Especially in times of war Americans have claimed for their nation a unique world mission, often defining it in religious terms. James Moorhead analyzes a crucial episode of this patriotic piety through the behavior of four major Northern Protestant denominations in the 1860s. After examining the antebellum origins of the concept of America as a redeemer nation, he investigates the churches’ use of familiar dogmas—principally that of millennialism—to interpret the experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Moorhead studies the words of leading theological spokesmen, the popular religious press, and the printed sermons of ministers now little known. His vivid narrative explains how the war between North and South became an apocalyptic struggle in which the federal armies battled for the Lord on the field of Armageddon. Northern Protestants expected dramatic consequences from the contest. Moorhead shows how their inflated hopes reinforced simplistic views of slavery, Reconstruction policies, and the future of American democracy. In a final overview of the Gilded Age, he relates the tumultuous events of the 1860s to the tensions and failures of Protestantism in the late nineteenth century.