| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark A. Noll. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. (The Stephen and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. x, 199. $29.95.
Mark A. Noll writes in his impressive new study that "theology in the Civil War is now riding the crest of a historiographical wave" (p. 11). From the height of that wave Noll has been able to describe its force and direction and to see far ahead. His pithy book is a summation and extension of many trends in the fields of American religious history and Civil War-era ideology. The book is bound to spark major revisionist studies and challenge young scholars to explore its provocative and convincing theses. Chief among them is Noll's blunt revelation that the most trampled topic in American historiography, the Civil War, has yet to be fully understood as a cultural rupture of the first order. The war, and the moral and theological debates about slavery central to its causes, crippled American Protestantism and altered its role in national discourse. The theological crisis of the era constituted much more than high-minded wrangling among ministers. Theological meltdowns presaged broad cultural, ideological, and institutional dissolution as the war came on and progressed.	1
Prior to the Civil War Christians in the United States reveled in self-aggrandizing formulas that explained the nation and the universe. Divine providence directed events and designed favorable paths for the new country. The Bible stood as a shared standard and an accessible guide to morality, both private and public. Yet the rhetoric based on these two pillars of American theology, assuming a distinctive religious culture, turned out to be bluster. The national culture was dependent on religious authority, but lacked it (p. 159). In this democratic religious setting, a multitude of "self-selected individuals" (p. 122) claimed authority to interpret both scripture and providence.	. . .

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