A pril E. H olm . A Kingdom Divided

April E. Holm’s well-researched and compelling book A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era opens with a quote from Robert Stanton’s 1864 pronouncement laying the blame for the Civil War squarely “at the door of the Church”—specifically on the schisms that split Protestant denominations during the antebellum period. Without endorsing that perspective, Holm convincingly details how an influential “religious narrative of sectionalism” emerged well before the war, continued through it, and persisted long after. Unlike most previous studies of religious sectionalism, which have focused almost exclusively on the polarized northern and southern views regarding slavery, Holm’s book examines the players in the middle—border-state evangelicals who articulated a narrative distinctly counter to that of their northern and southern coreligionists—and in so doing exposes a more complex and enduring set of convictions, debates, and circumstances. As she demonstrates, border-region ministers and their congregations responded to the pressures that caused schisms among their denominational brethren elsewhere in the country, and they did so by privileging church unity and the preservation of the American and Christian kingdom as a national and religious entity—priorities that led them to seek a neutral middle space in which their congregations and denominations could remain united. Their effort, Holm demonstrates, would have enduring repercussions.

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