The American Experience of a Darkening and Receding Providence: The Civil War and the Unmaking of an American Religious Synthesis

Recent studies of religion during the Civil War period have revealed an underlying theme: a widespread belief in both North and South in a particular and deterministic divine providence. In this essay, and drawing especially upon George C. Rable’s God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War, Dr. Bender outlines the details of this doctrine and argues that its intrinsic weaknesses and problems played a part in the unraveling of a Christian understanding of history in the post-war period in America. The Civil War thus stands as an important marker and event in the history of the secularization of American culture and the receding of Christian witness within and influence upon it.