From the book: The Attitude of the Northern Clergy Toward the South, first published in 1942. Its author, Chester S. Dunham, wrote Southern Christianity or the theological position of Southern Christian churches was thoroughly orthodox.
Religion in the South supported the civilization, culture and social order south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners saw themselves primarily as a Christian people and their civilization was the outworking of that view…In the decades prior to the War Between the States, Southerners were also aware that their peculiar institution of slavery was coming under increasing attack by the rest of Western Civilization. During this period, Southern clergymen and laity urged southerners to bring slavery more in line with biblical principles.
Northern churches were moving toward more liberal positions on original sin, human depravity. Unitarianism, transcendentalism, atheism, Utopian Socialists. These flourished in the north.
It is not the narrow question of abolition or slavery, whether we should emancipate our Negros or not. The real question is the relationship of man to society, of states to the individual.
These are the mighty questions that are shaking thrones to their centers, rocking the solid pillars of this union. The parties in this conflict are not merely atheists or communists, red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. The world is a battleground. Christianity and atheism the combatants. The progress of humanity is at stake.
It was a clash of orthodox Christianity in the south against Northern liberals who professed Christianity while they did their best to destroy its central doctrines…
Some of the radical abolitionists in the North reviled the Bible because it did not condemn slavery and admired John Brown for his violent murderous rampage and raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
After Lincoln’s election, the South Carolina legislation passed an act Nov. 11, 1860 calling for a state convention to deliberate the question of secession. Soon afterward the governor proclaimed a day of humiliation and prayer.
On that day, Nov. 21, Dr. Thomas Smyth preached a sermon entitled the Sin and the Curse. It laminated the death of this Glorious Constitutional Union and identified America’s true source of this union as “the infidel atheistic, French Revolution, Red Republican principle embodied in the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence. All men are not born equal. The equality is that all men are born in sin. The nation is divided because of the influence of a group of Americans rejected the divine inspiration and infallibility of the Bible and who developed their own code of morality, or higher law principle. They were an overwhelming mass of atheists, infidels, Communists, free lovers, rationalists, Bible Haters, Anti-Christian levelers and anarchists who held a self-developing morality, and who decided that a majority of His creatures can decide for God and against God that slavery is in its essential nature absolutely sinful that it is so essentially and heinously wicked, that in order to overthrow it, compacts may be broken, and robbery, murder, arson, treason, rebellion, massacre, with all the hellish crew of bigotry, hatred, uncharitableness, are let loose to devastate and destroy. They pervert the great doctrines of personal responsibility, liberty of conscience, opinion and action. This they do by requiring all others to adopt as God’s truth, that which is contrary to scripture, and by assuming that they are responsible for the conduct and conscience of other men. And what could be the result of this “higher law?” that is the majority and equality principle, but anarchy, prodigality, profanity, Sabbath profanation, vice and ungodliness in every monstrous form. In the end, the corruption and overthrow of the republic and the erection upon its ruins of a bloody despotism of which coercion is the bloody principle. An anti-slavery Bible must have an anti-slavery god, and a god anti-law, order, property and morality. That is no god but the god of this world (Satan).
Many Northern clergymen believed that the civilization of what they called the semi-barbarous and religiously orthodox South should be done away with.
As one historian put it, Northerners sought to make regnant in the South the Northern way of life.
One religious journal of Boston, The Christian Register editorialized in 1865, The present condition in the South to a great extent is a result of its religious teaching. She needs men who preach the practical righteousness and aim to build up the church of the divine humanity. The South is missionary ground and needs a new gospel. Its theology and preaching must be changed. The South, in order to be thoroughly regenerated, must have a religion which shall conform to the essential ideas, aims, and spirit of liberal Christianity.
That writer is urging a kind of cultural genocide, making Southerners give up their traditions and beliefs and making them over in the image of the North.
There were also calls by the radicals, for the actual extermination of the Southern people.
The South as a Christian Civilization
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