The previous wars we have covered for this class have exhibited much religious "othering," that is, making the enemy out to be fundamentally different from the Americans, and thus justifiably fought. King Phillip's War was against the heathen American Indians, and even as we saw in the Revolutionary War, Americans went to great lengths to describe their enemies as of an other religion, even of an other religion.
As Stout reminds us, the Civil War did not have such a luxury: "the soldiers' awe at the scale of conflict and destruction eventually transcended personal 'spite'; in the very act of annihilating one another, they recovered the fact that they really were Americans all." (339)
Did this failure to effectively create an "other" contribute to the Civil War's dismantling of biblical justification in war? If one side had been successful in convincingly demonizing the other side, would rational, literal biblical interpretation's reputation have taken such a hit?
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