For more than a century, scholars and others have scrutinized
the U.S. Civil War, exploring the people and the forces that
shaped this defining national conflict and its aftermath. But
until recently, little attention has been paid to the role of
religion. As one modern historian put it, religion in the Civil
War “has not been so much debated among historians as it has
been ignored.” According to a new and growing body of
scholarship, religion, for both good and ill, was at the very
heart of the Civil War experience. To Grant Wacker, professor of
church history at Duke Divinity School, religion clearly played
a key role in the war. “Religion didn’t cause the war, but it
aggravated and accelerated the causes,” said Wacker, who taught
“For God and Region: Religion and the Civil War,” for the
divinity school’s lay academy of religion last fall. Most
historians today, Wacker said, describe the country prior to the
war as two fundamentally different societies, an agrarian South
and an industrialized North, divided