At the start of the Civil War, there were more than 53,000 churches in the United States. Although only about 40 percent of the nation’s almost 32 million people were formal members of organized faith traditions, as many as 80 percent of Americans visited Catholic or denominationally Protestant churches regularly.
Churches As Influential Opinion Makers
In addition to inculcating personal faith beliefs, churches acted as important agents of culture. There were, after all, no movies, television or telephones—and certainly no Internet—to inform Americans in their development as citizens.
Along with families and local communities, antebellum and wartime churches were a primary means through which gender and racial roles were outlined and civic knowledge was delivered. Civil War-era religiosity was not confined by the walls of the local meeting house but permeated northern and southern secular society. Mark Noll, an expert on American religions, asserts,
“By 1860, religion had reached a higher point of public influence than at any previous time in American history.”
The southern defense of slavery, for example, was largely formulated by Protestant clergymen and predicated on the biblical validity of the institution. Southern planters, moreover, used biblical catechisms in their efforts to control the enslaved. Northern church leaders were instrumental in all kinds of reform movements of the day, including abolitionism.
Church-affiliated newspapers were widely read and American higher education was principally the provenance of denominations.
Throughout the antebellum period, Catholic and Protestant churches collectively served as the nation’s only organizational instrument of social welfare and indigent assistance. With war, church leaders in both the North and South assumed central roles in maintaining home front commitment to their respective war efforts.
Christianity’s Role On The Battlefield
Away from the home front, men in both Union and Confederate armies were resigned to divine but unalterable providence and certain of a heavenly afterlife; both beliefs made them better soldiers, as military commanders knew and played upon.
Perhaps most importantly, in both the Union and the Confederacy, religion provided a way for men and women to make sense of the unimaginable suffering wrought by the war. Millennialism, a belief in the imminent earthly reign of Christ, was the dominant theme of mid-19th century Christianity.
Most in the North were post-millenialists and believed that the gradual defeat of evil and perfection of humanity would facilitate Christ’s return (postmillennialism helps explain the emergence of so many northern reform movements during the age). These individuals thought of the war as a means of eradicating slavery and other impediments to the establishment of Christ’s new order.
A minority of northerners and southerners were pre-millenialists who believed apocalyptic destruction must precede the new Christly kingdom, a kind of purification through fire. Because of its “New England” origins, many southern Christians eschewed millennialist thought in all of its forms but believed the southern slave society was unequalled in its Christian sublimity, and thus, any sacrifice offered in its defense was warranted.
In one way or another, then, wartime Americans viewed the Civil War through the lens of religion and saw it as a prerequisite for a coming age of peace, prosperity and spiritual harmony.
Minority Faiths
Civil War-era Americans typically attended Catholic or mainstream Protestant services (usually Baptist, Methodist or Presbyterian), but such was not always the case. Hundreds of thousands of historic “peace” church members, chiefly Brethren and Mennonites, including Amish and Quakers, adhered to the doctrine of Christian pacifism, although some took up arms in the conflict. There were 150,000 Jews in the U.S. when the Civil War began; 7,000 served in the Union Army while 3,000 fought for the Confederacy. A small number of Americans, almost all of them northerners, practiced mystical religions like Swedenborgianism.
Pennsylvania was unique among all the states in its proliferation of such comparatively minor groups, owing to its long history of religious tolerance. Of the country’s 109 Mennonite meeting houses, 95 were in the state, as were roughly one-fourth of all Baptist Brethren places of worship (46 of 163). There were also more Friends churches (141) in Pennsylvania than even in New York (116). All told, the Keystone State could boast of more than 5,300 churches when the war began, more than any other state in the North or the South.
The Spirit Of America
In the last decades of the antebellum age, religion played an increasingly formative role in American society, so much so that even avowed secularists could not escape its cultural influence.
Thus, when word of Fort Sumter’s fall spread throughout the divided country, religion shaped the way in which most people received and interpreted the news. When the war grew bloody beyond all expectations, faith helped Americans make sense of it all.
By the war’s close, the spiritual zeal of the American people had taken a considerable hit, and ethical scientism and societal secularization further lessened the church’s role (though not its size) in American society in the post-war decades. But during the Civil War, religion shaped American life in a unique and profound way.