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

God's Almost Chosen Peoples is the most recent offering from George C. Rable, the Charles Summersell Professor of Southern History at the University of Alabama and author of the highly acclaimed Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). In his latest work, Rable explores how the American people interpreted the Civil War through their religion. To achieve his goal, he has mined the records of churches, voluntary religious organizations, and devout Americans from all walks of life. He explores these sources in twenty approximately chronological chapters that proceed from the coming of the war to the surrender at Appomattox Court House. While there is no driving thesis, two key themes emerge from Rable's examination of religion in the Civil War. In particular, he elucidates the role played by civil religion in the Union and the Confederacy, and he investigates how Americans' providential view of history affected their understanding of the war.

Civil religion, which Rable defines as "a set of beliefs about the relationship between God and the nation that emphasized national virtue, national purpose, and national destiny," supported each section's war effort by creating linkages between patriotism and religion (p. 3). For instance, throughout the war both governments held numerous official days of thanksgiving or prayer either to celebrate God-given victories or beseech His divine intervention in the conflict. At the same time, churches in the North and South increasingly entered the political arena to support a variety of governmental policies such as conscription, southern secession, or emancipation.

Americans also shared a providential view of history that seemed to border on fatalism. This belief held that every event in human history played out within God's ultimate plan for mankind and with His final approval. As Rable acknowledges, this view lengthened the war by maintaining morale even in the face of seemingly crushing defeats on the battlefield. For example, after the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson in the western theater, devout southerners still believed themselves to be God's chosen people. Many southerners viewed these defeats as a divine punishment inflicted for some national sin, but they could not conceive that God would countenance their ultimate defeat. This was a common perception. The belief in God's direct oversight of mankind usually prompted Americans to see military setbacks as punishments inflicted because of some societal failing. Many northerners certainly took this point of view following the Union debacle at Bull Run in July 1861. Northern religious leaders in this case continued their active support for the war even while trying to identify the particular northern sin that had required divine punishment; suggestions included Sabbath-breaking, the framers' failure to invoke God in the Constitution, rampant materialism, and even slavery. While this belief in God's direct involvement in human affairs survived the war, the emphasis on civil religion did not. In the defeated South, the devout turned their focus from the secular to the sacred, shifting their attention to individual conversions. A similar development occurred in the North, where the intense suffering inflicted by the war "made the standard messages of salvation all that more appealing" (p. 395).

Despite the significance of civil religion and a providential understanding of the world, this book is not narrowly focused on these two themes because, as Rable acknowledges, such an approach "would miss important exceptions, ignore significant dissenters, and overlook paths not taken" (p. 7). To avoid these pitfalls, Rable provides a synthetic account of the ways in which Americans filtered their understanding of the war through their religion. While his approach highlights these major themes, it also includes room for a consideration of religious minorities, conscientious objectors, the roles of the clergy at home and in the armies, as well as the multitude of ways in which religion shaped contemporary Americans' understanding of the conflict.

Unfortunately, this synthetic approach requires a...