The Politics of Faith: Religious Authority and Politics During the American Civil War
Open Access
- Author:
- Wesley, Timothy Leon
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 07, 2010
- Committee Members:
- William Alan Blair, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
William Alan Blair, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Amy S Greenberg, Committee Member
Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, Committee Member
Stephen Howard Browne, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Civil War
religion
preachers
politics - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the political involvement of denominational preachers, both black and white and in both the North and South, during the Civil War. Wartime ministers were often gravely conflicted, torn between patriotic impulses and a desire to maintain the inviolability of their sacred pulpits. Churchmembers and lay people however often expected the clergy to lead home front campaigns to sustain their respective war efforts and were unwilling to abide clerical apathy or recalcitrance. Most in the Union believed in fact that religious propriety did not discourage, but actually compelled, preachers to rhetorically toe the Union line. In the South, where political preaching was in theory an abomination but was in reality an established fact of life by the beginning of the Civil War, preachers became important agents of Southern nationalism and arbiters of Confederate loyalty. And as directed by the leaders of the foremost independent black denominations, the politicized wartime leadership of the African American clergy was characterized by both an emphasis on racial uplift and a persistent level of disagreement among its members. In looking at conventional denominationalists who resisted the politicization of their offices and not, as a rule, pacifist or Peace Church leaders, this project reveals a degree of individuality and self-determination among members of the mainstream wartime clergy that has not been identified before. The categorization of ministerial thought featured in this dissertation is predicated on the truism that spirituality was as salient as Copperheadism in the formation of clerical attitudes during the war and thus likewise challenges the dominant historiography. And by showing the ways in which the greater society---including elements of state and local governments and the national government, denominational hierarchies, and local populations---proscribed ministerial speech during the war, this dissertation seminally posits that the war marked the first meaningful campaign to check the clergy‘s freedom of speech in the nation‘s history. In the end, what emerges in this study is a wartime America different, in terms of the conflation of religion and politics, policing of dissent, and consensus among members of the ministerial class, than most imagine today.