Summary
Title: Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877
Author: Daniel W. Stowell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195149815
Pro:
• Extensive documentation
• Reveals an important aspect of American religious history which continues to resonate today
Con:
• Very academic in style
Description:
• Analysis of how Southerners, Northerners, and Freedpeople rebuilt religion after the Civil War
• Demonstrates how current patterns of belief may derive from religious reconstruction
Book Review
Christians seem to have a remarkable ability to attribute to God and God’s will just about any attitude or belief they themselves hold. Whatever they want, God also happens to want. Whatever they believe, God also happens to believe. When Southerners wanted slavery, they managed to find that God also supported slavery.
When Southerners wanted to leave the Union and create a slave-holding nation, they managed to find ample support in God’s words for that as well. Throughout the course of the war, they cited God and the Bible to argue that the South was engaged in a holy and righteous cause.
Of course, that cause suffered a humiliating defeat. If Southerners’ religious beliefs were followed to their logical conclusion, they would have decided that they had been wrong and that the Northerners who were doing the exact same thing for the other side of those issues were right. Southerners’ Christian beliefs were not dictated by logic, however, they were dictated by faith — and faith always manages to find a way around inconvenient facts.
So, Southerners decided that they lost because they were impure of heart rather than because slavery was an unmitigated evil — to admit that they lost because they had been wrong all along would have bee too large a blow to their sense of self and their self-identification as Southerners.
They had to have been right; therefore, their loss must be attributed to other reasons. Many argued that God was chastising them in order to prepare them for some higher and glorious purpose in the future — that certainly helped them think highly of themselves.
As Daniel W. Stowell explains in his book Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877:
- “Central to their remarkably resilient worldview was the adamant conviction that God still favored the South and its churches. Slavery as an institution and secession were not sinful, though most admitted that some abuses had existed in the practice of slavery. Since northern denominations were hopelessly political and radical, the southern denominations had a duty to preserve the Gospel untainted. Furthermore, while northerners and freedpeople controlled much of the political and economic life of the South, southern evangelicals had to maintain their churches as bastions regional identity.”
Military loss produced a serious strain on Southerners’ faith in the idea that God wore grey and supported slavery. Ultimately, though, their vision of Southern religion, identity, and politics won out over the competing vision offered by northern evangelists — namely, that the South lost because both slavery and secession were sinful acts that God punished. Northerners wanted southern churches to reunite into national denominations again, but Southerners refused.
For Southerners, maintaining separate churches was necessary to hold on to who they really were. Churches became a primary vehicle for transmitting cultural as well as religious identity. Through the churches Southerners were able to transmit to their children their ideals about slavery, the inequality of the races, the righteousness of secession, the evil and tainted gospel preached by Northerners, and so forth. Except for the overt racism and defense of slavery, the situation today remains strikingly similar.
