Civil Religion and the Nation

So far in this class, we have focused on how religion could be a motivating factor for war and how it could frame how participants saw the war.  However, both of this week’s readings reversed that dynamic, asking us to look at how the practical exigencies of war forced contemporaries to reassess their religion and their worldview.   Ultimately, both seem to struggle with an underlying question: what role does civil religion play in the imagined community of the nation?

For Stout, the Civil War, through its shared experience of conflict and destruction, gave rise (Stout uses the term “baptized”) to an American civil religion, the legacy of which still exists today.  Faust similarly gives weight to the impact of the shared experience of loss.  However, I found her argument more nuanced in how it dealt with the South.  Stout did little to differentiate between Northern and Southern civil religion.  While it is true that both experienced loss on an unprecedented scale, it was unclear to me why both sides should unite in some sort of civil religion immediately after the war.  (And, indeed, the history of Reconstruction attests to the enduring sectional resentment after the war.)  Faust, on the other hand, shows how religion evolved to cope with the war, but also realizes she must reckon with Southern nationalism.  The federal government, for example, took care of burying Union soldiers, thus enlarging the role of the state.  But it was left to Southern private organizations to take care of Confederate soldiers, and this became a “means of keeping sectionalist identity and energy not just alive but strong.” 

Given the competing nationalisms that survive in Faust’s narrative, can we identify a single “civil religion” that emerged from the Civil War?  Or was this forged later?  To put this another way, which came first, nationalism or civil religion?