Masters Theses

Date of Award

12-1999

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

History

Major Professor

Stephen V Ash

Abstract

This thesis is an intellectual history that examines how the ideology of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States evolved during the years of the Civil War 1861-1865. Previous to this study, most historians who have studied this church have either provided little examination of the responses of its doctrine and ideology to the pressures imposed by the war or characterized its clergy as monolithically evangelical. In the latter portrayal, an evangelical church supposedly attempted to merge church and state behind a millennialist effort to convert the Confederacy into the earthly realization of God's kingdom on earth. Although this latter conception accurately depicts the views of the Confederate Church's dominant evangelical party, others within the Church made very different assumptions from those of the evangelicals. A high church party rejected millennialist ideas and never really accepted the evangelical justification for separating the Southern Church from its parent Northern Church. In place of the evangelical emphasis on the Confederacy as earthly redeemer, the high churchmen focused on the Church alone as a redeemer whose kingdom (God's kingdom) was not of this world. In addition, other voices within the Church such as that of South Carolina rector James Warley Miles defy categorization by party and further refute the notion that the wartime church was an evangelical monolith. Although the evangelicals strove to seize from the North the exceptionalist mantle of divine redeemer nation and place it on the Confederacy, high church resistance to evangelical efforts to merge church and state and the doctrinal autonomy afforded voices such as Miles's prevented the Church from forming a doctrinal consensus on its proper response to the war. High church resistance to the evangelical program ultimately left the Confederate Church without a viable justification for separating from the parent church and for that reason the Confederate Church collapsed as an independent body soon after the war and its dioceses rapidly rejoined the parent church.

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