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"Immortal Until His Work Is Done": Northern Methodists And The Klan In Reconstruction Alabama, Christopher T. Lough

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Although the congressional report from the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Hearings has featured prominently in the historiography of Reconstruction, the insight it offers into its witnesses’ religious experiences has gone largely unnoticed. Using the testimony of Arad Simon Lakin, a Northern Methodist preacher who ministered in Alabama following the Civil War, this article seeks to fill in the gaps. Lakin’s work and the violent resistance he encountered is understood as a microcosm of the Christian life in the Reconstruction South. Building on analyses of the Ku Klux Klan as the embodiment of apocalyptic rhetoric in Southern evangelicalism, I argue that …