The American Civil War was launched not from the cannons in Charleston harbor but from the pulpits of southern churches. Like the Germans in World War I, who wore belt buckles engraved with “God is with us,” the southern population was righteously convinced of the fact that God was on their side, even though it was the side of human bondage and slavery.

From Pratt’s book, “The power to convince Southerners that not only was their independence assured (Victory), but survival and prosperity would follow was a powerful refrain in Southern sermons.” They also preached that their ancestors had spent decades establishing that slavery was the will of God.

By the time the Evangelical and Catholic ministers had finished, they had created an army of Christian soldiers who, in their minds, were serving the will of God. They fell in the hundreds of thousands, not for what they thought was the will of God, according to pastor Bubba, but to preserve the profits of the slave-holding class, the billionaires of their time, of which the soldiers actually doing the dying usually had neither slaves nor money.

RC Romine