3:57, #551 The Epilogue of God Caused the Civil War

Every history book should be able to answer the question, “What’s your point?” It has not been to add one more to the ever growing list of books written on the Civil War. More than seventy thousand published titles adequately fill that bill. It is not to make money from the sale of another book on the War, although that would be a pleasant side effect. It is to indicate that God, in fact, was the primary agent causing the Civil War, using people, places, weather, and events in specific ways to accomplish His ends. The coincidences of the Civil War were designed by the God of Israel and were not the result of fate, luck, destiny, or impersonal providence. The logical extension of this reasoning is that God caused all wars throughout history to bring about His Biblically stated purpose, and then they will know that I am God. Andersonville survivor, Warren Lee Goss, wrote at the end of his book, “Revenge is not tolerated in the light of our high, ennobling civilization; but when I behold the South, stricken and suffering from fire, famine, and the sword, as one of the results of the awful civil contest just closed, I seem to see the hand of God’s retribution seeking out and visiting her crimes with chastisement. If in coming times, as in the past, she shall sin against the moral ideas of the age, or if we, as then, become participants in her crime, so shall we reap, with her, the punishment of those crimes.”(1)

Author Mitchell Snay points out in his work, Gospel of Disunion, that prior to the Civil War, the spiritual split on North/South lines in each of the mainline denominations of the United States over the issue of slavery was the spiritual precursor to the North/South split politically during the Civil War. Hartford Institute for Religion Research identifies that there are “35,000 independent and nondenominational [apparently Protestant Christian] congregations currently with approximately 10,000,000 members in the United States, making these congregations a large but relatively anonymous presence in the U.S. religious landscape.”(2) It appears to be a continuing and growing trend. Evangelicals fight among themselves about anti-abortion tactics as much as they did anti-slavery activity. Every new independent congregation formed illustrates the spirit of secession that split the South from the United States, but also which caused West Virginia to break off from Virginia, north Texans to talk about seceding from Texas, and Governor Joseph Brown to threaten to take Georgia out of the Confederacy at various times. The spiritual fragmentation of the Church into thousands of independent congregations, as well as thousands of parachurch organizations, is the likely spiritual precursor to political fragmentation of the United States into a continentally encompassed feudal state where locality and its immediate demands take precedence over the concept of one nation under God. The alternative is repression of this spirit in such a fashion that centralized totalitarianism is the likely result.

The Church has stood by and allowed abortion to be legal for three decades, just as it stood by and justified slavery for two hundred and fifty years. It has allowed prayer to be removed from public schools for four decades. It has allowed the societal practices condemned in Leviticus 17-28, that describe the lands of Egypt and Canaan of the 15th century B.C., to dominate its culture. Poll takers estimate that 30-35% of Americans claim to be Evangelicals. They should be changing society more now than they did before the Civil War. The United States stands at a time in its history as controversial and pivotal as the middle of the nineteenth century. If Evangelicals in America do not more actively live out their expressed beliefs, then “the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?”(1 Peter 4:17) As Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, Americans of every description have a great task before us. May God cause us to walk by His light, since the handwriting is on the wall.

Sources: 1. Goss, Op. Cit., p. 242.
2. Hartford Institute for Religion Research, “Nondenominational Congregations Today”, [http://hirr.hartsem.edu/org/faith_congregations_nondenom_FACT.html][cited 4/13/05]