A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era

Even as the Civil War still raged, interested observers knew that religion had brought on and sustained the conflict, a view that a trove of more recent scholarship has sustained. In more recent years, Civil War era scholars have turned to studying the border between the United States and the Confederate States to further elucidate the nature of union and secession in ways that complicate a simpler binary of north versus south. Holm’s splendid monograph combines these two vital areas of study revealing many important and ironic ways in which border religion at once sought to mitigate disunion impulses, but then nurtured both sectional separation and continued ecclesiastical disunion long after Appomattox