Baptized in Blood

by Charles Reagan Wilson

Book Overview

Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820306819
• ISBN13: 9780820306810
• Release Date: August 1983
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An objective look at the religion of the Lost Cause...

~Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920~ is a very candid reflection upon the religious affections of the wounded south in the aftermath of the military extirpation of the Confederate States government following the Civil War. While the North dashed southern hopes for independent nationhood, it did not dash the sense of chosenness that southerners possessed. A myth represents an understanding or interpretation of something--be it an event or cause. The status of being mythical need not mean that it is false by any means. Indeed, it may be said that there is a modicum of truth to the religion of the Lost Cause. The Southern sense of having a special place in God's providential plan may have been insular and arguably chauvinistic. Nonetheless, the Civil War and subsequent military defeat of the former Confederacy was also an occasion for religious revival. It inculcated a deep sense of humility amongst pious Christian southerners. The `Religion of the Lost Cause' at its core embodied the conceptualized Christian ideal that `when we are weak, He is strong.' It was in defeat that Christian southerners found triumphant on a transcendent plane. It is a testament to the uniqueness of Christianity that such humility can come in the face of defeat. The southerners could draw comparisons to their being vanquished by northerners just as the ancient Israelites recognized God's disciplining hand in their perils at the hands of the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians centuries beforehand. By the late eighteenth century a southern civil religion had taken shape in the unique postbellum, post-Reconstruction social order of the New South: "The second organizational focus for the Southern civil religion was the Christian churches. The religion of the Lost Cause and the Christian denominations taught similar religious-moral values, and the Southern heroes had been directly touched by Christianity. The God invoked in the Lost Cause was distinctly biblical and transcendent. Prayers at veterans' gatherings appealed for the blessings of, in J. William Jones' words, the 'God of Israel, God of the centuries, God of our forefathers, God of Jefferson Davis and Sidney Johnston, and Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, God of the Southern Confederacy.'" To some northerner Christians, such words sound positively fanatical, and served as evidence of southern hubris and arrogance past off as religious piety. But to southerners, their sense of being the elect of the elect was deep rooted in their religious affections and conscious. After the war, southern heroes were as esteemed as the Knights of King Arthur's roundtable and the disciples of Jesus Christ. "To Southern ministers, Stonewall Jackson was like a stern Old Testament prophet-warrior." Jackson's death was the occasion for his martyrdom, for he faced death with a sense of solemnity and imbued with hope in the promises of God. Wilson writes, "One of the greatest religious lesso

An Extraordinary Eye-Opener!

Wilson's Baptized in Blood is a brilliant book, one of which I was required to read for a graduate history course on religion in the American south. Although I was born and grew up in the south, I nevertheless was a foreigner there. There was much in the psychology of southerners which made no sense to me. Reading Baptized in Blood was an extraordinary eye-opener! Though I am yet and always will be a stranger in the land of my birth, through the cogent narrative Wilson provides, I understand more deeply now the mythic, psychological origins of the many peculiar and bizarre thoughts, feelings and behaviours of southerners. Southerners REALLY and TRULY BELIEVED that GOD was on their side, in the prosecution of the civil war, and have had to reconcile their defeat as best they could. The inability to let go of that loss goes far in making southerners what they are.Baptized in Blood is well worth the reading of anyone who seeks to understand the post-civil war period, and/or the social and political psychology of the American south.

Brilliant Look at Civil Religion in the South

Charles Reagan Wilson's work brilliantly describes the civil religion (as described by Geertz) of the "Lost Cause" that was pervasive in the Reconstruction and Early Modern South. Wilson argues that this civil religion was a combination of Christian and Confederate symbols. According to Wilson this civil religion was formed out of Confederate ministers attempts to reconcile defeat in the war with the Will of God and (as the ministers believed) Confederate righteousness. Significant in this study is Wilson's look at the role that White Supremacy played in this civil religion. He looks extensively at the role of racism as embodied in groups such as the KKK. All in all, the work is a brilliant look at ideas pervasive in the reconstruction and early modern south, ideas which have been influential in formation of the modern New South.

Explains the history and hypocrisy of the religious right

This book discusses the theological basis of southern slave society. Anyone who questions the religious self-righteousness of the southerners should read this book because it highlights the contradictions inherent in the hateful southern society and the teachings of Jesus Christ. I have acquired a much greater understanding of the history of the religious right, and, being a southern black trying to understand the hatred around which I live, this book enlightens my perspective.