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Pure Heart: The Faith of a Father and Son in the War for a More Perfect Union. By Scott Quigley. Kent Ohio: Kent State, 2016. xxix + 381 pp. $39.95 hardcover.
On the eve of the Civil War, the Spiritualist firebrand James Martin Peebles decried the “solid, congealed orthodoxy” and “sectarian churchianity” infecting the nation's churches (James Martin Peebles, Signs of the Times, 8, 25). The greatest threat to Christianity, he concluded, was not infidelity but ecclesiastical rigidity and the tendency of churches to defend institutions over their message. “Christianity and churchianity,” Peebles insisted, “should no more be confounded than religion and theology, or chemistry and alchemy” (James Martin Peebles, The Christ Question Settled, 230). Such anticlericalism was hardly an aberration: it was echoed in the skepticism of Charles Knowlton and Abner Kneeland and in the writings of Free Thinkers and Garrisonian come-outers, all of whom sought to wrest the moral ground from beneath a Church they saw as elevating clerical authority and cultural power over the moral demands of the Christian message.
In Pure Heart, Scott Quigley speaks to the moral, social, and cultural impact of the American Civil War and to the struggle of the faithful to abide. Based on the fortuitous survival of a trove of documents in the archives of the Governor's Academy, Quigley has written what is in essence a double dual biography: a biography of a father and son coping with the war's divisions that doubles as a biography of a church and city...