Right Reverend Stephen Elliott: Political Influence and the Protestant Episcopal Church in Georgia, 1840-1866

By the late 1840\u27s, the South\u27s religious and political convictions upheld slaveholders\u27 social and economic views. These convictions permeated worship services in Georgia via the ministries. At the onset of the Civil War, spirituality provided an essential source of Southern strength in both victory and defeat. As fortitude subsided, religion also played a prodigious role in perpetuating the Confederate experience. For a generation, its theology had endorsed the South\u27s social arrangement, asserted the morality of slavery, expunged Southern sins, and recruited the populace as God\u27s devout guardians of the institution. Sustained by the belief that they were God\u27s chosen people, Southerners rallied to the Confederate cause. Assserting great influence as the presiding Episcopal bishop of the Confederacy, the Right Reverent Steven Elliott, Jr., aggressively participated in contriving a religious culture that discerned threats to Southern society as challenges to Christian civilization