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Right Reverend Stephen Elliott: Political Influence And The Protestant Episcopal Church In Georgia, 1840-1866, Paulette S. Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the late 1840's, the South's religious and political convictions upheld slaveholders' social and economic views. These convictions permeated worship services in Georgia via the ministries. At the onset of the Civil War, spirituality provided an essential source of Southern strength in both victory and defeat. As fortitude subsided, religion also played a prodigious role in perpetuating the Confederate experience. For a generation, its theology had endorsed the South's social arrangement, asserted the morality of slavery, expunged Southern sins, and recruited the populace as God's devout guardians of the institution. Sustained by the belief that they were God's chosen people, …