commentaries

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - We are marking the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. So what?

Most Americans beyond the South are indifferent to the event. Even in the former Confederacy the sesquicentennial has captured only sporadic attention.

That's a pity. The Civil War can tell us a great deal about ourselves, then and now. We have an unfortunate history of plunging into wars for God and democracy that have often made a mockery of both. If we can use this anniversary to learn more about why we rush to war, it will be an exercise worth undertaking.

More than 750,000 men died in the Civil War. Extrapolated to today's population, the death toll would be close to 10 million.

Consider also the millions who mourned the loss of their husbands, brothers and sons, and consider those soldiers who survived yet who returned home maimed in mind or body. Most historians today would lament the casualties, but commend the outcome: the liberation of 4 million slaves.

I disagree. The Civil War was not a just war. It was a war of choice brought on by the insidious mixture of politics and religion that caused our political process and, ultimately, the nation to disintegrate.

The war's outcome did indeed end slavery, but could we have achieved this noble objective without the slaughter? The U.S. was the only slaveholding nation to abolish the institution with a civil war.

Our government governs best from the center and depends upon compromise. By 1861, however, the Bible had replaced the Constitution as the arbiter of public policy, particularly over the issue of extending slavery in the Western territories.

Framing slavery as a moral cause rendered compromise unlikely, for you cannot compromise with sin. The party in power, the Republicans, deployed evangelical dogma to raise the stakes of political discourse.

The party's ideology lay within the Second Great Awakening, a national religious revival begun in the early 1800s. Within a generation, nearly 40 percent of Americans who expressed a faith were members of evangelical Protestant denominations. The message of evangelicals was simple: If you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, you will be saved and enjoy eternal life in heaven.

In the North, however, evangelicals used the Gospel not only to convert individuals, but also to reform society. They viewed America as a God-blessed nation, ordained to conquer a continent from sea to shining sea and spread democracy and Protestant Christianity across the land and, eventually, throughout the world.

In order to accomplish this great objective, America must expiate its sins, foremost among them slavery and the Roman Catholic Church - two forms of despotism that undermined democracy and Christianity, according to Northern evangelicals.

Historians have soft-pedaled the religious bigotry of Northern evangelicals and their allies, praising instead their antislavery position. However, you cannot discuss one without accounting for the other because they merged in the political arena.

Also, we should not confuse antislavery with pro-black. Many antislavery Northerners believed, along with the vast majority of whites (including Abraham Lincoln), that African-Americans were inferior.

Beginning in the early 1840s small evangelical political parties emerged in the North demanding government action against slavery and the Catholic Church. Catholics not only competed with Protestants for souls, but they also supposedly avowed allegiance to the pope, not the president.

Violent clashes of Protestant and Catholic gangs in the streets of major Northern and border cities accompanied the entrance of evangelical parties into the political system. One of the bloodiest sectarian riots occurred in New York City in July 1857, an event depicted in Martin Scorcese's film "Gangs of New York."

By the time of the New York mle, the mixture of evangelical religion and politics was pervasive. Between 1847 and 1857, more than 1 million Irish Catholics emigrated to the United States to escape the potato famine. The sudden influx of Catholic immigrants alarmed evangelicals, especially those in the North. At the same time, the controversy over the extension of slavery in the territories worsened.

Northerners concerned about the Catholic "invasion" and the "Slave Power" formed a new political party in the mid-1850s, the Republicans. In 1858, when Abraham Lincoln ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois as the Republican candidate, the party cited "The Two Despotisms - Catholicism and Slavery - Their Union and Identity."