ABSTRACT
Southern religion contributed to the defense of Southern society against the growing criticisms of it by militant abolitionists in the North. A recurring phrase in the Confederate religious lexicon was "baptism of blood". The anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace argues that religion originates "in situations of social and cultural stress", and for postbellum Southerners such traditional religious issues as the nature of suffering, evil, and the seeming irrationality of life had a disturbing relevancy. In addition to fulfilling the role of religion as, in Clifford Geertz's words, interpreter of "social and psychological processes in cosmic terms", the Lost Cause religion also fulfilled another function of religion by shaping these processes. In short, the Lost Cause religion did not have the prophetic, ethical dimension that Hill calls for. Its prophetic aspects were not focused on racial issues. The Southern civil religion also failed after 1900 to perform a prophetic function in regard to the American civil religion.
