Civil War casualties shattered evangelical postmillennial optimism
Evidence
Those efforts at social reform were remarkably fruitful. Evangelicals succeeded in shaping the conscience of the nation in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and their persistence eventually drove an angry South to secession. But the Civil War itself began to prompt a reconsideration of postmillennialism. The battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam and Manassas, not to mention the horrific tally of casualties (historians now estimate something close to three-quarters of a million), prompted evangelicals to reexamine their postmillennial optimism about the perfection of society. — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 51
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The Second Awakening drove determined evangelical mobilization toward equality despite imperfect methods — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 48; Evangelicals abandoned social reform for individual conversion as proto-liberals embraced it; Clergy reframed Confederate defeat as a Christlike resurrection narrative promising eventual triumph — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 256 (+3 more)
Related
- Evangelical abolitionism collapsed when the Civil War’s carnage discredited perfectionist optimism (similarity 0.91)
- Civil War defeat drove southern evangelicals from postmillennialism to premillennialism (similarity 0.85)
- The Confederacy was founded on postmillennialist Christian optimism (similarity 0.82)
- The Second Awakening drove determined evangelical mobilization toward equality despite imperfect methods (similarity 0.81)
- The Second Great Awakening rivaled the Civil War in reshaping American history (similarity 0.80)
- Clergy reframed Confederate defeat as a Christlike resurrection narrative promising eventual triumph (similarity 0.79)