A good book review is a historian’s best friend. In that spirit, The Life of a Historian offers our review of…
Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Oshatz, Molly. Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Affiliate Disclosure
The Life of the Historian:
A Book Review of Mark Noll’s and Molly Oshatz’s
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
&
Slavery and Sin:
The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism
The question of slavery pervaded all aspects of American society until its eventual dissolution with the ending of the Civil War. American slavery, arguably, affected religion more than most social institutions. Both pro- and antislavery religious leaders looked to the authority of the scriptures to develop arguments in defense of their views. The abolitionist movement and slavery debates during the decades preceding the war accentuated the conflicting biblical interpretations and the importance of scripture for public policy and social issues. The debates among religious leaders, particularly Protestants, over slavery and its moral standing according to the Bible, proved unable to engender a consensus. Ultimately, the Civil War ended a debate the Bible could not for religious leaders and theologians.
Historians Mark A. Noll and Molly Oshatz explore this history in their respective works, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis and Slavery and Sin. Both agree that the slavery debates created a theological crisis that ended not with a consensus biblical interpretation, but by the Civil War. However, each perceives the effect of this differently. For Noll, this crisis diminished the authority of religion on social issues; furthermore, “the religion with which theologians emerged from the war was essentially the same as that with which they entered the war.”[1] This left Protestant leaders unprepared against theological criticisms and diminished the importance of religion within the public sphere. Oshatz, on the other hand, argues that the slave debates prepared Protestants “to respond to postwar challenges to the faith,” and helped push forward the movement of American liberalism.[2]
In The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Noll argues that before the Civil War “religion was…much more important than any other center of value at work in the country.”[3] Although the theological crisis centered on slavery and the Bible, as Noll illustrates, that was not the only issue at hand. Since the inception of the American republic, “theologians had been uniting historical Christian perspectives with specific aspects of American intellectual experience.”[4] By the time of the Civil War, “American churches promoting reasonably orthodox beliefs and reasonably traditional practices flourished precisely because they adapted so energetically to the republican freedoms won in the War of Independence, guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and then expanded considerably with the opening of the new country.”[5] Christianity, namely Protestantism, was one of the strongest cultural forces in American society. As a result, and at the time of the theological crisis, religion wielded immense public influence and “had contributed so much to the construction of national culture.”[6] Without a consensus answer to the question of the Bible and slavery, Noll argues, religion’s importance within the public sphere diminished during the postwar years.
Noll comes to this conclusion through his examination of the debates on biblical authority and interpretation on slavery, and the conflicting understandings of providence and God’s participation in human history. Throughout his work, Noll shows how “evangelical Protestants, who believed that the Bible was true and who trusted their own interpretations of Scripture” led to a series of competing biblical interpretations.[7] Noll effectively demonstrates this by highlighting the oppositional interpretations of Henry Ward Beecher, James Henley Thornwell, Henry Van Dyke, and Rabbi Morris J. Raphall in chapter one and again with his analysis of the debate between Francis Wayland and Richard Fuller. Additionally, Noll adds another layer to the question of slavery and the theological crisis itself with chapters discussing biblical interpretations of race and providence.
The question of the Bible and slavery proved too dividing for the “intellectual vigor that evangelical Protestants had brought to bear on so many tasks between the Revolution and the Civil War.”[8] Noll argues that they did not have the theological resources to address postwar challenges.[9] Moreover, the Civil War “took the steam out of Protestants’ moral energy” as many remained divided along regional lines.[10] Consequently, any Americans moved away from scriptures as the defining authority on public policy. In short, the Civil War and a failure to develop a consensus on slavery left Protestants divided and intellectually unprepared to address postwar social issues and challenges to religion by way of biblical interpretations.
In Slavery and Sin, Oshatz disagrees with Noll’s approach and conclusion. According to Oshatz, Noll’s assertation amounts to “blaming the literal, flat-footed, and racist hermeneutics of the antebellum era for the Northern Protestant failure to arrive at an adequate biblical antislavery argument.”[11] As a result, he “obscures the depth of the challenges posed by the slavey debates.”[12] Rather than focusing on the competing biblical interpretations that separated pro- and anti-slavery advocates alike, Oshatz specifically examines moderate antislavery Protestants including Leonard Bacon, William Ellery Channing, E.P. Burrow, Horace Bushnell, and Samuel Harris. In doing so, she argues that they “came to rely on a new liberal understanding of Christian truth” that they believed reconciled the sin of slavery and the bible without the need to “surrender the scriptures or to declare every white Christian slaveholder an object sinner.”[13] For Oshatz, their challenge of slavery in the abstract laid the groundwork for the liberal Protestant theology of the late-nineteenth century.
This leads to another critique Oshatz has of Noll and other historians. Although Oshatz agrees that the Civil War marks an end of an era—namely the possibility “to base a national Protestant consensus on biblical literalism”—and that a new era of religious traditions begins, she contends the demarcation historians have created belies the strong connections between the two eras.[14] According to Oshatz, liberal Protestantism’s understanding that “God’s revelation unfolded progressively through human history, moral action had to be considered in its historical and social context and the ultimate source of Protestant truth was the shared experience of believers rather than the letter of the biblical text” derived from ideas and thoughts of moderate antislavery Protestants during the slave debates.
In sum, the biblical interpretations of the antislavery Protestants paved the way for the theology of liberal Protestantism during the late-nineteenth century. According to Oshatz, not only did moderate antislavery Protestants lay the foundation for liberal Protestantism but they also provided a template for liberal Protestants to address theological issues of the postwar era—specifically evolution and historical biblical criticisms. Although, as Oshatz notes, liberal Protestantism proved short-lived, it “served as a spiritual halfway house between orthodoxy and secular humanism.”[15] Thus, Oshatz effectively demonstrates how moderate antislavery Protestants shaped the American religious and intellectual life well after the conclusion of the slave debates.
Although Oshatz successfully challenges Noll’s argument and approach, both works offer value to the scholarship of nineteenth-century American religion. As Oshatz has shown, historians need to further examine the connections between pre- and post-war Protestant thought while possibly broadening this approach to include proslavery Protestant advocates. In defense of Noll, his argument develops not from the perspective of one particular group of Protestants but from the thoughts and words of a variety of opposing individuals. His examination of domestic—the North and the South—and foreign perspectives of biblical interpretations of American slavery deserves further exploration and comparison.
[1] Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 16.
[2] Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11.
[3] Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 11.
[4] Ibid, 17.
[5] Ibid, 28.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid, 159.
[9] Ibid, 160.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Oshatz, Slavery and Sin, 10.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, 4.
[14] Ibid, 11.
[15] Ibid, 145.