TLANTA (ABP) – People debate what caused the Civil War 150 years after the fact, but Baptists of the era from both North and South agreed it was fought over slavery, says the author of a forthcoming book.
Bruce Gourley discusses reserach for his upcoming book at the Georgia CBF annual meeting.
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“What many people in the South believe about the reason for the Civil War is different than what people were saying during those historical moments,” Bruce Gourley, executive director of the Baptist History and Heritage Society said during a breakout session at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Georgia annual meeting, Nov. 7 in Atlanta.
Gourley contends in a book due out later this month, Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia during the Civil War, that formation of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 signaled the inevitability of war, slavery was the central issue and the Confederate States of America was God’s kingdom on earth. Gourley says Baptists’ historic emphasis on separation of church and state took a back seat as religious leaders embraced a Christian nationalism.
Gourley researched the book using primary documents like Baptist newspapers and church records from the decades preceding and during the Civil War. For generations, he said, Southern Baptist leaders downplayed slavery’s role in the convention’s founding, framing the issue instead as autonomy of the local church.
“Sometimes we choose to forget the past or we choose to remake the past or re-imagine it,” Gourley said. “We change things around. That has been true, I think, of the Civil War. There are a lot of particularly white Southerners that the Civil War to this day was really not about slavery. It was about something else — particularly states’ rights.”
Gourley said the term “states’ rights” appeared occasionally in Baptist writings during the war, but it was used as a legal term to preserve slavery. Even while southerners invoked states’ rights defending slavery, he said, they appealed to the federal government to override laws passed in northern states that allowed people not to return escaped slaves to their owners.
“It cannot be denied that the institution of slavery is the cause of the war,” wrote Christian Index Editor Samuel Boykin. “With the world opposed to us, with the whole North in arms against us, with 500,000 bayonets bristling upon our borders, we have boldly seized the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other and plunged into this struggle resolved to maintain our cause or die martyrs with the sincerity of our convictions.”
Ironically, Gourley said, Baptists in the South had the Bible on their side. With no explicit teachings in Scripture banning slaveholding, Southern Baptists became biblical literalists. Gourley said he traces the emphasis on literalism that carried over into the 20th century back to the Civil War.
“Slavery forms a vital element of the Divine Revelation to man,” Ebenezer Warren, pastor of First Baptist Church of Christ in Macon, Ga., once preached. “It is necessary for ministers of the gospel to teach slavery from the pulpit as it was taught by holy men of old.”
“Slavery is right,” Warren continued, “because their Maker has decreed their bondage.”
After the war, Gourley said, Southern whites were not repentant about being pro-slavery but set out to create a “new narrative” about states’ right or the “lost cause.” He said Leon McBeth’s 1987 Baptist history was the first textbook used in Southern Baptist seminaries to correctly identify slavery as the central reason the Southern Baptist Convention was formed.
“My contention is that we need to go back to what folks were saying to relearn the true history of words from their own mouths,” Gourley said.
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Bob Allen is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press.