Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker (review)

In Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North, Steve Longenecker argues that Gettysburg is important for more than the battle that occurred there two years into the war. Religious sites, such as Cemetery Hill, the Lutheran seminary, and the “technically secular” site, the Peach Orchard, provide “powerful memories, not just for three bloody days in July 1863, but for their embodiment of the small-town North and their ability to touch themes vital to nineteenth-century religion” (2). Two of these themes, refinement and race, Longenecker shows, reflect national trends, while the third theme, diversity, foretells or anticipates American life into the next centuries. Religious, ethnic, and racial diversity was unusual for an antebellum rural region but “signaled a coming pattern for all of the United States” (4). Without doubt those three days in July impacted Gettysburg residents, Longenecker asserts, yet trends in religious life serve as a better barometer for understanding the town and the border North in the antebellum and Civil War era.

Introducing each theme with a “divertimento” of individuals or families to illustrate his points, Longenecker demonstrates that religious life in Gettysburg was vibrant but routine. The communities were more interested in local issues than in the grand reforms of the day, and while some community members paid attention to issues like temperance and abolition, they did not allow these issues to dominate. Instead, religious refinement took center stage before and during the Civil War. Borrowing heavily from Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, and Cities (1992), Longenecker shows that churches were preoccupied most with exhibiting their emerging middle-class status with new standards of behavior and improved church facilities. Genteel religion required an educated clergy and refined congregants who dressed fashionably but without ostentation and drank moderately but not to excess. Interdenominational committees were more engaged in social reform activities like Sabbath-keeping and temperance, while Gettysburg congregations “usually got refined rather than reformed” (38).

Gettysburg Methodists illustrate well the national trend in refinement as the denomination moved quickly toward conformity with mainstream religion. Revivals, camp meetings, and classes, the hallmarks of Methodism in its early years, declined and were replaced with a more polished, dignified liturgy that viewed the emotionalism of the past with suspicion. Dignified Sunday schools eventually replaced classes, and stress on sudden singular conversions slowly ebbed as children were nurtured “along a path of gradual new birth” (46). Likewise, discipline waned in Methodism. Reflecting the trend in middle-class standards nationally, congregants were less concerned with behaviors that in earlier years would have meant suspension or even expulsion.

Just as the middle class throughout the nation pursued material goods in their quest for symbols of respectability in their homes, churches, and cemeteries, Gettysburg congregants did the same in creating garden cemeteries with winding lanes in rural pastoral solitude. The more inclusive new cemeteries mirrored an evangelicalism of a forgiving God available to all, stressing acceptance of all classes, denominations, and sects. Catholics and African Americans, however, were conspicuous by their absence. Structural improvements of churches complemented cemeteries, and music was now more refined. While costly, refinement was deemed requisite by a middle class bent on signaling sophistication. The “Dunkers,” or the Church of the Brethren, were the exception that proved the rule as they remained uninterested in higher education and committed to nonconformity, still stressing simplicity in dress, architecture, and discipline.

Longenecker asserts that diversity in Gettysburg religion anticipated national trends, marking “the town and region as uncommonly modern” (2). In extensive detail, the author explores doctrinal and denominational diversity. In this period, denominational variety and doctrinal diversity within Protestantism held sway as Lutherans, Associate Reformed, German Reformed, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Dunkers, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches all existed within this small northern border area. Heterogeneous Protestants added doctrinal diversity in their debates...