Our Country

Based on his 2008 dissertation at the University of Notre Dame, Grant R. Brodrecht's Our Country focuses on white, male, moderate northern evangelicals in the period from 1860 to the 1880s. It incorporates a coda that discusses changes in evangelicalism in the 1920s, the World War II era, and the 1970s. The author defines evangelical broadly: evangelicals were Protestants—especially Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists—who held the Bible to be authoritative regarding salvation and conduct, preached the necessity of a personal conversion experience, and stressed an active Christian life. Thus Brodrecht applies the term even to revival-shunning groups such as Old School Presbyterians. His main theme is that “throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction many northern white evangelicals subordinated particular concern for the four million African American slaves—and then ex-slaves—to a larger vision for the Union's persistence and continued flourishing as a specifically Christian nation”: an acceptable, if unsurprising, discovery (p. 2). Brodrecht supports his thesis by drawing on the statements of clergymen such as Henry Ward Beecher in sermons, speeches, articles, autobiographies, and letters. He engages the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. He does not add to his inquiry what could have been a productive comparison of evangelicals' views during the Civil War with, for example, those of Northern Roman Catholics or High Church Episcopalians: If these churches' positions on war, emancipation, and other topics differed, then what social or theological factors catalyzed those differences

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