Christ, Church, And Country

A history of the home mission movement and a window on the roots of Christian nationalism In the decades after the American Civil War, men, women, and children across the Northern United States bankrolled a continental effort to create a homogenous Protestant republic through the home mission movement-a domestic counterpart to foreign missions abroad. This book provides the first multidenominational account of post-Civil War home missions by focusing on the thousands of ordinary Americans who supported them spiritually, emotionally, and-above all-financially. These benefactors believed that through subsidizing the soul saving of their fellow countrymen, they would receive spiritual blessings of their own. Millions of dollars' worth of this so-called moral capital crisscrossed the nation, creating a "spiritual economy" that Northern Protestants hoped would reunite the republic and bind it for all time. Christ, Church, and Country tells the story of a nation still reeling from the shock of the Civil War embarking upon a period of unprecedented economic growth and demographic transformation-convulsions that encouraged many Americans to use religious benevolence as a tool to bring greater coherence not only to the republic but also to their own disordered selves.