Rebuilding Zion
Subtitle: the religious reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877
By: Daniel W. Stowell.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 278
Subjects: Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877); Southern States -- Church history -- 19th century; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Religious aspects -- Protestant churches
Description: Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W.

Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart of which was the fate of the freed-people's souls and the southern effort to maintain a sense of sectional identity.

Stowell plots the conflicts that resulted from these competing visions of the religious reconstruction of the South. By demonstrating how the southern vision eventually came to predominate over, but not eradicate, the northern and freedpeople's visions for the religious life of the South, he shows how the southern churches became one of the principal bulwarks of the New South, a region marked by intense piety and intense racism throughout the twentieth century.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 246-267) and index.