In the decades between George Washington’s first presidential inauguration and Abraham Lincoln’s, nearly 50,000 church structures sprang up in the young nation, “sacralizing the landscape,” as the Welsh historian Richard Carwardine writes in this deeply researched new study. Religion had played an active role in American life since the Puritans, but its explosive growth in the first half of the 19th century, especially among evangelicals, resulted in most Americans’ believing that divine providence was operating not only in their daily lives but also in the direction of their exceptionalist country. The First Amendment outlawed the establishment of a national religion, but the founders “left room for the civic role of Christian ideas and values,” Carwardine writes. The preachers at the pulpits in those many new houses of worship, as well as existing ones, often entwined religion and the idea of America’s specialness, creating “the substantial and visible building blocks of nationhood.”
But even as this unifying theme was promoted by a broad range of Christian denominations, the differences among these groups hardened in ways that paralleled and reinforced political differences. Carwardine sees two general divides that eventually merge into one. The first was between pious, theocratic New England millennialists who sought to make the United States a moral exemplar for other nations, and the anti-Yankee, anti-authoritarian “upstart churches” that catered with “a plain gospel” to immigrants and settlers in the middle, southern, and western states. These worshippers, many of them uneducated, valued personal and religious freedom. The second divide was over the question of emancipation, which separated the churches along similar lines. Because religionists who were pro-abolition and anti-abolition both found, or thought they did, biblical reinforcement for their positions, the growing political disputes over the future of slavery, both in new states and eventually in the nation at large, led inexorably not to compromise but to war.
Lincoln spoke against slavery in the 1850s, and his 1860 election on the antislavery Republican ticket overjoyed those who believed that enslavement was a stain that must be removed before the nation could deserve the full blessings of Providence. The secessionists of South Carolina read the same Bible and worshipped the same God but drew the tragically different conclusion that slavery and Christianity were compatible, as did many other churchgoers in both the South and the North.