In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War by Benjamin L. Miller (review)

In the book In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War, Benjamin L. Miller explores how religious life was constructed during the Civil War on battlefields and in military camps, hospitals, and prisons in both the North and the South. By examining the role of the clergy in organizing religious communities and constituting and modifying religious spaces in camp conditions, he portrays worship practices during the war and the spaces in which they took place. Miller’s book is the first study on the Civil War to use as its framework the study of religious space, which “is important because one cannot divorce religious experience from ritual space” (p. 2).

The book begins by identifying some of the thousands of clergymen who associated with the armies and by describing their prewar clerical work. The author explains the challenges that chaplains and missionaries faced in wartime conditions and how they solved problems by building on antebellum religious practices while also modifying those prewar practices to better suit the chaotic life of the camp and the battlefield. Miller then proceeds to write about soldiers as worshippers, their relationship with preachers, and the adaptation, with the help of the clergy, of prewar religious practices to those of the camp. In an especially engaging section, he shows how chaplains and missionaries constructed sacred spaces, such as chapels, in the camps and how they toiled to create dynamic makeshift sacred spaces amid battles or hospital beds. Miller concludes by arguing that these wartime religious practices impacted the development of postwar civil religion.

The ecumenism in both armies, a central theme in this book, is one of its most interesting findings. Miller argues that sectional differences in religious practices diminished during the war, as wartime exigencies created practices that abandoned denominational and sectarian differences. “With few exceptions,” he notes, “chaplains and missionaries ministered to men regardless of religious belief, racial identity, or army affiliation” (p. 4). Because this practice was unprecedented, the conclusion would have benefited from a more thorough analysis of northern and southern practices of religion before the war and their transformation. Another key theme is “the masculinization of religious adherence,” stemming from the fact that the religious community in the camp was, by necessity, composed of men (p. 5). The book would therefore be more balanced by a dialogue with the abundant literature on manhood before, during, and after the war to further develop that argument.

Miller’s extensively researched book uses a variety of both northern and southern sources. The book is well structured, informative, and clearly written. One of its strengths is that the author has ambitiously approached the relationship of faith and war by applying questions formulated by other disciplines to historical study. Even so, the book would yield a more comprehensive outlook on religious spaces had the framework been more distinctly explained. Miller introduces the concept of “religious space” by referring to multiple, rather divergent, works by “religious theorists” (p. 1). A more thorough discussion of how these works contribute to the framework, and especially how the author applies these various ideas, would have been fruitful. The framework would have also benefited from recent studies carried out in the field of geographies of religion to conceptualize spatial practices and performances of place.

That being said, In God’s Presence is a welcome study of religion’s role in the Civil War and also a useful read for everyone interested in the daily life of the camp and the battlefield. It contributes to our understanding of religious spaces beyond so-called official sacred places and of the importance of the clergy in community construction and everyday practices during the war.