If we’re looking for a time of high tension and intense polarization, now would be a good example. Covid is raging and political actors are lashing about finding someone else to blame for it, while economic and social breakdown builds and climate change accelerates. Deep at the core the invisible shift in values goes on from unbending authoritarian toward its opposite, nurturant progressive. The potential for violence in this milieu is real and is appearing more intensely and frequently.
As Dr. Lisa Schirch* says, conflict is local. Always local. World war I started as a local event. The American Civil War started local. So did every war. What were the human networks in those local communities doing when conflict broke out on their watch?
As for the Civil War, some recent historical research** is examining the role Southern white churches played in the build-up to war. It doesn’t sound pretty. Southern religiosity was intensified in the early part of the 17th century through the Great Awakening. If you have any Baptist heritage you might remember grandparents soulful recall of huge revivals that swept the South. There were attempts to revive the revivals in my youth in the 1950’s, that never met the expectations of those who remembered. Churches were ecstatic hubs of inspiration for a couple of generations, and networks of evangelists criss-crossed the South carrying the flame of faith between churches and communities. My grandpa, born in 1899, was one of them.
Private letters and published sermons reveal that evangelical ministers used the local church networks that emerged to defend their deep authoritarian values, and the economic engine of the South, (the institution of slavery, a quintessential authoritarian system). Organized regional religious networks emerged in the early 1800’s that were utilized as bully pulpits that pressured Southern politicians to take more extreme positions on secession and slavery to ensure the purity and power of faith.
Private William Sergent of Co. E, 53rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, in uniform, after the amputation of both arms. 1861. © Library of Congress
During early Southern war victories those same ministers touted God’s blessings on his faithful, but as things fell apart for the south they shifted to blaming church members for losses because they were insufficiently pious. The sense among some historians was that this was an important cause for the collapse of Southern morale.
Southern ministers had a huge impact. Hearing themselves portrayed from the pulpit as noble defenders of the faith made soldiers face certain death on the battlefield with fierce determination. It helped them endure months of privation in the camps to know their family was at home supporting them with every prayer and every public fast day. As victory shifted to defeat, it affected them just as deeply when ministers – their authority figures – told them they were losing because their faith wasn’t strong enough. That their families weren’t praying hard enough. As the war dragged on, it was likely a factor in choices to abandon their comrades on the field and go home.
It also led seductively into the doctrine of the Lost Cause that still drives white nationalism and Southern politics today.
The church networks built before the Civil War are still operational. The Southern Baptist Convention, The United Methodist General Conference, and The Presbyterian General Assemblies were all built during that time. The Methodists and Presbyterians backed away from the extreme elements of the pre-war system. The Baptists averted the issue by ignoring their connection to the war. When I was growing up, Baptist history had two parts, as printed in the Baptist Faith and Practice of the time: 1) John the Baptist was our founder, and 2) we defended separation of church and state when we emigrated to America. When asked what happened during the rest of our history, nobody seemed to know anything about it.
* Dr. Lisa Schirch — North American Research Director for the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, Senior Policy Advisor with the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and Research Professor at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. https://emu.edu/faculty-staff/?show=schirchl
** “God, Fatalism, and the Downfall of the Confederacy”, Robert L. Wheeler Jr., 2016, thesis in military history American Public University. file:///C:/Users/glady/Downloads/GOD_FATALISM_AND_THE_DOWNFALL_OF_THE_CON%20(2).pdf
**“Baptist Accommodations to Slavery: A Study of Economics and Southern Notions of Honor”, Frederick Widdowson,
**“The Effects of the Civil War on Southern Baptist Beliefs” John T. Sneed, Trident University International, file:///C:/Users/glady/Downloads/The_Effects_of_the_Civil_War_on_Southern%20(1).pdf