This nation’s duty, reformers believed, was nothing short of redeeming the world, and progress was the means. But they faced a major hurdle. How could God’s nation erase global sin when it hadn’t absolved itself of the glaring sin of slavery? How could God bring heaven to earth when the Antichrist was still in the American South? This was part of the motivation behind the call for abolition. Many in the Social Gospel movement assumed slavery was the last hindrance to Jesus’s return—and that the Civil War would be the battle of Armageddon itself.
