A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era by April E. Holm (review)

April Holm has written a fantastic and deeply illuminating book. Part of the extensive Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War series under Michael Parrish's editorship, A Kingdom Divided explores the complexities of religious division in evangelical Protestantism throughout the nineteenth century. Holm argues that the particular dynamics of border-state Christianity played a pivotal role in both the development and the permanence of sectional autonomous denominations.

In her approach to border-state evangelicals, Holm fits into a recent trend of scholars viewing the nineteenth-century border as a distinctive region of the country, as opposed to simply a blurry middle ground or fusion between North and South. As she defines it, the border region included "Delaware, Maryland, western Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, as well as portions of every neighboring state" (7). The territory and influence of the border proved quite formidable in the bourgeoning sectionalism of the early midcentury. And while the border states were at the center of the conflicts over slavery that would break apart first the churches and then the nation, Holm asserts, border Christians' efforts to resist fracture and polarization led them to spearhead the "spirituality of the church" doctrine of avoiding politics from the pulpit, a tactic that functionally led to a tacit accommodation of societal political mores while not overtly endorsing them. But such quasi-neutrality, Holm demonstrates, hardly sheltered the border from increasingly intense Northern and Southern volleys.

Indeed, after deftly establishing the border West's importance to expansionist evangelicals and effectively synopsizing the denominational schisms of Methodists and Baptists in the mid-1840s, Holm contends that the inherent futility of trying to create a clean line between North and South spurred mass conflict and confrontation as sectional partisans on both sides evangelized and recruited the contested territory that spanned denominational jurisdictions. Nevertheless, neutrality proved as ineffectual as partisanship in staving off the impending crisis, and so border evangelicals were left to navigate the course of war in the midst of starkly divided and increasingly militarized denominational struggles.

In her particularly excellent chapters titled "Wartime Conflict and Federal Response" and "Union Victory and Religious Reconstruction," Holm parses the effects of ecclesiastical-politicalmilitary alliance and coordination by Northern leaders on the strained stance of moderation among border Christians. She asserts convincingly that attempts at enforced nationalism and punitive association between moderation and Confederate sympathy ultimately broke many of the remaining tenuous bonds between border evangelicals and Northern denominational structures. Critically, Holm finds that the refusal of border churches to reunite or align with their Northern counterparts after the war "represented continuity, not a break, with the priorities and prewar trends of border evangelicals" (152). Increasingly, border Christians blamed the denial of neutrality and the failure of the "spirituality of the church" doctrine much more squarely on perceived Northern zealotry than on Southern resistance.

In the meantime, Southern evangelical spokesmen embarked on a concerted and expansive effort to frame (or, in some cases, reframe) the narrative of sectional religious division. With border churches largely nested in Southern denominational alignment, Holm argues, those Southern spokesmen appropriated the border's historical aloofness to craft a kind of ecclesiastical Lost Cause wherein their preachers had never sullied the pulpit with prewar politics, and it was the North that had abandoned Christ and crucified him for territorial expansion and infrastructural acquisition. Slavery, they insisted, was merely the occasion, rather than the cause, of separation, and the underlying cancer of political intrusion into the pulpit justified and indeed necessitated continued Southern denominational autonomy.

Legitimacy, Holm emphasizes, remained a consistent imperative for Southern evangelicals from the inception of their distinct denominations throughout the Civil War era. In that context, attacks on Southern denominational autonomy, whether through the equitable distribution of centralized funds and infrastructure in the wake of schism or through wartime occupation of property and mobilization of missionaries to the Southern jurisdiction, were...