The American Christian Missionary Society as it Relates to the Problems during and after the Civil War

I said that we’d mention again the American Christian Missionary Society. It ended up not playing a significant role in the war itself, but it played a fairly significant role in brethren taking sides. As we have seen, most brethren, most leaders, in the church, both North and South, were pacifists. They counseled against participating, fighting, in the war, and so on. However, it would occur in 1861 that the American Christian Missionary Society would, in fact, take a side. They’d take the side of the North against the South. And, even though they were a group of men, they still had enough influence and commanded enough respect and interest that brethren in the South became outraged. While there are no numbers to quote, the general feeling among Christians in the South was that those who might have been on the fence, so to speak, about military service, about fighting the war, and whatnot, many were driven over the fence, were driven to take a stand, because of the position that the American Christian Missionary Society would take in that regard. They saw it as a slap in the face, not only to the South, but also to southern Christians.

Of course, there was a great deal if controversy about this, a great deal of turmoil that was caused. Much information was published, and many things were stated both during the time of the war, as well as after the war. We won’t go into a whole lot of detail on that, just simply mention it so that we’re aware of the fact that it took place.

Well, we know the outcome of the war. We know how devastating it was. The divisive effect of the Missionary Society’s pro-Union resolutions was soon evident, but it also continued through the war and even after the war. Early in 1866, Tolbert Fanning proposed a General Consultation Meeting of southern Christians. Christians in the South, like all southerners, had suffered great hardships during the war. Communications had been disrupted—that is, communications among Christians. Religious periodicals had been forced to suspend their publications. Preachers were unable to travel freely among churches as they had prior to the Civil War. And, Tolbert Fanning believed that southern Christians needed to counsel together and to assess the condition of the church, and he proposed a General Meeting for this purpose, this General Consultation Meeting.

The meeting was held in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in June, 1866. Six southern states were represented. Benjamin Franklin [the 1812 – 1878 one] read of the proposed meeting, and he objected because northern churches were excluded. He made this comment: “There is no South or North in our Gospel.” Fanning’s response illustrates the mood of the churches in the South after the war. He told Franklin that he “doubted the propriety of a hasty religious reconstruction with northern brethren.” A bad situation. They had, as Fanning said, “been employing the fist of wickedness against their brethren in the South.” And Fanning would add, “It seems to me that men engaged in such service may not be very well prepared to engage in genuine spiritual cooperation.”

Well, when The Gospel Advocate resumed publication in 1866, David Lipscomb was the editor at the time. He wasted no time in writing about the war-time resolutions of the Missionary Society. Lipscomb’s language was even more bitter than Fanning’s. Lipscomb recalled that he expected the Cincinnati Society (he refers to Cincinnati because that was the headquarters of the American Christian Missionary Society) to strengthen those who were pleading with Christians not to enlist in the armies. “But instead,” he wrote, “we found only vindictive, murderous spirits ruling its councils and encouraging the ‘Christian work’ of Christians North robbing and slaughtering Christians South.” Lipscomb charged that the Society “had performed a valuable service for the North in inducing the followers of the Prince of Peace to become men of blood and of war.” And Lipscomb recalled that when the war began nothing had been more effective in restraining southern Christians from enlisting than Franklin’s articles in The American Christian Review, and because of these, he indicated that northern Christians were trying to stand aloof from military service and bloodshed, but the Missionary Society’s 1861 resolution had encouraged brethren to enlist in the Union army. The Society’s resolution, Lipscomb knew, had caused southern brethren to enlist, and he points out that “many did not return.” And Lipscomb concluded, “We felt, we still feel, that the Society committed a great wrong against the church and the cause of God. We have felt, and we still feel, that without evidence of a repentance of the wrong, it should not receive the confidence of the Christian brotherhood.”

There are also some records that the Missionary Society itself had, which points out that they were in conflict over this whole matter. As a matter of fact, they had a Board of Managers meeting in 1879, and they admitted in their minutes of that meeting that the Society was fighting a fearful battle against its opponents, and the first source of this opposition which they cited was the “alienation” produced by the late war.

The Civil War had shattered the sense of brotherhood that had existed between North and South, between Christians on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, such that they could never again be called “one people” in any meaningful sense. This does not mean that the Civil War alone was responsible for this ultimate division. Even before the war, southerners had accepted a stricter view of the Restoration principle, and this had led them to oppose the Missionary Society. On the other hand, the South’s narrower understanding of the Restoration principle did not result in division until the bitterness that resulted from the Civil War and the Society’s endorsement of war came about.

What happened is that two threads of alienation, sectional bitterness and differences in understanding the Restoration plea, had become tangled together and had shattered the Christians’ oneness. Tolbert Fanning would never again say, as he had told the Missionary Society in 1859, “We are one people.”

Well, that is a little bit of the history of the church during the Civil War. We, perhaps, have a difficult time understanding and appreciating just how difficult this was. We understand it, certainly, on the national scale. We know what our country went through, but as a microcosm of that, we have seen in this lesson that the brotherhood also went through a very, very difficult time and was, in fact, divided in this way.