“Such men will have their rewards,” wrote a Missouri Radical Republican of southern-sympathizing Copperheads in 1864. “They will be hated on earth, excluded in heaven, and loathed in hell” (120). There is no mistaking the religious underpinnings of this former Methodist minister's denunciation, and it is the centrality of religious beliefs and schisms in the long Civil War era that undergirds Lucas P. Volkman's Houses Divided: Evangelical Schisms & the Crisis of the Union in Missouri.

Volkman's thesis is that congregational and denominational schisms over the entwined issues of slavery and abolitionism – and subsequent issues of secession and loyalty – “were central to the crisis of the Union, Civil War, and Reconstruction” (xv). These divergent political and moral interpretations, debated incessantly in the religious press, resulted in legal disputes over congregational properties. They also “forged antagonistic and uncompromising northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence,” contributed to the escalation of brutal guerrilla warfare in this border state, and “fueled postwar vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation” (xv). An urban/rural divide and issues of class, gender, and especially race played roles in the infighting within the three evangelical Protestant movements on which Volkman concentrates: Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. Focusing on a single state allows Volkman to burrow deep into the kinds of primary sources that illustrate the longevity, persistence, and vehemence of congregational and denominational battles. These revealing sources, and the nuances they contain, too often go untapped in broader national studies. Few states would seem to be better suited for this study than Missouri, a place deeply divided over slavery and loyalty issues before, during, and after the Civil War.

Just how groundbreaking Volkman's work is—the publication of a Missouri case study by one of the world's most esteemed academic presses seems to signal a certain gravity—remains a matter for debate. Religion's role in the process is of utmost importance. Did religious thought and action serve as a catalyzing agent in the evolution of the sectional divide, or was it more of a reactant to a broader cultural and political force that carried everything, including organized Protestant evangelicalism, along in its wave? Were the schisms of Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the vanguard of growing American sectionalism, or were they responses to essentially secular, political developments that pushed the nation toward disunion independent of the actions of churches and denominations? Volkman, of course, argues for a more integral role for religious infighting, stretching all the way back to Old School versus New School schisms that rent Presbyterian communities in the late 1830s and early 1840s, even before the denominational breakups of Baptists and Methodists in the mid-1840s that commonly occupy our attention on the road to secession.

Volkman's sweeping argument feels only mildly convincing through the first half of the book as he puts flesh on the skeleton of the familiar path to disunion. For a time it appears to be another overreaching thesis by a doctoral student, long on promise and short on delivery. But Volkman hits his stride when he reaches the war years, when religious divisions clearly became a leading and active source of contention in conflicted Missouri, where schisms and religious rivalries “played a previously unexamined role in energizing the notorious guerrilla war in Missouri and . . . its associated vigilantism” (133). As the war progressed “Unionist congregants increasingly embraced the view that disloyalty to the United States, secession, and support of slavery amounted to sin. Union military successes ratified these beliefs” (133). As Union forces solidified their hold on much of the state following the first year of war, Unionists put their beliefs into action by monitoring and arresting southern-sympathizing preachers and claiming and confiscating church houses belonging to the disloyal wings of their broken denominations.

Even more convincing, and perhaps ground-breaking, are Volkman's concluding chapters on Reconstruction and “Redemption.” Sectionalized theological disputes “fundamentally shaped the process of Radical Reconstruction and spurred its collapse,” he argues (193). Applying a Test Oath to ministers and other professionals with the 1865 constitution, Radicals sought “to impose on southern evangelicals . . . the proposition that those who had supported slavery, secession, and the Confederacy were moral reprobates and unworthy of citizenship and full membership in church organizations” (193). But Radical Republicans and their allies within the northern denominations overplayed their hand, leading to the same sort of southern pushback that took place in former Confederate states. Ultimately, in the years following Missouri's conservative Redemption southern religionists refused to accept the emancipationist, loyalist civil religion advocated by their northern brethren, resulting in a ceasefire but no reunion for the divided denominations.

Houses Divided is the revised and truncated version of the author's doctoral dissertation, and this shows through in its regimented style. Volkman dutifully provides handy chapter summaries and an abstract-style, single-paragraph synopsis of the book's argument in the epilogue. Despite its lack of attention to graceful prose and organizational creativity, Houses Divided is readable and should be useful for college courses. The chapters are densely packed with page after page of evidential research, but the book's organizational structure makes its message comprehensible even to undergraduate students. While Volkman's argument may not hold up evenly throughout the four decades he analyzes, Houses Divided certainly provides a fresh perspective that places sectional religious divisions front and center during the Civil War and Reconstruction.