The Future of Reconstruction Studies

Reconstructing Religion
http://journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies

Fresh scholarship has documented a new understanding of religion during Reconstruction. Spurred by path-breaking research from Daniel Stowell, John Giggie, James Bennett, John Coffey, Curtis Evans, and still others, that scholarship has been particularly effective in demonstrating why African American churches became so important for black community life as well as the course of Reconstruction in the former confederacy. Significant work from, among others, Donald Mathews, Scott Poole, Molly Oshatz, Allen Guelzo, and Michael Hochgeschwender has also shown how thoroughly the religion of white Americans was affected by the forces precipitated into Reconstruction by the Civil War. The result has been a new silver age for scholarship on white religion to accompany the golden age that now exists for serious study of African Americans. Recent publications by Edward Blum and Paul Harvey have also made a persuasive claim that, absent full attention to religious dynamics, no account of Reconstruction and its long-enduring national effects can pretend to anything like completeness. The key lies in an awareness of how directly religious aspects of the nation’s antebellum history affected postbellum life. Rapid development of independent black churches, the strengthening of white racism after the ending of slavery, and the relative silence of religious voices about the effects of industrial growth emerged from a religious landscape in which the cultural authority of “evangelical America” had dramatically weakened. The causes of that weakening, as well as its spillover effects, merit full attention in every effort to grasp the complex character of American history in the Reconstruction era.