Righteous Strife

How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union

De: Richard Carwardine

Narrado por: Fred Sanders

The first major account of the American Civil War to give full weight to the central role played by religion, reframing the conflict through Abraham Lincoln’s contentious appeals to faith-based nationalism

How did slavery figure in God’s plan? Was it the providential role of government to abolish this sin and build a righteous nation? Or did such a mission amount to “religious tyranny” and “pulpit politics,” in an effort to strip the southern states of their God-given rights? In 1861, in an already fracturing nation, the tensions surrounding this moral quandary cracked the United States in half, and even formed rifts within the North itself, where antislavery religious nationalists butted heads with conservative religious nationalists over their visions for America’s future.

At the center of this melee stood Abraham Lincoln, who would turn to his own faith for guidance, proclaiming more days of national fasting and thanksgiving than any other president before or since. These pauses for spiritual reflection provided the inspirational rhetoric and ideological fuel that sustained the war.

In Righteous Strife, Richard Carwardine gives renewed attention to this crucible of contending religious nationalisms, out of which were forged emancipation, Lincoln’s reelection, and his second inaugural address. No understanding of the American Civil War is complete without accounting for this complex dance between church and state—one that continues to define our nation.

©2025 Richard Carwardine (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"There is no greater interpreter of how religious thought and imagery shaped Abraham Lincoln’s statecraft than Richard Carwardine, who has now turned his attention to broader questions of how a clash of theological worldviews gave us what Lincoln called ‘a new birth of freedom.’ With grace and insight, Carwardine sheds new and important light on issues of perennial significance in America’s past—and present.” —Jon Meacham, author of And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“An extraordinary and indispensable book—with radiant prose, Carwardine evokes Americans’ profound yearning to divine the workings of Providence and to define the Civil War as a holy conflict.” —Elizabeth R. Varon, author of Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South

"Not since James Moorhead's American Apocalypse, almost fifty years ago, have we had so thorough an exposition of religion's place as a motivator, a definer, and a divider in the American Civil War. No one has a more vast command of the intellectual geography of American religion in the mid-nineteenth-century than Richard Carwardine, and no one paints in more complex and comprehensive colors the labors of the American soul to come to terms with the war that wracked its national body from 1861 to 1865." —Allen C. Guelzo, author of Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment