The Cause of the Civil War--And the Next One

Some may think it inconsequential that the oldest American mainline Protestant churches are splitting (witness the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, in particular). Inconsequential? Perhaps. Splits have punctuated the history of these church lines since the Revolution. These remaining rump church bodies are small, owing to decades of neglect. After all, what harm could a split in these bodies do?

Arguably, it mattered a great deal in the past, and it mattered to Americans who never were part of these Christian institutions. In fact, it mattered to all Americans, and may have cost millions their lives.

If the PCA denominational start in the early 1970s is not considered, then the last time that the Presbyterians (PCUSA) split was in 1837. David Brion Davis is quoted (in Gary Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities (2007)): "Slavery placed a central part in the national division of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches, institutions that had served as the cultural bridges between North and South." The Charleston Mercury, a newspaper which could reasonably be expected to be prescient concerning the outbreak of civil war, greeted the Methodist church split in 1847 as "the first dissolution of the Union." When the Baptists split in 1848, the Savannah Republican wondered whether this event "was intimately connected with our Southern institutions, and perhaps may have a remote bearing on the ultimate political relations of the Northern and Southern portions of the Union."

This time, the churches are splitting all across the country in a pattern which is less like blue states north/red states south, into a diffuse, geographic, small-plaid pattern which divides the very interstices of communities, much less states or even towns. The difference is that the churches involved are small and ineffectual. The churches which have power to change peoples' hearts and conscience today are, by and large, independent churches, or churches in small cooperative groups, which are growing. This change in the power of large Protestant denominations may blunt the forces which today threaten to tear the country apart again: support for our country's defending personnel, political unrest and divisiveness within the highest levels of government, brotherly (sibling-like, for the politically correct) love between all Americans. For example, in the Southeastern United States, things have changed dramatically over the past 50 years: the person you will be more likely to split with physically and psychically is not the person with the other skin color, but rather the person of your own skin color with the flaky ideology. Is it possible that this must change in order to avert the second Civil War?