Benjamin L. Miller. In God’s Presence

Benjamin L. Miller’s book In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War explores how religious Americans—clergymen and missionaries specifically—navigated the apocalypse of the American Civil War. Unfolding in six chapters, the narrative begins with an exploration of the men who served as Civil War chaplains (there were almost four thousand of them spread between the North and the South), tackles the religious conundrums they confronted in army camps (there was plenty of profanity, booze, and card playing to keep them busy), shows how they resourcefully deployed antebellum religious models in wartime (so prewar revivalists provided a good example for makeshift chapels), and then follows them to the field of battle, where the ministers confronted a reality far different from their congregations at home. On the battlefield and in field hospitals, Miller persuasively argues, they were in worlds not their own making. With no settled congregations,...

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