Evangelical abolitionism collapsed when the Civil War’s carnage discredited perfectionist optimism

Evidence

In the decades following the Second Great Awakening, early in the nineteenth century, evangelicals plunged into the enterprise of social reform, including common schools, peace crusades, the abolition of slavery, temperance, prison reform, and women’s rights. What animated their efforts was the conviction that they could reform society according to the norms of godliness and thereby bring about the kingdom of God here on earth—and, more particularly, here in America. … 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, 50

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’/‘On Sacrifice’ family only loosely, but as infrastructure for the whole book relates to the racialized origin story — evangelical social conscience was abolitionist before the war, which sharpens the later irony of the religious right.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the three-quarter-million casualty figure and the specific claim that battlefield horror, more than any other factor, broke postmillennial optimism.
• XREF: connects to: Civil War casualties shattered evangelical postmillennial optimism — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 51; Premillennial theology insulated fundamentalists from the war’s disillusionment — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 48; Vietnam’s failure was read by evangelicals as a crisis of American manhood — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 122

Related

• Civil War casualties shattered evangelical postmillennial optimism (similarity 0.91)
• Civil War defeat drove southern evangelicals from postmillennialism to premillennialism (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Civil War casualties shattered evangelical postmillennial optimism #corroborates (0.92) — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 51
• Premillennial theology insulated fundamentalists from the war’s disillusionment #corroborates (0.78) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 48
• Vietnam’s failure was read by evangelicals as a crisis of American manhood #expands (0.75) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 122