Houses Divided: Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri

In his book, “Houses Divided: Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri,” author Lucas Volkman provides insight into the significance of early- to mid- 19th-century rifts initially arising over the moral question of African American bondage. He examines such fractures in the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches of Missouri, then a slaveholding border state. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerilla conflict that gripped the state through the Civil War, and fueled post-war vigilantism between emancipation’s opponents and proponents. Join us as Volkman discusses how the schisms produced the interrelated religious, legal, and constitutional controversies that shaped pro- and anti-slavery evangelical contention before 1861, as well as during wartime radical rule and Reconstruction’s rise and fall.