North and South Said Bible Supported Cause

James P. Byrd opens his A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War with Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address. The sixteenth president famously observed that Americans “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” This is a fitting opening for a book that sets out to explain how Northerners and Southerners used Christian scripture to sustain their cause in the public religious realm, motivate their respective peoples to continue fighting, and justify in the eyes of the Almighty a war that eventually cost 800,000 lives. Byrd’s book treats the Christian scriptures not as a set of historical or even strictly religious texts, but as spiritually pulsing words pushing its readers—be they soldiers, civilians, or ministers—to action in a variety of different ways. The Bible, Byrd argues, was not simply a compilation of texts. It was “text in action—spoken in sermons, read in devotions, printed in newspapers, and more.” In this sense, the work Byrd offers is a quintessentially American story of scripture’s use, which is fitting to understand an event that Robert Penn Warren called the central event of the American imagination.