Both Prayed to the Same God: Religion and Faith in the Civil War

Robert J. Miller, Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 243 pages. Paper, $29.95.

Review by Dan Reigle, 2007

© Cincinnati CWRT and Daniel H. Reigle 2007

This is an important book for anyone interested in the history of the Civil War era beyond a narrow “battles and generals” focus. Over the past fifty years, historians such as Bell Irvin Wiley, James I. Robertson Jr., Reid Mitchell, Drew Gilpin Faust, and James M. McPherson have expanded the field to examine the experiences and viewpoints of the “common” soldier and sailor and their families at home, in addition to the major military and political figures and events of the war. However, “of the thousands of books written about the American Civil War, few have focused on its crucial religious dimensions,” according to McPherson’s preface to this book. In that context, author Robert J. Miller sets out to produce “an overview of the topic–a comprehensive summary of the central issues which frame the topic of religion and faith in the American Civil War.” In my opinion, he has accomplished this objective admirably.

Robert Miller is a Catholic priest, the pastor of St. Dorothy Church in Chicago, who in addition to his advanced professional education in religion, has been involved in the Chicago CWRT for several years and researched this book during a six-month sabbatical at Notre Dame. His preparation and research are clearly evident in the book. He covers a lot of ground:
- America’s “Great Paradox:” the development of race-based slavery and its moral impasse with ideals of liberty and freedom.
- The role of religion in antebellum America, including the role and importance of the conflicting approaches to interpreting the Bible and its meaning for slavery.
- Religious divisiveness, the involvement of religious beliefs and leaders in the escalation of sectional conflict, and the effect of the slavery-based breakups of the three largest Protestant denominations as a prelude to Southern secession.
- Religious support systems during the war, including the “invisible institution” of slave religion, military chaplains, charitable giving and organizations, and revivalism.
- Post-war influences, such as the Lost Cause belief system, expansion of African-American church life, and unification of religion and patriotism into a civic religion.
- The profound theological concepts in President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, from which the words of the book’s title are drawn: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

This overview approach is perhaps the only possible way to approach a subject of this breadth and complexity. A very important perspective that Miller develops early in the book is the difference between religion (organized, formal, institutional) and faith (personal, belief-based, motivational). Distinguishing between the structural and the personal dimensions of religion and faith in the Civil War is a helpful concept when attempting to understand events and issues that range from the life and death experiences of an 18-year-old farmer/infantryman to Protestant denominationalism to the prewar immigration of European Catholics to the post-war Lost Cause hero worship of Robert E. Lee.

In building this outline of major issues, Father Miller relies primarily on several significant sources, including Mark Noll’s America’s God and The Civil War as a Theological Crisis; Randall Miller, Harry Stout, and Charles Wilson’s Religion and the American Civil War; Ronald White’s Lincoln’s Greatest Speech; Sydney Ahlstrom’s Religious History of the American People; and the “common soldier” studies of Wiley, Robertson, and Mitchell. To me, these examples illustrate the depth and quality of Father Miller’s research behind this book, and provide many suggestions for further reading.

In light of my opinion that this is an excellent book that offers an excellent introduction to a complicated, multi-faceted subject, I would offer only these two points of critique. Perhaps they are not actually critique, so much as expression of a desire to have “heard more” on these two subjects.

First, I fully agree with Father Miller’s emphasis on the positive effects of bringing religion and faith “out of the shadows” for a more thorough examination and, frankly, for acknowledging the positive effects of its impact on morale, on its role in the enormous charitable support for the military, and on resolution of the Great Paradox. However, it seems to me that there is room and need for greater examination of the other side of these issues. What about the half of the soldier population who were not known to have a religious affiliation or a personal belief system? How should we reconcile the viewpoints of participants who did not consider religion or faith to be essential to the outcome of the war? (As an example, Confederate General E. Porter Alexander wrote after the war, as quoted in Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis that: “It is customary to say that ‘Providence did not intend that we should win.’ But Providence did not care a row of pins about it.”) What about the proportion (even if small) of the chaplain population who did not live up to the calling of their profession, whether through lack of courage, unwillingness to share the hardships of camp life or of the march, or their inability to address the real-life issues of men in their charge? How should we think about the issues of stress, desertion, breakdowns in combat or in camp life, or post-war stress in light of religion and faith? I do not intend this as a criticism of the current book, perhaps so much as an indication of the questions that the book draws to the front.

Second, while the book confronts the role of religion in the pre-war debates on slavery and includes an excellent chapter on the importance of religious activity among slaves, it makes little mention of the intertwining of religious beliefs and leaders in the post-war decades that eviscerated the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Amendments and later codified the race-based exclusion of African-Americans from political, social, and economic participation in both North and South. It is obvious that Father Miller is quite aware and sensitive to these issues, so this is not a critique of his viewpoint. It is more a statement of the potential value of expanding his work in that direction, perhaps drawing upon and expanding on the work of W. E. B. DuBois, John Hope Franklin, and David Blight.

Perhaps these points are more indicative of the success of the book, than they are of any shortcomings. A book on this subject that did not lead to further questions or stimulate deeper thinking would probably not be very worthwhile. This book is both worthwhile and stimulating to read, in addition to providing a foundational basis of ideas and facts from which further study can proceed.