John C. Carter
Christians
Thu Jul 5 14:42:29 2001


Alan...

I would disagree with your comment that "most Southern volunteers entered the war with predominantly pagan beliefs." You seem to be equating the lack of religious belief and conviction with the conduct of young men who are going off to fight in a war that could possibly cost them their lives. Even in peace time, "sinners" do occasionally cross over the line and behave badly without renouncing their religious beliefs.

I think, however, there is an element of truth in what you have found. Granted, there were many aethiests and agnostics; and Southerners who could easily cast their religious beliefs aside when they thought it was necessary to do so. I think, however, it had a lot to do with the way Southern religion evolved.

Southern protestant religions (as well as Catholicism, Judaism, and the Black churches) were all affected in the 18th and 19th centuries by the Enlightenment and the Evangelical movement of the Second Awakening. It's not the church attendance figures in the census that represent the strength of Southern religion, but the affect that the Evangelical movement had on all of the religions and on the South as a whole. It cut across the social lines and various denominations in the South, and its ideals of conversion and of a personal religious experience, became not only the religious focus of the planters by 1850; but it also became the foundation for a distinct Southern Christianity. With all the diverse elements of southern society and politics, religion was the one connecting institution. As historian, Emory Thomas, points out: "the glue that held this region together (the South) was religion."

The North was affected too by Evangelicalism, but the large number of immigrants coming into the North (unlike the South) and bringing their own religions kept the Evangelical movement from dominating that region. Irregardless of competing religions, the South had followed a different path. Perhaps it came out of the 18th century natural religion of "deism" (from the Enlightenment) which focused on ethics and reason and the belief that God was to be found within each person. Deists, including Thomas Jefferson, believed that society could be built by responsible men using the reason that God had given them, and they did not look to orthodox Christian institutions for solutions. Deism seemed to have found expression again in Southern Evangelicalism. It diverged again from that of the North as it took on an intensive introspection of the self, and the conviction that religion was essentially a private matter between a person and God, and not between the person and the church. It fit very nicely into the entrepreneural nature of the Southern planter and that of the Southern Whigs.

The generation growing to manhood in the 1860 South had fathers who were products of the Second Awakening, and grandfathers who were products of the Enlightenment. All three generations would have had very different ideas about the role of religion in daily life. However, all three seemed to believe in God and share a basic faith that men were basically sinful and had to repent before they stood in judgment before God. In the South, religious conversion became more of an individual process of growth with an obligation to others, which was expressed in the planter's sense of noblesse oblige. In the North it turned more towards a struggle for the reform of society.

My point is that there were not only different religions and societies in the South affecting Southern culture, but there were also individuals who looked to themselves first, then to society afterwards. This left a lot of room for questionable behavior by supposed Christians. Terry Matthews of Wake Forest University makes that point: "Southerners were united by their conviction that human beings were profoundly sinful, a dark self-assessment that was relieved only by the northern too), were practicing Christians (or practitioners of other faiths) who believed in the basic tenements of their religion, but who had a hard time living up to its best ideals ("the better angels of our nature"). Sometimes those ideals were more within the framework of their own religious constructions as they saw them, and not necessarily as a particular church would see them. As for the soldiers, I think "boys will be boys" may also be a good explanation for some of their behavior.

Some good sources on southern religion: Donald C, Matthews, "Religion in the Old South;" Charles S. Sydnor, "The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819-1848;" and Samuel S. Hill, "Southern Churches in Crisis." Also see the site for the class. "Religion in the South," by Terry Matthews at Wake Forest University.

John