Theology Of The South
Rev. Steve Wilkins (Monroe, Louisiana)

The first two centuries of our country's existence saw a remarkable degree of unity among the people, based largely on a commonly held Christian faith. Most people believed the Bible to be the word of God and followed its teachings with more or less consistency. Most adhered to the old Reformation, Protestant faith which was dominantly Calvinistic in outlook.

Theologically the colonists of both New England and the Anglo South were almost indistinguishable. Both believed the Church of England needed purification; both believed the Bible was the safest rule for civil legislation. Both passed laws mandating universal church attendance, as well as regulations prohibiting public profanity. They both desired to establish a Christian culture on these shores.

The theological accord which prevailed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was lost during the first half of the nineteenth century. While the South grew more committed to Puritan theology, new England was rapidly discarding it. The descendants of the Massachusetts Puritans rejected the old orthodoxy for a new. Dr. M.E. Bradford observed, "In the North was a regime whose primary faith was in the human will and intellect, in the ability of man through science and politics to subdue the entire Creation and reshape it according to his fondest dreams." It was this theological deviation which made the views of the South intolerable and incomprehensible to the Northern descendants of the old Puritans.

The New England intellectuals made Reason the supreme authority in matters of both faith and life. The Bible was rejected as a book full of errors, myths, and contradictions, while its doctrines of human depravity and God's sovereignty were denounced as the enemies of "progress." The ultimate authority was to be found in man rather than in the Book. Basic doctrines were abandoned. The fall of mankind was myth not fact. Evil was merely the consequence of man's environment or his lack of education, not his nature.

Salvation was the job of social reform, not God's grace. "Reform" became the new religion of the north. Ridding the world of "abuses" took the place of evangelism as the means of salvation.

The South, to the contrary, was never congenial to religious skepticism. Even prominent Southerners like Jefferson had little influence. Throughout the nineteenth century, the South grew more and more united in its theological commitment. In Civilization of the Old South, Clement Eaton states that by 1860, "All classes in the South adhered to a conservative faith, a common orthodoxy. The variations between the different forms of Protestantism...were principally in matters of ritual such as baptism and communion...In the beliefs that mattered -- the role of the supernatural in life, the efficacy of prayer, ideas of sin, salvation, and an over-ruling providence -- there was virtually no disagreement."

Consequently, the main opposition to northern radicalism came from the increasingly conservative and Calvinistic South (which would from this time forth be labeled "backward"). Their belief in the old doctrines of sin and grace made Southerners skeptical not merely of the means of radical reform but of the motives of the radicals themselves.

The theological disagreement lay at the bottom of the political conflict. To many Southerners, the defence of the Southern Cause became equivalent to a defense of Christendom itself. The Southern preacher, professor, and theologian James H. Thornwell gave this analysis of the controversy in his Fast Day Sermon of 1860: "The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and slave holders, they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake."

The War of 1861 was a war between advocates of the old union and proponents of the new nation. It was a war for the preservation of God-given rights and freedom. It was a war of two different world views -- one based upon the Bible, the other upon the minds of men. It was a war between two antagonistic faiths between which there was no possibility for compromise. It was a war that continues to this day.