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.