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A scene in the movie where Jackson prays with the slave George Jenkins is indicative. Jackson thanks God for his sovereignty over all events and prays feelingly for absent families, including George's. George's prayer begins in much the same way, but then broadens into an appeal that God would provide liberating justice for those who labor as chattel in bondage. After the prayers are over, Jackson is silent. The film rolls on.
Because there is more space in the companion volume, the unanswered queries press even more sharply there. This volume, for example, provides solid documentation about the many revivals that were experienced in the army camps, both North and South, but especially in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. So powerful were these revivals that it leads one contributor to conclude that their long-term effects ingrained a deeper, purer Christianity in the defeated South than in the victorious North: "The hardship of their loss taught the Southerners forbearance and Christian humility."
But we turn over only a few pages in this same book and read about what happened in Mississippi soon after the war ended, when freed slaves tried to take up the duties of citizenship. "Tragically in 1874 three hundred blacks were killed by white vigilante groups in Vicksburg." What, then, is the connection between the powerful revivals in the Southern camps, which did in fact play a part in making the South more thoroughly evangelical than the North, and the vicious Southern assault upon liberated slaves, which in the two generations after the end of Reconstruction turned the South into a crucible of lynching, mayhem, and exclusion for blacks? This is a serious question deeply rooted in the religiosity of the war, but for answers the movie and the companion volume are silent.
It is the same with the frequent evocations of providence that both movie and book accurately record. Depiction, however, is not enough, as the story of the Huntley family reveals. The Huntleys were "a devoutly religious Baptist family in North Carolina who owned no slaves." When their son George was called to war, they were deeply troubled by the fact that he had not yet professed faith in Christ. In their desperation, the family made a "bargain with God" that if George would receive Christ, "they would accept the death of another family member who was already saved or that of a young child presumed to heaven at death." George Huntley was wounded at the Battle of Manassas in 1862 and returned to North Carolina to recuperate. At home, "George made his profession of faith, and his younger sister Martha Catherine Huntley, aged seven, died on December 9, 1862." Without pausing, the narration then quotes from an impressively pious letter that George wrote home in April 1863 shortly before he was killed at Gettysburg. In Faith in God and Generals, this story is presented as if it were edifying, when in fact it looks like a species of Moloch worship.
Simply drawing attention to religion is not enough. There are better and worse, more orthodox and more heterodox, ways of understanding and applying Christianity. Manipulative trust in providence is an offense against the God of the Bible. Praising the piety of the Civil War armies, while not addressing the racism that was endemic on both sides, and that festered into gross evil in the postbellum South, is as indefensible as not paying attention to religion at all.
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