voices of moderation were not that thoughtful, they were merely cautious" (196). Repeatedly, people figure out how and why God was on their side. Setbacks didn't matter in this theology, for these were "chastisements" to prepare God's people for greater things to come. Religious conviction thereby "produced a providential narrative of the war" and "created a fatalism grounded not in deism but in providence." Americans came to see the war "as part of an unfolding providential story," and this helps explain the longevity and ferocity of the conflict (9).

Of religious life in the army camps, we learn that reports of revivals were exaggerated and did not mislead soldiers who acknowledged that most were sinners rather than saints. Discussions of swearing, card playing, tippling, and the like fill many pages, since these "sins" explained God's chastisements of his chosen people. Soldiers contemplate the meaning of death, as do the folks (usually women) back home; chaplains assume a "humble and secondary" place; churches struggle to survive; congregations in the border states engage in their own bitter civil wars; and reverends on both sides interpret every up and down in the conflict according to what they determined to be the will of Providence (110).

Instead of offering sweeping arguments or theses, this deeply researched book proceeds slowly, patiently accumulating stories and reflections from the actors of the period. This is not Skip Stout's "moral history of the Civil War," in which self-righteous rhetoric simply fueled killing. It is not the "American apocalypse" of Yankee Protestants studied by James Moorhead, and it is not a story of Americans "baptized in blood" as later Lost Cause mythology had it. Rable shows that Christ was in the camps, but he had to compete with cards, prostitutes, alcohol, and bitter skepticism and irony increasingly evidenced among many boys in blue and gray. Churchgoers at home had great faith that the virtue of their boys would yield success, while those boys quickly found out that piety was connected only randomly with the...