Republican Virtue and the Civil War

[Semper Fidelis]

One of the things I love about studying theology or history are moments when something that someone writes summarizes an issue you've been wrestling with and they write something where all the pieces fall together.

This section in Mark Noll's work on the history of religion in the U.S. and Canada is one of those sections. There are actually an awful lot of "a ha" moments to be found in this book. What I appreciate about this quote is how it so clearly articulates the tension that people find themselves in. I hestitate to put this in Church history because I fear it will become a hot political topic. If it does then I'll move it. That said, what's useful here is to recognize that the early part of American thought was shaped (generally) by Christian ethics and common sense realism. People came to different conclusions about the policies that ought to be in place but there was general consensus on the virtues that undergirded American life. I think those of us who find ourselves at odds with the current climate need to realize that the days are long, long, long past when this kind of consciousness existed in the US.

Republican Virtue

The War may also have signaled an end to the synthesis of republican and Christian values that had dominated American culture since the Revolution. An important component of that synthesis—as it was realized in colleges, the courts, and the pulpit—was the assumption that Christian virtue was a prime requirement for the support of republican institutions and that republican institutions served as guarantors of the freedom necessary for practicing Christianity. Educators (most of them Protestant ministers) enlisted intellectual methods from the Scottish common-sense philosophers and exploited popularized forms of scientific reasoning to make their case for the interdependence of republican and Christian virtues. The intensity of the debate between the North and the South in the decades before the War derived from the way similar systems of moral reasoning were applied to a common problem but led to radically different conclusions. Southerners felt that Northern busybodies were destroying republican institutions and subverting Christian order. Northern critics of the South countered by pointing out how slavery subverted republican ideals of freedom and so paved the way for the suppression of Christianity. Both used common-sense arguments and an appeal to philosophical (or scientific) evidence to make their case. After the Civil War, the social, political, and cultural circumstances that had made the arguments, the conclusions, and the methods of common-sense moral philosophy so important were unalterably changed. When these conditions changed, so too did the need for common-sense moral philosophy itself.
During the antebellum period, common-sense moral philosophy contributed profoundly to a series of ongoing political arguments about the nature of the Union, the rights of the states, and the imperatives of republicanism. After the War and the securing of the Union, there was little call in national politics for a philosophy of justice concerned with the nature of virtue. Armies, not arguments, had settled the issue of what a republic was and how its parts should fit together. American politics then entered into a long period, from which it has not yet emerged, in which material interests and debates over the role of government—but not arguments over first principles—have determined the horizon of public debate. In such a political situation, common-sense moral philosophy has been all but irrelevant.
With political and social conditions changed, the Christian alliance with common-sense moral philosophy became a problem. Protestants might still rely on common-sense philosophy to articulate public positions, but when they did so, they were speaking a conceptual language whose day had passed. More and more after the Civil War, other forms of reasoning were being exalted as better ways to truth. On one side were advocates of a romantic sensibility who suggested that the innate inner powers of human beings could lead to truth and beauty. On the other side, and much more important in the culture at large, was a new trust in science. Common-sense moral philosophy had once provided a widely accepted method for supporting the link between republican and Christian virtues, but the new arbiters of national intellectual life had little stake in that synthesis. Intellectual method had been the servant of republican religion, but after the Civil War another relationship prevailed. While a few elite Americans turned to a religion of literature and the arts, masses turned to the new religion of science. In such a world the public-spirited constraints that common-sense moral philosophy had once inculcated as a way to preserve both Christianity and republicanism had little meaning.
The Civil War decisively solved many of the public problems about which Americans had quarreled since the time of the Revolution. After the War, it was clear that republican freedom did not include the liberty to leave the Union, and for purposes of preserving the Union, the force of the federal government was more important than details of moral reasoning. The new authoritative notions of public virtue now excluded Southern slavery, but they offered scant morality to the hustling concern for markets that prevailed in the North. In every instance, it was action, not argument, that settled the issues. With the constitutional crisis resolved and the prize of wealth for all becoming ever more important for ever larger portions of the population, there simply was little place for the antebellum system of moral reasoning. To be sure, romantic trust in the self and a deep respect for scientific proof were both present before the Civil War, but these impulses were subservient to a public concern for Christian faith and republican virtue. After the War, that bond between intellectual methods and Christian or republican outcomes was broken. The War, which had been fought on both sides to defend republican Christian virtue, led to a world in which that kind of virtue was not nearly as important as it had been before.


Noll, M. A. (1992). A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (pp. 328–330). Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.