Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Regional Religion and North-South Alienation in Antebellum America

Abstract

I have long been intrigued with the role of the American churches in dividing the nation and reinforcing the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Elsewhere I have argued that evangelical Protestantism was a major bond of unity for the United States during the first part of the nineteenth century; that the chief institutional forms of this faith were the large popular denominations—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, each with nationwide constituencies; that these denominations, increasingly agitated by disputes over slavery, sundered into northern and southern factions long before political rupture, thus opening the first major cleavage between slaveholding and free states; and that the denominational schisms portended and to some extent provoked the crisis of the Union in 1861. What I wish to pursue further in this article is how the regional religion which these schisms both exposed and augmented not only broke a primary bond of national unity but also furnished a persuasive example of sectional independence, encouraged the myth of peaceable secession, reinforced North-South alienation, and heightened the moral outrage which each section felt against the other. The “inner civil war” of the divided churches thus exacerbated the ordeal of the Union and confirmed the nation's course to unrepressed conflict.

‘Money does not stink’ – Accounting and slavery

“…However, there were major disagreements among religious groups regarding the morality of slavery before the Civil War. See Goen (1983). The Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodist Episcopal churches split along regional lines over the issue of slavery.…”

Another Civil War in America? Comparing the Social Psychology of the United States of the 1850s to Today

“…Churches offer an excellent example of such "bridging," particularly when they extend over large geographic areas with diverse views, as did the larger Protestant denominations in the early history of the United States (Smidt & Smidt, 2003). By the mid-1840s, however, both Baptists and Methodists officially split over the issue of slavery, with the new Southern denominations-the Southern Baptists and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South-holding that slavery was biblically sanctioned, in direct opposition to the Northern branches (Goen, 1983).…”

How Religion Shapes Foreign Policy? An Explanatory Model for Non-Western States

“…Here, I use the term "regional religion" differently from the mainstream religious studies which usually has a strong reference to "region" rather than the concept, for example, see Hunt and Hunt (2000) and Goen (1983).…”