It is hard to imagine the horrors of the Civil War. The massive death toll, the battlefields strewn with bodies, and the brutal loss of so many young men so rapidly could not have been born without higher meaning or ultimate purpose. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address attested to the need to wrest meaning from the carnage: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” In his thorough and evocative portrait of the Bible in the Civil War, James P. Byrd also quotes Bishop Stephen Elliott of Georgia, who after the First Battle of Manassas said: “God does not permit his creatures, especially those who are bound to him in the bond of the Christian covenant, to be slaughtered as they have been slaughtered in this war without meaning to produce effects adequate to the punishment. . . . What a terrible reckoning! It cannot be for nothing!” (286). As Byrd demonstrates, the Civil War was not just America's bloodiest war, but also its most “biblically infused” war (2). Pastors, civilians, and soldiers turned to the Bible to find meaning and divine purpose in violence, death, defeat, and victory.

As Byrd explains, the Bible possessed enormous cultural and religious authority at the time of the Civil War. Byrd incorporates Catholic, Mormon, and Jewish sources, but given the time period, it is fitting that the bulk of his sources are Protestants, who took a common sense, literal approach to the Bible and eagerly applied its stories and precepts directly to current events. The Bible was full of stories of war—both literal and spiritual—that could reveal the providential plans of God. War, Byrd writes, “was a revealer of God's providence that only the Bible could decipher” (287). Americans fighting on opposite sides both found the meaning of scripture in the war and the meaning of the war in scripture. They found different meanings, of course, but both maintained a faith that the war revealed and fulfilled God's purposes.

In hundreds of political sermons, American Christians used the Bible to motivate soldiers to fight. Assisted by Lincoln Mullen, Byrd uses machine learning to identify biblical citations in his sources, and the book's appendix provides a chart detailing the most cited verses by both sides in the war. Byrd's research indicates that during the Civil War the Old Testament was cited far less frequently than it had been during the American Revolution, which he studied in his earlier book, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible in the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013). Turning to the Old Testament's stories of violence only worked if ministers could demonstrate that these narratives did not conflict with the precepts of Jesus, who told his followers to turn the other cheek. Many sermons used Romans 13, which calls political rulers “revenger[s] to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”

The biblical language of martyrdom and sacrifice also prepared men to kill and to die. Surely soldiers had much to fear, but in a culture that conceived of death on the battlefield as a heroic, holy sacrifice that helped to unite them with Christ in heaven, a meaningless death need not be among their fears. Along with Lincoln, many Americans attested to the power of soldiers to consecrate the nation by their deaths. Byrd quotes Horace Bushnell, who proclaimed that “without shedding of blood, there is almost nothing great in the world, or to be expected from it” (295). Bushnell looked to “the new great history sanctified by this war, and the blood of its fearfully bloody sacrifices” (296).

In the North, especially as the war wore on, many identified that sanctification with an end to slavery. Byrd notes that both abolitionists and the defenders of slavery made biblical arguments, with abolitionists focusing on the overall spirit of the New Testament, along with Paul's insistence that God “hath made of one blood all the nations of men” (295) and slavery defenders pointing to scripture's many passages countenancing slavery. Many Southerners believed that God intended slavery to convert Africans to Christianity. In Lincoln's words, Americans “read the same Bible,” but often found in it opposing meanings.

Both sides turned to the Bible after losing battles, which many interpreted as God's chastisement for sin and worldliness. When they struggled to find meaning in events, or began to doubt in God's providential care, Byrd writes, Americans turned to Old Testament examples of the suffering of God's faithful ones. A Northern sermon after Fredericksburg looked to the example of Job, who suffered horribly despite deep faith. After Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Southerners looked to the example of the ancient Jews in exile, perhaps chastised by God, but still favored and ultimately vindicated. Not that many Southerners saw defeat as a punishment for the sin of slavery—Byrd's Southern subjects allowed that God was chastising the South, but maintained that slavery was providential. Southern sermons often predicted future loss for the North, especially if Northerners persisted in their pride. As Byrd attests, Lincoln's faith in a God who “has his own purposes” was rare. Desperate to find meaning in suffering, most Americans had no interest in a God with inscrutable plans.

Read from our time, the ability of Byrd's subjects to find transcendent meaning in each event and experience is striking, and his book offers a convincing case that this ability made an enormous difference in the Civil War. What is less clear is what difference it made, exactly. Byrd's approach is refreshingly humble. For the most part, he lets his sources and events speak for themselves, leaving to others, such as James McPherson and Mark Noll, the work of making definitive statements about the effect of the Bible on the war or of the slavery debates on American religion. Overall, Byrd's many sources leave the reader with the impression that reliance on scripture made the Civil War both bloodier and longer(by encouraging radical, idealistic action, acceptance of death, and fortitude) and also more bearable (by giving transcendent purpose to sacrifice and suffering).