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Houses Divided

Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri. Religion in America

By (author) Lucas P. Volkman
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York, United States
Published: 5th Apr 2018
Dimensions: w 156mm h 234mm d 19mm
Weight: 634g
ISBN-10: 0190248327
ISBN-13: 9780190248321
Barcode No: 9780190248321
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Synopsis
Houses Divided provides new insights into the significance of the nineteenth-century evangelical schisms that arose initially over the moral question of African American bondage. Volkman examines such fractures in the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches of the slaveholding border state of Missouri. He maintains that congregational and local denominational ruptures before, during, and after the Civil War were central to the crisis of the Union in that state from 1837 to 1876. The schisms were interlinked religious, legal, constitutional, and political developments rife with implications for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States from the late 1830s to the end of Reconstruction. The evangelical disruptions in Missouri were grounded in divergent moral and political understandings of slavery, abolitionism, secession, and disloyalty. Publicly articulated by factional litigation over church property and a combative evangelical print culture, the schisms were complicated by the race, class, and gender dynamics that marked the contending interests of white middle-class women and men, rural church-goers, and African American congregants. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerilla conflict that gripped Missouri through the Civil War, and fueled post-war vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation. The schisms produced the interrelated religious, legal and constitutional controversies that shaped pro-and anti-slavery evangelical contention before 1861, wartime Radical rule, and the rise and fall of Reconstruction.

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Volkman's study reveals that race-, class-, and gender-shaped contestations as urban and rural social interests collided in Missouri during the Civil War. Houses Divided dives deep into the archives of Missouri journalism in the nineteenth century to reveal how news publications wrought conflict upon the people of Missouri. * Daniel Jones, Religious Studies Review * This deeply cited work deserves attention from students and scholars interested in the Civil War, religion in the nineteenth century, religion and law, and religion and race. Those studying church history in the United States will be amply rewarded in reading Houses Divided. * Daniel Jones, Religious Studies Review * While we often look at denominations from ten thousand feet, many times the "divided houses" are on the ground. Volkman demonstrates that small slices influenced the entire pie.Houses Divided helps us better understand the religious dimensions of the Civil War. * Journal of Southern Religion * Volkman's case study sheds considerable fresh light on these significant events, and is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on Civil War religion and the contested nature of American evangelical identities. * Andrew Atherstone, University of Oxford * a definitive study ... Volkman demonstrates how the major evangelical schisms of the mid-nineteenth century profoundly shaped politics, constitutional law, and the everyday lives of ordinary Americans. * Luke Ritter, Journal of Southern History * there is much in Volkman's Houses Divided that is both unique and uniquely enlightening in all of its complicated relationships and diverse antecedents, the history of evangelical strife in nineteenth-century Missouri demands a capable scholar of real substance. In refreshingly accessible prose and with supporting detail aplenty, Lucas Volkman has proved himself, with Houses Divided: Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri, to be
just that. * Timothy Wesley, Missouri Historical Review * Lucas Volkman's admirable concentration on place, in this deeply-researched study of the troubled borderland state of Missouri, pays rich dividends by showing how religious, political, and cultural antagonism profoundly shaped the lives of ordinary people during the era of Civil War and Reconstruction. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the interpenetration of church and state at this crux of American history. * Richard Carwardine, Rhodes Professor Emeritus of American History, University of Oxford * Lucas Volkman's thorough research into local Missouri sources makes Houses Divided a refreshingly informative contribution to understanding an entire era. By attending to church disputes before, during, and after the Civil War, Volkman demonstrates the importance of Missouri for American cultural conflicts and the salience of religion alongside race and gender to those conflicts. It is an important book. * Mark Noll, author of America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln * Houses Divided is a vital and groundbreaking book that expands historical understanding of both evangelicalism and the entire Civil War Era. Through the microcosm of church schisms in Missouri, it illuminates the role of religious division in the ideological, economic, legal, social, and political changes that transformed America between 1830 and 1875. Rich in insights, its discussion of the schisms' role in Reconstruction is particularly original and
brilliant. * John Patrick Daly, author of When Slavery was Called Freedom * [T]his work represents a crucial local piece to the national puzzle of how religious conflict featured in the sectional conflict. It contains a trove of state-level church-state conundrums that Volkman deftly unpacks. And it closes with an intriguing claim that white evangelical Missourians rejected prohibition in the late-19th century due to the lingering abolitionist taint on moral politics. Altogether, Volkman shows that, for some Americans, lasting sectional
allegiances took shape within houses of worship-and they ventured out of them with a righteous vengeance. * Laura Rominger Porter, Reading Religion *