While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers.

By Steven E. Woodworth. Modern War Studies. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, c. 2001. Pp. xii, 394. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1099-5.)

The Civil War stirs the American imagination like few other national events. As a democracy, America holds self-creation in special regard, and if the country, much like a person, passes through a dark crisis, we are fascinated by the process of trial and healing and what it reveals about our identity. Readers of Civil War histories are moved by accounts of individuals facing physical and moral hardships. But the larger-than-life temper of the events of the 1860s also tempts historians to play up the grand contours of the story.

In While God Is Marching On Steven E. Woodworth both harnesses the drama of the Civil War and suggests the hazards of writing about it. Religious men in the Confederate and Union armies went to war supplied with pious precepts. Tested viscerally and spiritually, they used their beliefs, almost like weapons, to make sense of their experiences. Woodworth deliberately sets his focus narrowly: neither examining civilian religion nor the war's role in the development of American faith, he studies soldiers. We are shown the theology that appeared in diaries, the temptation to consider patriotism the equivalent of salvation, and the revivals that swept through military camps. Southerners and northerners, in Woodworth's view, were similar, religiously speaking. Although few of his themes are new, and more attention to the social context of beliefs, such as that sketched by Bell Irvin Wiley decades ago, would have better shown the rough soil in which faith grew, Woodworth offers a sharp, sometimes gripping account of Civil War religion.

This is, however, a tale of a Christian nation tried and renewed, a picture that understates historical complexity. Although it is possible to quarrel statistically with Woodworth's decision to omit Catholics, Jews, and unbelievers as "a small minority of the soldiers" (p. ix), the deeper problem lies in his presentation of a solid Protestant phalanx. Phrases such as "religion of Jesus Christ," "Gospel of Jesus Christ," and "Orthodox Protestantism" appear as synonyms for the Protestantism of the era (pp. 16, 18, 22). But from the first European arrivals Protestant Christianity was never homogeneous in North America, and it was even less so by 1861. Historians attentive to variation and transformation avoid such reified definitions and the rigid boundaries they impose. The charm of seeing the Civil War as a Protestant struggle does not diminish the historian's obligation to take an inclusive and critical view.

These reservations aside, Woodworth invites readers to hear the voices of Protestant soldiers on religious topics. While God Is Marching On shows clearly that common men asked hard spiritual questions and sometimes found answers. It makes the religious dimension of the Civil War unmistakable and underlines the active and thoughtful role in religious discussions of ordinary citizens.

ANNE C. ROSE
Pennsylvania State University