Recently Received: Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877, by Daniel W. Stowell. Publisher: Oxford University Press.

Churches in the South played a crucial political and social role during the Civil War, providing people with both temporal and transcendent justifications for both slavery and secession. The South lost, however, which created a crisis for southern evangelicals who now had to deal with how so righteous and holy a cause could fail. What happened that allowed them to develop the “Lost Cause” myth and prevail over the religious perspectives of northern Christians?

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