Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877Oxford University Press, 28 mai 1998 - 288 pages Both the North and the South viewed the Civil War in Christian terms. Each side believed that its fight was just, that God favored its cause. Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W. Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart of which was the fate of the freedpeople's souls and the southern effort to maintain a sense of sectional identity. Central to the southern churches' vision of the Civil War was the idea that God had not abandoned the South; defeat was a Father's stern chastisement. Secession and slavery had not been sinful; rather, it was the radicalism of the northern denominations that threatened the purity of the Gospel. Northern evangelicals, armed with a vastly different vision of the meaning of the war and their call to Christian duty, entered the post-war South intending to save white southerner and ex-slave alike. The freedpeople, however, drew their own providential meaning from the war and its outcome. The goal for blacks in the postwar period was to establish churches for themselves separate from the control of their former masters. Stowell plots the conflicts that resulted from these competing visions of the religious reconstruction of the South. By demonstrating how the southern vision eventually came to predominate over, but not eradicate, the northern and freedpeople's visions for the religious life of the South, he shows how the southern churches became one of the principal bulwarks of the New South, a region marked by intense piety and intense racism throughout the twentieth century. |
Table des matières
3 | |
Disruption Destruction and Confusion | 15 |
The Confederate Understanding of the Civil War | 33 |
The Northern Understanding of the Civil War | 49 |
The Freedpeoples Understanding of the Civil War | 65 |
The Black Quest for Religious Autonomy | 80 |
Denominational Structures | 100 |
Sunday Schools | 114 |
Northern Missionary Efforts in the South | 130 |
Religion and Politics in the Reconstruction South | 146 |
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ABHMS Alabama AME Church AMEZ Annual Conference MECS antebellum April armies Assembly Atlanta August Baptist Association Baptist Church Baton Rouge Bishop black Baptist black churches black members Brownlow Caldwell Chattanooga Christian Index Civil CME Church College colored committee Confederacy Confederate congregations Cumberland Presbyterian declared Emory Freedmen's freedpeople George Foster Pierce Georgia Annual Conference Georgia Baptist Convention Georgia Conference God's Henry McNeal Turner History Holsey James John Knoxville Louisiana State University Macon McCallie membership Memphis Mercer University Methodist Episcopal Church Minutes Nashville Negro North Carolina Northern and Southern northern black northern denominations northern missionaries organized pastor PCUSA political preach preachers Presbyterian Church quotation Religion religious reconstruction religious scalawags reunion secession slavery slaves South Southern Baptist Convention Southern Baptists southern churches southern evangelicals Southern Presbyterian southern white Sunday school Tennessee Baptist Convention Thomas tion Turner Union United University of Georgia University Press white southerners wrote York Zion
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Page 3 - THE righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: And merciful men are taken away, none considering That the righteous is taken away from the evil to come.