ABSTRACT
In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered in March 1865, Abraham Lincoln said of the North and South that during the Civil War: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” Lincoln referred to the religious commonalities that characterized the conflict. Yet even the South itself was not monolithic in its spiritual culture. The antebellum and Civil War South was religiously diverse and, in some respects, southern regional identity shaped religious beliefs and practices more than religion shaped culture.
