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Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920
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 of Confederate tradition. Out of defeat emerged a civil religion that embodied the Lost Cause. As Charles Reagan Wilson writes in his new preface, "The Lost Cause version of the regional civil religion was a powerful expression, and recent scholarship affirms its continuing power in the minds of many white southerners."
264 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1982
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August 31, 2020
The South I grew up in wasn't, as I think back on it now, conspicuously boastful of its Confederate past but was nevertheless aware of the heritage it had conferred on us. One of the notable events of fall at my Alabama high school was the annual football game we played against the state powerhouse, Robert E Lee High School in Montgomery. Their very name itself carried tradition and identity with the famous past we knew but couldn't claim at my little school with the same authority as our rivals. It may have even been true that their association with our history lent them a superiority and us an inferiority allowing them to thump us every year. Later, as a man in Georgia my attention was focused each year on Confederate Memorial Day because it was a state holiday. But I don't remember, in those years, any overt celebration of or even interest in the old Confederacy. There were no public ceremonies, no wearing of the gray or waving the battle flag. I've never known anyone who owned a Confederate battle flag, let alone displayed it. If someone wanted to show pride of place or past they might, at most, have on their car one of those popular license plates depicting the ole Yosemite Sam-looking Confederate general proclaiming "Hell no, I ain't fergettin'".
Attitudes about the Confederacy weren't always so low-key in the South. Several recent histories teach us the South after the Civil War and Confederate defeat was a seedbed of strong feeling and resistance to the political situation forced on them. Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood is one of those histories. His premise, all the more fascinating to me because I'd not previously had this perspective of the years following the war, is that the defeated states, led by its clergy, constructed a myth around the Lost Cause which helped the defeated people define their cultural identity. That identity lay embedded in Protestant evangelism and became the fuel feeding the cultural war against northern political control during Reconstruction. Southerners made a religion out of their history that gave their cherished regional narratives and personalities a divine legitimacy.
It's perhaps hard for us to understand today, 155 years after Appomattox, how apocalyptic defeat seemed to the South. Added to the material and human destruction was an abrupt end to a way of life amounting to a spiritual and psychological disaster. Through strong belief in their archetypal institutions and heritage perpetuated in myth they tried to affirm long-held ideals and pay tribute to revered ancestors and regional heroes. The resulting Lost Cause religion was a defense against losing their culture. They'd thought the war a holy one. In 8 compact chapters Wilson relates all this and weaves in such topics as the tensions between the Lost Cause and the materialism promoted by the more moderate New South movement, how the formation and progress of the Ku Klux Klan came from the Lost Cause but focused on opposition to racial equalities rather than the religious defense of Southern culture. And Wilson explains how segregation came out of both factions, the political and the religious, as a substitute for slavery.
Wilson's book, published in 1980, has some years on it now, but its ideas are not as dated as those it describes. It's clear in showing how Jim Crow developed in the South during the years his history covers. The Lost Cause was a powerful civic religion competing with American civic religion all those years. Only the Spanish-American War and WWI united the country again, a union made possible at the expense of social justice for African-Americans. We began healing the wounds of that following WWII. The divinities the Lost Cause created are receding even faster now that the public has recognized and agreed as a nation that their monuments glorify white supremacy. Wilson's message is correct: we need myths to help explain the past. But when the motivations of the past are shown to be, as Carl Sandburg said, a bucket of ashes and we agree the gods should be allowed to fade or to be taken away we need other gods to replace them. To me, the pickings are slim. Other iconic Southerners worthy of sainthood--think of Flannery O'Connor--can be too easily tarred with the same racist brush as Lee and Jackson and Davis. Maybe we can find no finer substitutes than Wendell Berry and the Allman Brothers.
Attitudes about the Confederacy weren't always so low-key in the South. Several recent histories teach us the South after the Civil War and Confederate defeat was a seedbed of strong feeling and resistance to the political situation forced on them. Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood is one of those histories. His premise, all the more fascinating to me because I'd not previously had this perspective of the years following the war, is that the defeated states, led by its clergy, constructed a myth around the Lost Cause which helped the defeated people define their cultural identity. That identity lay embedded in Protestant evangelism and became the fuel feeding the cultural war against northern political control during Reconstruction. Southerners made a religion out of their history that gave their cherished regional narratives and personalities a divine legitimacy.
It's perhaps hard for us to understand today, 155 years after Appomattox, how apocalyptic defeat seemed to the South. Added to the material and human destruction was an abrupt end to a way of life amounting to a spiritual and psychological disaster. Through strong belief in their archetypal institutions and heritage perpetuated in myth they tried to affirm long-held ideals and pay tribute to revered ancestors and regional heroes. The resulting Lost Cause religion was a defense against losing their culture. They'd thought the war a holy one. In 8 compact chapters Wilson relates all this and weaves in such topics as the tensions between the Lost Cause and the materialism promoted by the more moderate New South movement, how the formation and progress of the Ku Klux Klan came from the Lost Cause but focused on opposition to racial equalities rather than the religious defense of Southern culture. And Wilson explains how segregation came out of both factions, the political and the religious, as a substitute for slavery.
Wilson's book, published in 1980, has some years on it now, but its ideas are not as dated as those it describes. It's clear in showing how Jim Crow developed in the South during the years his history covers. The Lost Cause was a powerful civic religion competing with American civic religion all those years. Only the Spanish-American War and WWI united the country again, a union made possible at the expense of social justice for African-Americans. We began healing the wounds of that following WWII. The divinities the Lost Cause created are receding even faster now that the public has recognized and agreed as a nation that their monuments glorify white supremacy. Wilson's message is correct: we need myths to help explain the past. But when the motivations of the past are shown to be, as Carl Sandburg said, a bucket of ashes and we agree the gods should be allowed to fade or to be taken away we need other gods to replace them. To me, the pickings are slim. Other iconic Southerners worthy of sainthood--think of Flannery O'Connor--can be too easily tarred with the same racist brush as Lee and Jackson and Davis. Maybe we can find no finer substitutes than Wendell Berry and the Allman Brothers.
August 24, 2017
Trying to understand the political decisions and cultural ethos of The South, you will always come up short without the dimension this book explores - the unique "civil religion" of The South. A racial or political history is only part of the story.
The Lost Cause is and always has been a movement preoccupied with mythologizing and absolving the fighting men of the Confederacy. It attempts to imbue their struggle with meaning and contradict the dominant narrative that these soldiers were traitors and complicit in systemic evil.
But The Lost Cause can also be understood in more explicitly religious terms. It's a cult. It's as interested in providing easy balms for wounded egos (how could the Civil War have been an evil war to preserve slavery when my grandaddy fought in it and he was a Good Christian Man?) as it is in deifying Confederate heroes. Its pettiness and insecurities are wrapped up in a mythology that sees losing the Civil War as a unique trial from God meant to forge a grand southern destiny. A Southern Identity separate from the American Identity.
It's total garbage. It's stubborn. And its tendrils have wrapped themselves around the modern Evangelical community. This book gives great commentaries and examples of how this civil religion (or... real talk... weaponized political religion) sought to undermine the Reconstruction process and promoted toxic feel-good political racism instead of creating a new more integrated stronger economy.
This book is about a necessary topic. And Wilson is an important scholar. But I don't think this is the book on the subject. Some of the evidence is thin. Some of the writing is a little too dense. I think the right book is soon to be written, but in the meantime, these ideas are at least worth getting acquainted with.
The Lost Cause is and always has been a movement preoccupied with mythologizing and absolving the fighting men of the Confederacy. It attempts to imbue their struggle with meaning and contradict the dominant narrative that these soldiers were traitors and complicit in systemic evil.
But The Lost Cause can also be understood in more explicitly religious terms. It's a cult. It's as interested in providing easy balms for wounded egos (how could the Civil War have been an evil war to preserve slavery when my grandaddy fought in it and he was a Good Christian Man?) as it is in deifying Confederate heroes. Its pettiness and insecurities are wrapped up in a mythology that sees losing the Civil War as a unique trial from God meant to forge a grand southern destiny. A Southern Identity separate from the American Identity.
It's total garbage. It's stubborn. And its tendrils have wrapped themselves around the modern Evangelical community. This book gives great commentaries and examples of how this civil religion (or... real talk... weaponized political religion) sought to undermine the Reconstruction process and promoted toxic feel-good political racism instead of creating a new more integrated stronger economy.
This book is about a necessary topic. And Wilson is an important scholar. But I don't think this is the book on the subject. Some of the evidence is thin. Some of the writing is a little too dense. I think the right book is soon to be written, but in the meantime, these ideas are at least worth getting acquainted with.
March 25, 2021
I once lived in Mississippi for an extended period, and was struck by the breadth of Christian texture that surfaced in the social nuances and niceties. So, in many ways, "Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause. 1859-1920" penned by Charles Reagan Wilson, professor emeritus of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Studies, gave me some colorful background to my experiences. This volume first surfaced in the 1980s and was republished in 2009. The volume's thesis is plainly stated early on, "the Lost cause was a mythic construct that helped white southerners define a cultural identity in the aftermath of Confederate defeat" (x). Since the book has already been around for decades and has received numerous reviews, online and in educational and historical journals, I will simply get down to brass tacks.
I'm not sure the author makes a completely convincing case. The material is intriguing, quoting from a decently diverse, but select, number of original sources. In many ways it feels like he might be close to the heart of the matter in most areas, but the fact that he paints a monolithic picture, and doesn't draw in the larger scenes going on in Evangelicalism throughout the west at the time, as well as northern cultural/religious trends, and so forth, often left me with doubts about many of his conclusions. For example, simply reading the sources he cites I often thought, "But that doesn't seem to go along tightly with your conclusion! That actually seems to go against your assertions."
With that said, I did find the manuscript useful and cautioning. The danger for Christianity is to allow itself to get folded into national or intra-national mores and movements and begin to identify the aims and goals of the one with the other, and to merge the Kingdom of God with a political format. We did it in the west in Rome, then the Holy Roman Empire, and so forth. And our Eastern Orthodox friends did it under Byzantium and Constantinople. Thus, it is a real danger, and that's what made the book mostly "believable". The material in the book will give a reader reasons to think and reflect, but also some historical background to certain customs. For example, I always wondered why and when the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" found approval in the south and southern churches - a hymn written by a Unitarian which pictures the Kingdom of God housed in the Union Army. I received my answer, and how it fit into the perception regarding the first world war (176). All said, it's a worthwhile book.
I'm not sure the author makes a completely convincing case. The material is intriguing, quoting from a decently diverse, but select, number of original sources. In many ways it feels like he might be close to the heart of the matter in most areas, but the fact that he paints a monolithic picture, and doesn't draw in the larger scenes going on in Evangelicalism throughout the west at the time, as well as northern cultural/religious trends, and so forth, often left me with doubts about many of his conclusions. For example, simply reading the sources he cites I often thought, "But that doesn't seem to go along tightly with your conclusion! That actually seems to go against your assertions."
With that said, I did find the manuscript useful and cautioning. The danger for Christianity is to allow itself to get folded into national or intra-national mores and movements and begin to identify the aims and goals of the one with the other, and to merge the Kingdom of God with a political format. We did it in the west in Rome, then the Holy Roman Empire, and so forth. And our Eastern Orthodox friends did it under Byzantium and Constantinople. Thus, it is a real danger, and that's what made the book mostly "believable". The material in the book will give a reader reasons to think and reflect, but also some historical background to certain customs. For example, I always wondered why and when the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" found approval in the south and southern churches - a hymn written by a Unitarian which pictures the Kingdom of God housed in the Union Army. I received my answer, and how it fit into the perception regarding the first world war (176). All said, it's a worthwhile book.
April 7, 2017
Charles R. Wilson has a solid reputation as a scholar of Southern religion, but his desire to meld his field with his interest in the mythology of the Lost Cause has produced a book that is chock full of fascinating research but rather lacking in bringing that research into a coherent thesis; Wilson clearly wants to indicate a connection between the Lost Cause mythology and Southern religion, but in painting with overly broad strokes he seems to have shoe-horned excellent research into a poor argument.
In tracing the connection between Southern religion and the Lost Cause, Wilson fails to account for the ubiquity of both religion and pro-Confederate sentiments in the American South, and thus his fundamental thesis is called into question; Southerners also tended to plant cotton and also be Christian, and frankly making an argument linking those two truths makes about as much sense as what Wilson puts forward here. Entire chapters are dedicated to the fact that Confederate leaders tended to be Christian, that after the war they pursued religion vocations, and that religious officials were present at civic events celebrating the Confederacy; the same would effectively be true in any region of America, or even in any nation during the 19th century.
Unfortunately, Wilson's desire to make this book about the intersection of the Lost Cause civil "religion" and the actual Christian religion was his undoing; although a fascinating read filled with solid research, Baptized in Blood fails to establish a convincing argument. The book remains very useful, however, and remains an extremely valuable source for primary accounts relating to the Lost Cause mythology.
I would recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of the South after the War Between the States and in the religious dimensions of the Lost Cause mythology
In tracing the connection between Southern religion and the Lost Cause, Wilson fails to account for the ubiquity of both religion and pro-Confederate sentiments in the American South, and thus his fundamental thesis is called into question; Southerners also tended to plant cotton and also be Christian, and frankly making an argument linking those two truths makes about as much sense as what Wilson puts forward here. Entire chapters are dedicated to the fact that Confederate leaders tended to be Christian, that after the war they pursued religion vocations, and that religious officials were present at civic events celebrating the Confederacy; the same would effectively be true in any region of America, or even in any nation during the 19th century.
Unfortunately, Wilson's desire to make this book about the intersection of the Lost Cause civil "religion" and the actual Christian religion was his undoing; although a fascinating read filled with solid research, Baptized in Blood fails to establish a convincing argument. The book remains very useful, however, and remains an extremely valuable source for primary accounts relating to the Lost Cause mythology.
I would recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of the South after the War Between the States and in the religious dimensions of the Lost Cause mythology
January 16, 2024
More review to come. Wilson has an interesting perspective on the Lost Cause. He discusses the civil religion of the South and how that carried them through Reconstruction until WWI. I think he touches on some very true things, though he conflates actual Christianity with the Christianity they were displaying. Indeed, the south did seem to create thier own kind of religon that is quite facinating however skewed thier ideology proved to be. They crafted thier own narrative and religion in a way in the face of the destruction and defeat of the Civil War. In other words, they were kinda delulu. I didn't love his approach and he made a lot of generalizations, I wish he would have narrowed in on certain groups or actions rather than broadstroke culture moments. I'd like to know how these ideas he posed actually played out in the daily life of the South rather than just at the moments of their memorial/ritual ceremonies or sunday sermons.
March 24, 2019
I'm currently working on a thesis on white Southern identity in the 1950s and this book was very valuable. It provided a rich background concerning the formation of a separate "regional civil religion" and the whole ethos-mythology about the Lost Cause as well as its moral, religious, historical implications. Strongly recommend it if you're interested in such matters !
March 11, 2021
This is an important work, very detailed in its citations, on how the former Confederates dominated the narrative after the American Civil War to give us the mythology around the Civil War so widely accepted in the 20th century, if not so much in the 21st. The ideas these former rebels put into play had a strongly religious character and created, for a time, almost a competing secular religion in the South and parts of the North. Students of post-Civil War America should read this book. It is a classic.
July 7, 2021
A fascinating, and disturbing, account of how the lost cause functioned as a civic religion, sustained by the enthusiastic participation of several Christian denominations. There are plenty of accounts here of how Lee, and various other Rebel figures, were equated to Jesus, disturbing to a practising Christian. In a way the Trumpification of American Christianity is a repetition of this tragedy as farce.
June 18, 2018
An overall fair treatment of religion in the South before and after the war. Well researched and full of citations, no doubt the author wanted to give a thorough representation from the mouths and pens of those who were there. Even so, there was some cherry picking of quotes and sources that fit the intended perspective.
April 1, 2019
A well researched and insightful look at the impact of the influence the confederate cause on the South after the war ended. Especially significant to today's culture was learning why many of the confederate statues and monuments scattered across the South were erected.
February 18, 2023
Well written but didn’t quite scratch the itch. Very specifically about how ministers were integral the maintenance and propagation of the myth of the Lost Cause. I needed something a bit more basic and general about the entire Lost Cause myth.
September 8, 2022
In 2022 I was in North Carolina at a confederate fort on the Atlantic. They were still calling it the war between the states an echo of the Lost Cause belief.
December 16, 2024
Charles Reagan Wilson does a fantastic job describing the Lost Cause myth/Ideology as a civil religion that spread across the South and touched all aspects of Southern life and was eventually accepted by the entire American public into the American Civil Religion as a means of fully reunifying the North and South by 1920.
January 21, 2008
CRW presents a beautifully insightful and academic case for the ethic of the New South brethren.
I was originally drawn to this book for a research paper on Richmond's Monument Avenue for a class in historic preservation at the College of Charleston. It goes into great detail about the iconography represented by Civil War statues on one of America's most grand avenues and the consequent social implications invested upon Richmond's citizens, such as with the formation of private societies and educational institutions like St. Christopher's School.
I was originally drawn to this book for a research paper on Richmond's Monument Avenue for a class in historic preservation at the College of Charleston. It goes into great detail about the iconography represented by Civil War statues on one of America's most grand avenues and the consequent social implications invested upon Richmond's citizens, such as with the formation of private societies and educational institutions like St. Christopher's School.
October 28, 2021
If you think what is happening in our country today is new, you are wrong.
Read this book and you will discover that people have been creating a false narrative throughout time.
Nothing is new under the sun.
This book is a must read if you really want to know the truth of our current state of affairs.
Read this book and you will discover that people have been creating a false narrative throughout time.
Nothing is new under the sun.
This book is a must read if you really want to know the truth of our current state of affairs.
August 24, 2014
Interesting first half, and well written, but the back half dragged for me. Over all definitely a good assessment of how Southern religion/culture coped with the loss of the Civil War.
August 12, 2011
A good read with a nuanced examination of religion and its effect on Southern history.
February 28, 2019
One of the most eye opening books about the connection between religion, racisim, and the Confederacy that I have ever read. Before this book was recommended to me, I had never heard of "The Lost Cause." Though Wilson writes largely without personal commentary, his research makes it clear that slavery was not small side issue for the Southern cause and for Southern Religion. Rather, it was integral part of the culture inherit in the belief system.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Civil War, racism, or even current race relations in the US.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Civil War, racism, or even current race relations in the US.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews