| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. By Mark A. Noll. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xii, 199 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3012-3.)

This book by the eminent religious historian, Wheaton College's McManis Professor Mark A. Noll, is a welcome addition to the recent surge of scholarly work on the U.S. Civil War and is an extension of arguments that Noll has advanced previously, most notably in his book America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002). Originating as the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures at Penn State University in 2003, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis cogently tracks familiar ground about the contrasting ways in which American preachers, religious scholars, and public figures interpreted the Bible and the providential workings of God in relation to the issue of slavery. Noll stresses the overwhelmingly Protestant character of American religious life and culture in the nineteenth century, the rise of an explicitly religious and ethical defense of slavery as a reaction to the ascendance of radical abolitionism in the early 1830s, the centrality of divine providence as a religious category in nineteenth-century American Protestantism, and the tendency on both sides of the debate about scriptural meaning to subordinate biblical texts regarding race to those regarding slavery.

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