Lost Cause of The Confederacy - Religious Revivals

Religious Revivals

Wilson argues that many white Southerners felt that defeat in the war was God's punishment for their sins, and turned increasingly to religion as their solace. The postwar era saw the birth of a pervasive "civil religion that was heavy with mythology, ritual, and organization. White southerners tried to defend on a cultural and religious level what defeat in 1865 made impossible on a political level. The Lost Cause - defeat in a holy war - left southerners to face guilt, doubt, and the triumph of evil: that is, they formed what C. Vann Woodward has called a uniquely Southern sense of the tragedy of history.

Poole argues that in fighting to defeat the Republican reconstruction government in South Carolina in 1876, white Democrats portrayed the Lost Cause scenario through "Hampton Days" celebrations shouting "Hampton or Hell!". They staged the contest between Wade Hampton and incumbent governor Daniel H. Chamberlain as a religious struggle between good and evil, and calling for "redemption." Indeed, throughout the South the conservatives who overthrew Reconstruction were often called "Redeemers," echoing Christian theology.