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{"id":2007,"date":"2012-07-14T11:36:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-14T11:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/07\/misrepresenting-the-civil-war.html"},"modified":"2012-07-14T11:36:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-14T11:36:00","slug":"misrepresenting-the-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/07\/misrepresenting-the-civil-war.html","title":{"rendered":"Misrepresenting the Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

David Goldfield\u2019s article \u201cAvoid the Carnage of War\u201d (June 29 Viewpoint)<\/a> may be provocative reading, but it is bad religious history. Goldfield does not like war, and he thinks the American Civil War could and should have been avoided. He labels the Civil War a \u201cwar of choice brought on by the insidious mixture of politics and religion.\u201d In this thinly veiled screed, summarizing some basic ideas from his recent book \u201cAmerica Aflame,\u201d Goldfield thus interprets the Civil War as a cautionary tale for America today.<\/p>\n

Who was essentially to blame for the war? Goldfield demonizes Northern evangelicals and the group he sees as their political arm, the Republican Party. Driven by their need to expiate America\u2019s sins, in particular slavery and the presence of the Roman Catholic Church, Northern evangelicals wrote the script for the Republicans and a \u201cmessianic\u201d Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n

Moralistic passion overrode rational thought, Goldfield argues, making political compromise impossible and war the result. Republicans \u201cdeployed evangelical dogma to raise the stakes of political discourse.\u201d One does not have to read far between the lines to find the views of a politically motivated, anti-religious critic, and also \u2013 ironically \u2013 an effort to let the \u201cSlave Power\u201d off the hook.<\/p>\n

It is quite a trick to throw bones to both the Lost Cause crowd and to those today who see \u201cevangelicals\u201d as a political bogey-man.<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"