The Civil War as a Theological Crisis Quotes

“An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“Americans claimed to be following a higher law, even when this higher law only turned out to be a personal preference.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for what support they could find to nerve their own side for battle.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“suddenly both parties have become theologians, the one side quoting the Pentateuch to justify slavery, the other side quoting the gospel to condemn it:... the people of the thirty-three United States, who are eminently and essentially political, cannot discuss a political matter without quoting the old and New Testa- ments!"97”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“It was no coincidence that the biblical defense of slavery remained strongest in the United States, a place where democratic, antitraditional, and individualistic religion was also strongest.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“The story of theology in the Civil War was a story of how a deeply entrenched intellectual synthesis divided against itself, even as its proponents were reassuring combatants on either side that each enjoyed a unique standing before God and each exercised a unique role as the true bearer of the nation's Christian civilization.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“In the event, what actually happened was that citizens, without paying much attention to government at all, went about creating a national culture for themselves. Long before political parties became effective as national, democratic institutions, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians were building the nerve system of a national culture.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“On the other front, nuanced biblical attacks on American slavery faced rough going precisely because they were nuanced. This position could not simply be read out of any one biblical text; it could not be lifted directly from the page. Rather, it needed patient reflection on the entirety of the Scriptures; it required expert knowledge of the historical circumstances of ancient Near Eastern and Roman slave systems as well as of the actually existing conditions in the slave states; and it demanded that sophisticated interpretative practice replace a commonsensically literal approach to the sacred text. In short, this was an argument of elites requiring that the populace defer to its intellectual betters.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“Catholics too could organize against specific ills, as witnessed by the profusion of religious orders founded and deployed to address particular problems in particular places. But by the mid-nineteenth century Catholics also shared another general attitude that worked against a reformist mentality. It was an attitude nourished by the great nineteenth-century revival in devotional piety that looked upon human suffering not just as a problem to be fixed but also as a condition to be embraced for spiritual good. . . .The link to sectional debates was that Catholic awareness of unjust slave suffering did not lead naturally to mobilization against that suffering. Rather, slave suffering might well be considered one of those intractable human conditions to be borne patiently for the sake of eternal reward.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“For over thirty years Americans battled each other exegetically on this issue, with the more orthodox and the ones who took most seriously the authority of Scripture being also the ones most likely to conclude that the Bible sanctioned slavery... The most skillful use of the Bible in defending slavery came from Americans like Richard Fuller, Thomas Stringfellow, or even Moses Stuart who were careful exegetes of individual passages but who also knew how to pose the question of orthodox fidelity: will you follow God’s faithful word in the Bible or the deliverances of your own finite and easily swayed conscience?”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“By defining slaveholding as a basic evil, whatever the Bible might have to say about it, radical abolitionists frightened away from antislavery many moderates who had also grown troubled about America's system of chattel bondage, but who were not willing to give up loyalty to Scripture...

It was the background that permitted the Southern Methodist minister J.W. Tucker to tell a Confederate audience in 1862 that "your cause is the cause of God, the cause of Christ, of humanity. It is a conflict of truth with error—of Bible with Northern infidelity—of pure Christianity with Northern fanaticism.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“Republicanism was easier to evolve than to define.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“The author finds any freaking, and remarkably objective, way to estimate religion's influence on American society before the Civil War. The population closely aligned with evangelical sympathies was three or four times the size of the voting population in 1860”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“Smith, for example, claimed that if Americans defended slavery on the basis of the Old Testament, they should also defend practices like polygamy and the complete annihilation of defeated armies that are also prescribed in the Old Testament”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“Thompson's message was straightforward: if God through divine revelation so clearly sanctioned slavery, and even the trade in "strangers," how could genuine Christians attack modern slavery, or even the slave trade, as an evil?”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

“In i86o the income of the nation's churches and religious voluntary societies came quite close to matching the total receipts of the federal government. Today the ratio of annual federal income to annual religion-related giving is about twenty-five to one.”
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis