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Our Country makes a welcome contribution to the growing literature on religion during the Civil War era.-- Civil War News Brodrecht, perhaps better than anyone else to date, has ably demonstrated that white northern evangelicals' overriding political goal in the Civil War era was to make America 'a national Christian organism characterized by affective onneness.' ... Brodrecht's book is a model integration of nineteenth-century American political and religious history.---D. H. Dilbeck, The Journal of the Civil War Era Grant Brodrecht's illuminating study shows how highly northern evangelical Protestants exalted their idea of the national Union before, during, and after the Civil War. With deep research and absolute mastery of standard historical scholarship, Our Country explains why this evangelical commitment to the Union as a providential, Christian nation exerted such influence during the war. Even more impressive is Brodrecht's account of how this evangelical vision of the Christian nation undercut the push for African American equality and hastened the end of Reconstruction. It is an unusually impressive book.---Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis In this elegantly written monograph, Grant Brodrecht focuses our attention to Northerners' view of the Union. More specifically, Brodrecht examines influential white northern evangelicals and their conviction that 'the Union as Christian America was a sacred trust that must be preserved.' Unfortunately, this preoccupation with national unity eventually overshadowed the need to protect African American liberties in the late 1860s and early 1870s.... Readers cannot help but be impressed with Brodrecht's thorough approach .... [He] utilizes an impressive array of primary and secondary sources ... [and] is a master of Civil War era historiography.... Our Country is an excellent book. Not only does it describe a central issue in Civil War-era politics, the last chapter summarizes the progression of evangelical nationalist thinking from the late-nineteenth century to the present. As it turns out, the struggle between ethnocultural nationalism and civic nationalism is still very much with us.---Curtis D. Johnson, Church History

Grant Brodrecht's illuminating study shows how highly northern evangelical Protestants exalted their idea of the national Union before, during, and after the Civil War. With deep research and absolute mastery of standard historical scholarship, Our Country explains why this evangelical commitment to the Union as a providential, Christian nation exerted such influence during the war. Even more impressive is Brodrecht's account of how this evangelical vision of the Christian nation undercut the push for African American equality and hastened the end of Reconstruction. It is an unusually impressive book. -- Mark A. Noll * The Civil War as a Theological Crisis *

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Grant Brodrecht, PhD, teaches history at the Geneva School, Winter Park, Florida.

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