In the 160 years between the US Civil War and 2025, history and literature of the American South have offered an ahistorical blending of the politics and religion of the South in to a single united socio-cultural whole that acted with a single intellectual mind. The Secession Crisis and the Civil War certainly unified southern intellectual, political, and even religious opinion, but the degree to which southern religion saw itself as a corrective of, and not a handmaiden to, southern politics, be that an aristocratic or democratic politics, needs a fuller treatment to be useful to historians, educated laypeople, and theologians.

            The case of southern Presbyterians, therefore, is instructive. James Henley Thornwell and Benjamin M. Palmer Jr. both turned into political champions of the political South in 1860, but both spent their ministerial careers opposing the majoritarian democratic (and often disunionist) politics of South Carolina. Both Palmer and Thornwell held views on civil religion, moral reform, and political theology like those of Northern Whigs, rather than Jeffersonian-inspired Democrats. Most southern Presbyterian divines, in fact, opposed most of what southern politics stood. In 1954 Margaret Burr Deschamps could not find “a single instance of a Presbyterian in Virginia, Georgia, or North Carolina mentioning in diary or letter adherence to any political party except the Whig, or the Know Nothing which was formed when the Whig party disintegrated. The generalization “that belief in the Union and the Whig party were political characteristics of ante-bellum Presbyterianism,” Burr noted, was an accurate summation of Presbyterians’ politics.

            Deschamps admitted that South Carolina was an exception. That state was a de-facto one party Democratic commonwealth after 1838. But even South Carolina Presbyterians, with Thornwell and Palmer at the vanguard, rejected South Carolina’s so-called Democracy and its political leadership. Old School Presbyterians “with few exceptions marched to the Federalist-Whig tune and were repelled by Jacksonian pandering to the people, regularly voiced uneasiness about the potential turbulence and anarchy of the lower orders if not contained by proper moral restraints.” One example of this rejection of the Democracy was what Theodore Dwight Bozeman in 1977 called “the predominantly Federalist-Whig cast of Old School leadership was Palmer’s 1875 biography of James Henley Thornwell. Both men prioritized social and moral restraint—even in their pro-slavery writings—while most southern politicos held white liberty to be the primary political telos of the antebellum South.

            Far from being committed to southern politics, southern Presbyterians, particularly after 1830, were an aberration. New England-born and trained professors at South Carolina College, Columbia Seminary, Franklin College (the University of Georgia), and other southern colleges saw themselves as moral reformers of a benighted and non-Christian South. Far from being the most-religious region in the United States, the antebellum South was considerably less churched than the North. While southern Presbyterian intellectuals often were in fact more conservative than their northern counterparts, they never represented the southern intellectual, moral, or political mainstream, which until the 1850s largely remained that of church and state separationist Jeffersonian Democracy, which was committed to the eradication of the very type of clerical power southern Presbyterians hoped to exercise.