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There was a third alternative for antislavery Christians, Noll notes, one that would have preserved biblical authority by conceding that Scripture did not prohibit slavery per se but contending that it did in fact condemn the racial slavery actually practiced in the United States. A few lone voices tried to marshal such arguments, but they failed badly. For one thing, their "nuanced biblical argument was doomed" by a democratic culture that exalted "common sense" approaches and was reflexively suspicious of sophisticated biblical interpretation. As important, Noll argues strenuously, was the pervasive racism—in the North as well as the South—that led whites to take for granted that references to slavery in the Bible "could only mean black slavery." To be successful, he asserts, "the argument that a racially discriminatory slavery was a different thing from slavery per se would have required the kind of commitment to racial antiprejudice that the nation only accepted … late in the twentieth century—if in fact it has accepted it now."
Some of the most interesting insights in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis come from Noll's brief survey of the views of European Christians regarding the American conflict. Although European Christians were just as likely to discern God's intentions in the struggle, almost none linked the defense of American slavery with the defense of scriptural authority. Noll attributes the difference to the greater weight that "history, tradition, and respect for formal learning" carried in Europe, as opposed to the United States, where the "interpretive will of the people" reigned without challenge. European observers also saw clearly much that was invisible to American believers, in particular the degree to which material interests, republican assumptions, and racial attitudes were shaping the Christians, North and South. Above all, they were willing to question whether the combination of individualism and a lack of centralized religious authority—the democratic and voluntary features of American Christianity that had contributed so much to its dynamic growth—might also be primarily responsible for the civil strife that had divided the country. "It was a point to ponder," Noll remarks.
This slim book raises momentous questions for the history of American Christianity while offering, in the process, intriguing insights into an understudied aspect of our nation's greatest civil ordeal. As such it deserves a wide audience, not only among scholars but, more important, among Christians outside the academy. It will be more accessible to the former. Published by a university press, derived from lectures originally delivered to an academic audience, this is a book that will communicate best with specialists. Church historians will be interested in Noll's characterization of the Civil War as a turning point in American theology, while Civil War historians will be enlightened by his explication of the conflict's understudied theological dimension. The latter may question whether he has really demonstrated the centrality of theological debate to the sectional crisis, given that Noll focuses primarily on a small number of prominent theologians and religious leaders, and both groups of specialists may wish that the author had offered more evidence of how élite theology translated into popular religious attitudes.
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