The Civil War had led some evangelicals and many Calvinists, some of whom blamed the early defeats of Union troops during the Civil War on God’s displeasure with Northern sins, to demand the country specifically identify itself as a Protestant republic. They denounced the North’s toleration of slavery as a collective sin, but they also pointed to the absence of any mention of God in the Constitution. Because the Constitution failed to acknowledge that all political authority derived from God, said the theologian Horace Bushnell, it created “no feeling of authority, or even respect among the
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