Clifford Longley |
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A war of words has broken out in America in advance of next year's 150th anniversary of the start of one of the bloodiest real wars in history, the American Civil War. It is a battle over interpretation: what was it really all about - states' rights, slavery, or something else?
By December 1860 - 150 years ago this month - the stage was already set for war. Abraham Lincoln had just been elected president. South Carolina was about to break away from the Union, the first Confederate state to do so. From then on war seemed inevitable.
In the view of the distinguished American commentator Kevin Phillips, the American Civil War needs to be understood as the third of a set of three wars, which he called wars between Anglo-Saxon cousins. The other two were the English Civil War in the middle of the 17th century and the American War of Independence towards the end of the 18th century.
Each of these three wars was driven not just by ideology but by theology - specifically, about how you interpret the Bible. In each of them one side employed the powerful Biblical metaphor of the Children of Israel escaping from the tyranny of the Pharaoh. And the other side quoted St Paul, about the duty of Christians to obey lawful authority.
And in all three we can spot the rivalry and religious conflict between Cavaliers and Roundheads - monarchists and republicans, Tory Anglicans and rebellious Puritans, Charles I and Cromwell, Virginia and New England - which still cast their shadow over contemporary politics both in Britain and in America.
Each of them brandished quotes from the Bible for and against slavery. But even more fundamentally it was a clash of cultures: Calvinistic egalitarianism versus the aristocratic good life depicted in Gone with the Wind.
It would be a historical distortion if the contemporary battles over the interpretation of the American civil war squeezed out the religious dimension. People whose mindset is secular might find it hard to imagine what the world was like when everything was steeped in religious belief. And among believers it can be embarrassing to have to admit that differences over religion can drive people to kill each other.
But these differences were real and vital. How does God want societies to be organised? When does God want me to disobey the law? Does God allow me to own another person as my slave? And when do we have a duty to God, to overthrow an unjust ruler or fight our enemies? On the 19th century battlefield, as in the 17th and 18th, the key political and theological issues were the same.
Translated into secular language, many of these issues are still with us. But in the 21st century it is not clear to me what alternative source we can turn to, to search for better answers.
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