Mark Noll’s Civil War as Theological Crisis isn’t a new book. It’s a book that I first heard of as an undergrad—and that remained on my “to read” list through graduate school, never graduating to the “have read” list. I’ve been on a slight Civil War kick as of late, in some ways ill timed, as I never had any interest in nineteenth century American history before, even in my graduate seminar on the topic. Shelby Foote says at the beginning of Ken Burns’ history of the Civil War that to understand the United States—all our divisions, all our peculiarities—one must understand the Civil War. Noll’s book illustrates that in a unique way.
If there was one way that we could be said to have moved beyond the war (one may believe), surely it is in the arena of religion. The nineteenth century was a time of pietistic revivalism in the woods, of the movement towards the “masculine” Christ, a time when the temperance movement was stirring. Most of all, it was a time when a pro-slavery Christianity could still be imagined, when abolitionism was a radical and fringe view, and a time when the “literalists” could marshal arguments from Leviticus and Philemon in support of chattel slavery. Surely we’ve moved beyond this.
Noll’s answer in 2006 was the same as it would be today: we haven’t. Americans then were consumed with questions of political theology, looking for divine justification for their actions, and reading Lincoln’s “same Bible” with an unbridgeable chasm between the two sides as to what that Bible meant. They claimed to exalt scripture while maintaining a strong skepticism of authority and emphasizing the direct operation of grace. This strong Protestantism was often inexorably tied up with republican nationalism, seeing the United States as in a covenantal relationship with Israel’s God. Furthermore, all of this was buttressed by an enlightenment belief that knowledge was simple and simply obtained. This was a move away from historic Christianity in so many ways, including the general move away from Augustinian conceptions of the sinful individual and the resultant need for the intermediate institutions of the church and the state to promote virtue and the common good. This Augustinian dialectic was replaced by a libertarian ethos with an individualism where good, moral choices were within reach of each individual responsible for himself—and those who were unable to make these decisions were simply needing of the heart change of a revival to redirect the sinner.
This unbridgeable chasm and belief in the simplicity of knowledge led to an intractable divide. First, this centered around the Bible itself, as pro-slavery advocates could simply point to the aforementioned Levitical and Pauline permissiveness as warrant for their roles as slavers. Abolitionists could not point so easily to a prooftext. It seems obvious now that a truly Christian anthropology would point towards the abolition of slavery and racial equality—but it did not then. And, due in part to the express permission some parts of scripture give to slavery in the ancient world, it takes a sustained reading of the whole of scripture to get there. This was the position of the moderates at the time, who pointed that obviously slavery was permissive in a legal sense due to accommodating scriptural references, but nonetheless that it should be eventually and incrementally abolished as incompatible with Christianity. For them, the radical position that slavery was not permissive in any context was at odds with scripture itself, and created a wedge between those who took the bible “seriously” and those who did not—with the more liberal-radical abolitionists being accused of the latter.
But of course, American Christianity has never been known for its ability to countenance nuance. The moderates and abolitionists had one point on which they had the sure upper-hand: scripture was not compatible with the racialized slavery of the American South. While the world has known wide-spread slavery from the ancient to the early-modern world, slavery based on the inferiority of one race to another—of the black to the white—could never be seen to be compatible with the permissiveness of scripture. Paul would countenance Philemon remaining a slave in the Roman system; but the Ethiopian Eunuch was not to be made a slave because he was dark-skinned. And at this point white, pro-slavery Christians fell back to their “common sense,” pointing to racist traits and arguments about their supposed superiority over their black slaves. The North was not immune from this impulse to be sure. As Noll notes, this is a distinct example of the nationalistic aspect of their ideology, as white, American Christians believed they had more in common with other white Americans than with black Christians. He points to the fact too that this had a detrimental impact on the evangelization of the Indian populations, who believed that conversion to Christianity would surely mean subjugation for themselves if white Christians treated black Christians so.
Noll points to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as a unique example of subtle and nuanced theological thought during the day. Lincoln could withhold judgment, wondering why God had permitted the scourge of war to destroy the nation, imagining that the war was God’s judgment on the land for slavery and praying that it would pass quickly, but ultimately placing his faith in the God who judges good from evil:
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
Lincoln’s faith was not regnant in the culture at the time. Noll notes that few trusted that God was in control for good or ill, or acknowledged the fact that a sovereign God may be acting in ways that they did not understand—in ways that are contrary even to how they believed he should. Instead, many feared the other and cultural change, believed that Christians who were different were not true Christians, and morphed their religion from something that orthodoxly would stand apart from and above politics in order to critique politics, into politics itself.
It should be noted, as well, that this is not something only seen today in conservative, evangelical Christianity, although it is certainly easier to see it there. As Noll points out, the radical anti-slavery movement was at first accused (incorrectly, often) of not hewing sufficiently to scripture. Eventually the slander came to be true, as it morphed into a secular leftism that would rewrite or ignore scripture at whim. Not that this was new in American life, as the example of Jefferson illustrates. If the besetting sin of American conservative Christianity is hypocrisy and heresy, the besetting sin of American liberal Christianity is blasphemy and apostacy. But where it fails to reckon with scripture itself, the liberal experiment often aims more directly at scripture’s political goals: radical equality and justice. What are we to make of a country in which those who purportedly read scripture are often blind to its message, but where those who would carry out its message often fail to read it and belittle it? It is certainly a conundrum—and certainly belies future crises of equal theological basis.
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