The Civil War began in April 1861 when Fort Sumter (in the harbor of Charleston, S.C.) was attacked by local rebels. Even with all the rhetoric for years, the United States was caught off guard. What became the Confederate States of America had better soldiers, better officers and better motivation, and these things created two years of success on the battlefields.
Dwight Moody
Bull Run (1861), Seven Days (1862) Fredericksburg (1862), Bull Run, again (1862), and Chancellorsville (1863) were Confederate victories, making Robert E. Lee a Southern hero. Only the stalemate at Antietam in 1862 and those out west tended otherwise. For two years, the Union struggled to find leaders, produce resources and mobilize armies. For two years, the outcome of the war hung in the balance.
That war involved the economy (especially cotton and slavery and Northern industrialization), the military (with most of the West Point graduates resigning to sign up with the Confederates) and the morality (with the debate raging between slave states and free states).
Since then, our beautiful country has fought two other wars. We call them the First and Second World War. We have endured great economic collapse. We call it the Great Depression. And we have struggled twice more with racial animosity and segregation; it is our ongoing crusade for civil rights.
“But now, we are engaged in another civil struggle.”
But now, we are engaged in another civil struggle, testing whether our nation can embody the conviction that all people are created equal, regardless of color, creed, gender, race or place of origin.
One army, asserting the rights and responsibilities of white Christian men, has been in training for 50 years. They have organization and leaders and a vocabulary fit for the occasion. They are done with guerilla warfare and have mounted a successful attack on the centers of American democracy: the Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court.
Like Lee at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg and elsewhere, they occupy the battlefield and plant their flag. Thousands are traumatized; life is upended; the future is uncertain.
But that first Civil War teaches us a lesson. The army that dominated those first two years did not win the war. In 1863, Lee took his army into Pennsylvania, encountered Union soldiers at Gettysburg and attacked. For three days, they attacked, creating some of the greatest drama of our 250-year history.
But when it was over, it was Lee who slinked away, defeated and depressed. He never won another battle. The Union, finally organized, equipped and mobilized, ran the table, so to speak, for the next two years. In April 1865, Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox.
I will not be surprised if that pattern does not hold for the struggle that has ensued with the election of Donald J. Trump as president. His people have been preparing for decades; they have a 500-page war plan; they have thousands of mobilized combatants eager to crush our democracy and create what they call a “Christian nation.”
“The majority of Americans do not want this.”
The majority of Americans do not want this. We do not want a country run by oligarchs. We do not want Christian fundamentalists running our public schools, colleges and universities. We do not want the care of the poor pushed aside in order to comfort for the rich. We do not want protections for products, workers and the environment to be thrown overboard in favor of executives whose sole concern is the value of company stock. We do not want equality and opportunity for women, minorities, immigrants and the disabled to be shunned aside so stockholders can buy yachts and jets and second homes.
We certainly do not want Christian symbols, rituals and organizations to be given preferential treatment as a way of dominating, even destroying other religions. And I say this as a committed Christian preacher and scholar. We want this to be a free place: for the believer and for the seeker and for the doubter.
It may take us two years to get organized and mobilized; but when it is all over, those who joined in the MAGA rebellion and stormed into Washington to destroy our democracy, our prosperity, our government and our freedoms will find themselves shamed, shunned and sent back home.
America will survive this religion-fueled rebellion, and we will be stronger for it. And many of these Christian nationalists will rediscover Jesus, the man of mercy and hospitality, the one who rejected dominion and embraced service, the Savior who died rather than cut a deal with those who seemed so strong.
Lead on, sweet Jesus, we are close behind!
Dwight A. Moody is an author, minister, scholar and host of the media site The Meeting House.