Glory! Glory, Hallelujah!

Elsewhere in these posts I’ve praised Mark Noll for his excellent work in tracing the history of Christianity in the American colonies and the early United States. Many Christians I’ve known in my life believe that this country was founded as a Christian nation, that God willed and established its theocratic constitution, and that any deviation from that foundation is a theological, moral, legal, and civic violation. They might also say that my disagreement with them indicates my lesser faith or spirituality. Some of the “history” books they recommended to me (many years ago – I’ve quit having the discussion with them since then) made arguments like this: since Columbus’s primary motive in traveling was to Christianize this continent, since he was absolutely consistent in his Christian treatment of the natives, and since his mission so obviously legally binds all future development of white civilization in North America, this country is a Christian theocracy, and anyone who sees it differently is absolutely wrong. To say that each of those premises is highly problematic would be an understatement. But where was the actual history that refutes such nonsense? Real historians are, alas!, so rarely interested in the subject of religion, it took me a long time to find the answer. The Search for Christian America by Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden proved to be the book I was looking for. Three years ago, I read even more on the subject in Noll’s America’s God. Among the scores of head-turning points Noll makes in that masterpiece is the one whose logic is very straightforward once one looks at it: if the United States was from 1776 a Christian nation, then why did so many Christians in the early 1800s try to make it a Christian nation?

This month I read Steven E. Woodworth’s While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers. I had seen the book highly praised both in the circle of Christian scholarship and by general historians of the Civil War. So my expectations were high. Wow! Did I hit a giant road bump when I read early on that “Americans” (all of them, apparently) saw their country as Christian from the time of Winthrop’s city on a hill until the Civil War. There’s the old, weird notion again. Woodworth himself knows better, because he admits that less than half of the population at the time of the Civil War was Christian, but he never addresses that contradiction. Another disappointing problem plagued the first two or three chapters. Woodworth wanted to tell the gospel in describing the most prominent religion among the soldiers, but his overzealousness leads him (1) to ignore some minority religious views (Catholicism, Judaism, etc.), which I would love to have read more about, and (2) to judge the truth of various forms of Protestantism. He says, for instance, that many fell into the “errors” of Calvinism on “subtle” issues. Does Woodworth really believe he has all the subtle doctrines straight, dogmas Christians have debated without conclusion for five hundred years, and that his audience will just accept his positions on the issues as authoritative? I was so discouraged at first!

But then he got to the main section of the book, which presented a chronological history of the war and chapters delving more deeply into special topics, and I suddenly saw why everyone else liked the book so much. The chapters on southern Christians’ justification of their cause, on the work and dubious benefit of army chaplains, and on the good and universally admired work of the missionaries of the Christian Commission are very good. The abundance of quotations from letters and diaries suits his purpose and theme perfectly. The chapter on the revival in 1862 and 1863 is especially good. Many Christians feared the army experience would coarsen men and lower moral standards, and many young Christians wrote home to their mothers and wives about the disturbances of profanity and the temptations to playing cards. But religious interest among these men roughing it for four years away from the softening influences of their nineteenth-century women actually grew, and revivals took place spontaneously throughout the northern and southern armies.

Ronald White presents a tantalizing hint of the spiritual lives of the Civil War armies in Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, a book about Lincoln’s second inaugural address that is so good, its author almost convinces me that it is history’s greatest speech. But after reading Woodworth’s book, I see a deep new dimension to the fierce combatants who, as Lincoln said, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God.