Part 21-18 - Why I Left The CofC - West's History - The Church During the War

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hi, I'm Bob Boltch with the That's Jesus Channel. We are in a book study on Earl Irvin West's The Search for the Ancient Order. It is a uh history of Churches of Christ, and in the last video we walked through the long, painful fight over instrumental music in worship. Now, we got through about 15-20 years of that uh from the first quiet flare-up in 1851 through the Midway Church story in 1862 McGarvey and Laird and their answers to Pendleton in 1864. Today, we are in volume 1, chapter 18 titled The Church During the War. So, I'm just going to pause here, get off script, and let you know this has been my favorite chapter so far. I used to teach US history in public school, eighth grade US history, and everything that he's bringing up uh the the precursors to the war, the things that happened in the war. I'm like, "Oh, yes, I used to teach about those things." And so, I'm I'm trying summarizing all of this. I'm I'm I've had to take a step back that I don't go into a lot of detail and teach you US history. I'm I'm assuming that you know what it is. If you don't, the book is available on my website for free. They're They're not at my website, but there's a link to the book. And it's just a a great chapter. So, all of these debates are happening against a much larger backdrop. The country was tearing itself apart. This chapter is about what happened to the the Church of Christ during the Civil War. The disasters that that fell on its colleges, the members who fought and died, and the two great questions that the war forced the brotherhood to answer. The brotherhood being the Restoration Movement or the Stone-Campbell Movement.

[00:01:51]Um What are those two questions?

[00:01:54]Can a Christian own a slave?

[00:01:57]And can a Christian go to war?

[00:02:01]Wow. So, in the 1850s, the political pressure has been building. Uh the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the the Dred Scott decision, the the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

[00:02:13]Right? By the By the spring of 1860, the country was racing towards a crisis.

[00:02:18]Lincoln won the November 1860 election with 40% of the popular vote.

[00:02:25]South Carolina seceded in December of 1860. Within 6 weeks, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, they all followed. In February 1861, the the seceding states, they organized together and they called themselves the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as its president. And then in April 1861, troublemaker, South Carolina.

[00:02:56]If you look through US history, everything that's uh is a crisis in America starts in South Carolina.

[00:03:02]A- April 1861, Confederate batteries open fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. The war had begun.

[00:03:12]Two preachers were on the road during the months of mounting crisis. Tolbert Fanning had left Nashville in late November of 1860 for a tour through Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama and Georgia.

[00:03:24]He went into the Mississippi state legislature. He listened to the to the southern orators make their case. The only question before them was when and how Mississippi would secede. Significantly, the veteran preacher, T. W. Caskey, was among those chosen to draw up the the secession document.

[00:03:49]What a difference the war spirit made in the church, right? 14 years before Fanning had preached in Jackson to an audience that nearly filled the legislative chamber, and now he preached for 2 days and the audiences were very small.

[00:04:07]Meanwhile, Alexander Campbell he's on a northern tour through Indiana with his newly appointed associate editor of the Millennial Harbinger, Isaac Errett.

[00:04:19]And Errett has taken on the task of raising funds for Bethany College, and they visited churches across Indiana and into Crawfordsville and Indianapolis through January of 1861. By February they were back at Bethany.

[00:04:36]And Errett goes on to Detroit and he attempts to do an extended tour of Virginia in the interests of Bethany College, but the war well, it catches up to him.

[00:04:48]As dispatches are passed between Washington and Fort Sumter, Errett prepared to leave Virginia at once. On his return trip, he passed through Washington Wheeling and Cleveland. Every town, large and small, filled with shouting and milling people and flags are unfurled and banners are across the public places screaming, hurrahing, and and fife and drums and and this is what's happening at at the beginning of the the of the Civil War. In 1861, in April 1861 W. H. Hopson began a hot hot gospel meeting for the church at Walnut and 8th Streets in Cincinnati.

[00:05:33]We've talked about that church before.

[00:05:35]During the meeting, news came across the wires of the fall of Fort Sumter.

[00:05:41]So, R. M. Bishop, one of the elders, was a mayor of Cincinnati. And only a month beforehand, he had entertained Abraham Lincoln himself on his way to Washington for the inauguration.

[00:05:52]But on this day, Bishop drove Hobson through the streets in his carriage, and they agreed to close the meeting that night instead of extending it.

[00:06:03]Members of the church joined the armies on both sides, the north and the south.

[00:06:10]James A. Garfield was president of the Western Reserve uh Eclectic Institute at Hiram, Ohio. And when the war came, he petitioned the governor for a commission, and he was made a lieutenant colonel. Garfield went back to uh Hiram and and formed the 42nd Regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry from the student body at the college there. He was soon promoted to be a full a full bird colonel and given full command.

[00:06:41]By November of 1861, the regiment was outfitted at Camp Chase, and they moved to Louisville in December, and they fought their first battle near Paintsville, Kentucky in early January.

[00:06:55]200 250 boys from Hiram College went into the Ohio armies.

[00:07:01]Several were killed. Major F. A.

[00:07:04]Williams early in the war, Charles uh Bowler at Cedar Mountain, Wallace Coburn at Winchester in 1862, Major uh Delos Northway in the Wilderness in 1864.

[00:07:18]On the other side, on the other side of the coin, you have T. B. Larimore.

[00:07:24]And he is destined to become one of the great preachers of the ancient order.

[00:07:29]Remember, this is West writing this chapter.

[00:07:31]Uh he joined the Confederate Army in the first year of the war. He served as a scout. He was at the Battle of Fishing Creek in Kentucky and went under a flag of truce with uh General Buckner to recover the body of General uh Zollicoffer. He fought at Shiloh. He uh fought the dispatch that or excuse me, he wrote the dispatch that went to General Albert Sidney Johnston notifying him of the passage of the first federal gunboat up the Tennessee River. He was finally captured at Millamore's Cove.

[00:08:06]Well, at Franklin College W.D. Carnes fought to keep the war out of the classroom.

[00:08:16]When Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers, almost the whole student body left to join the Confederates.

[00:08:23]And many never came back.

[00:08:25]Carnes closed the school and went home to Pikeville.

[00:08:29]It's just sad.

[00:08:31]Sad knowing that these people love the Lord.

[00:08:34]They're patriotic in their own way to to where they were brought up. You know, the states back then we we we say the state of Israel, it's a country of Israel, right? The state of Israel, but it's the state of Illinois, the state of Mississippi, the state of Virginia, the state of Ohio, the state of of Louisiana, the state of of of Alabama.

[00:08:58]They're states. They considered themselves really kind of small countries that had joined together.

[00:09:06]And so when you were raised in what you considered a country, your loyalties were to that country rather than the joined union that represented the all of those little small countries together. And that's one of the things that the Civil War did, that Abraham Lincoln did is after the Civil War, we no longer looked at ourselves as a bunch of small little country states.

[00:09:32]We looked at ourselves as a country of the United States.

[00:09:37]And uh anyway, let me get back on script here. At Arkansas College in Fayetteville, uh William Baxter was president, uh Robert Graham, who had founded the school, had returned to work with the Arkansas brethren. Almost all of the students were members of the Church of Christ. And when Fort Sumter fell, several of the young men came to Baxter to announce that they were enlisting. Some fought for the Union.

[00:10:04]Some fought for the Confederacy. The battles of Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove uh were both fought at the outskirts of Fayetteville. Uh the college that was there was occupied by both Southern and Northern troops at different times during the war. Once on a retreat, the Confederate Army burned it to the ground.

[00:10:23]After the long battle of Prairie Grove, the city of Fayetteville, well, it became one large hospital because you had so many wounded. The Confederate and the Union soldiers were crying out in agony. Uh of course, Graham was forced to escape the city secretly because of his Union sympathies, but Baxter was able to remain. The war did terrible things to some men. Before the battle of Pea Ridge, when the Confederate Army was camped at Fayetteville, William Baxter and Robert Graham went to visit B. F.

[00:10:54]Hall.

[00:10:55]And B. F. Hall had been a preacher in Kentucky, and then he in Memphis, he he went to Memphis, and then he went to Texas, and now he was a chaplain of a Texas Rangers regiment under General McCulloch.

[00:11:10]They never regretted any visit so much.

[00:11:14]Hall had changed completely, completely.

[00:11:18]He rode a fine mule. He had a splendid rifle. He told all of his friends that if a Yankee appeared, please let him get his share. He was going to shoot him.

[00:11:30]During the entire conversation, Hall mentioned not one word about the church, about the gospel, about Jesus, or anything that one might expect of a preacher.

[00:11:45]And he was a chaplain.

[00:11:47]He spoke only of his rifle and how many Yankees he hoped to kill.

[00:11:51]Hall told the story of a friend who had gone over the battlefield after Wilson's Creek and had seen a wounded federal soldier begging for medical assistance, and the friend had instead shot him.

[00:12:06]Hall told the story laughing as if he thoroughly approved that.

[00:12:10]Hall advocated catching every Yankee soldier, cutting off their right hand, and sending the soldier home with the hand tied to a saddle.

[00:12:21]Graham asked Hall how he could feel this way towards his own brethren in the north, people that he wants fellowship with in the church.

[00:12:33]Hall replied that he had no brethren in the north.

[00:12:37]They were all infidels.

[00:12:40]Going outside, Graham asked Baxter how he liked Hall. Baxter replied that he felt as though he had been in the presence of a highwayman instead of a Christian.

[00:12:51]When the Battle of Pea Ridge actually came, the Texas chaplain finally saw mostly running.

[00:12:58]The shattered columns of McCulloch's army, they poured back through Fayetteville on their way south, and Baxter and Graham stood by and watched as B.F. Hall, looking tired and worn, headed back in retreat. Hall's influence in the church was never the same after the war.

[00:13:15]The reason, according to West, is obvious.

[00:13:20]In Missouri, um a man they Mr. Payne, he was one of the H.F. Payne, is one of the first located preachers in the state where you stay at the one congregation and they pay you.

[00:13:34]But he was murdered by a group of bushwhackers who came to capture him under the pretense of an order from a commanding general.

[00:13:42]Members fought. Members died. Churches divided.

[00:13:47]Some congregations became discouraged and just stopped meeting together.

[00:13:54]Period. They just stopped. J.W. McGarvey sent a report to the convention of the missions society in October of 1862 describing what was happening in in Kentucky. A storm of human passion, he wrote. Seldom equated in the history of our sinful world is raging around us and we have caught the infection.

[00:14:16]Many brethren, he said, have been swept into hopeless apostasy.

[00:14:22]The zeal of many has been chilled.

[00:14:24]Distrust prevails among many who were once bosom friends.

[00:14:30]The evangelistic labors of nearly all have been much contra- contracted.

[00:14:36]Churches languish. Congregations dwindle. There's a fear that such divisions they have distracted the religious sects of the day and they have disgraced our history.

[00:14:48]Wow, what a quote. Now, it's a paraphrase, but you get the idea. Behind all of the fighting and the dying, two great questions were forcing themselves on the brotherhood and this is something that we really don't talk about much in the Churches of Christ. The The first question had been on the table since the 1840s, could a Christian own slaves?

[00:15:08]Well, Thomas Campbell wrote on this in January of 1845. He concluded that God had allowed slavery at certain times as a punishment for sin and that to hold slaves was divinely permitted.

[00:15:22]Slavery was okay. Slavery, he said, while an evil, it was one that God had at times permitted.

[00:15:30]And he was permitting it now. Alexander Campbell, he wrote on it the next month. He saw the storm coming. Anyone of of of of much intellect must see that the controversy between the north and the south has commenced.

[00:15:44]But Campbell had great confidence in the brethren of the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, whatever you want to name them, the people in the Restoration Movement.

[00:15:53]He believed that the principles that they held would never allow them to divide over something like slavery.

[00:16:00]Alexander Campbell turned out to be a true prophet.

[00:16:05]The Churches of Christ were among the very few religious bodies that did not divide over slavery during the war. They didn't.

[00:16:14]That's just a fact. Alexander Campbell's position was that slavery was not a moral question, it was a political question. He just kind of punted the issue. The scriptures, he said, neither condemned it nor upheld slavery as such.

[00:16:29]They just regulated it.

[00:16:31]There were instructions for masters and instructions for slaves. The settlement of the institution had to be left to the political government, not to the church.

[00:16:40]Campbell's grand object, he wrote, his grand object was to preserve the unity of spirit among Christians of the south and of the north within the Stone-Campbell Movement and within the Restoration the the Restoration Movement. Some of the brethren took stronger positions.

[00:16:58]John Kirk of Ohio refused to read any paper or hear or hear any preacher who was not strictly anti-slavery.

[00:17:09]National Field of Louisville was, Campbell said, body, soul, and spirit opposed to American slavery. Campbell himself drew lines on what no Christian could do.

[00:17:21]No Christian, he wrote, can on the principle of humanity or the gospel sell a wife from a husband. Right? There are some things that even if you are owning slaves that you just can't do.

[00:17:34]You can't sell a wife away from her husband or a husband away from a wife or an infant from its parents or parents from their infant.

[00:17:43]Right? Offspring under any pretenses whatsoever should not be separated from its parents.

[00:17:49]And no law of any state can justify any Christian in keeping his servants ignorant of God. That's another thing that Alexander Campbell said about slavery. Of Jesus Christ, they cannot be ignorant of the Bible facts. They cannot be ignorant of all of this, Campbell wrote, I have no more doubt than I have that Jesus is the Messiah. You simply cannot withhold the gospel from people simply because they're slaves.

[00:18:15]Now, Brent Ben Franklin, he took roughly the same line as Alexander Campbell.

[00:18:21]Um the Lord and the apostles, Franklin wrote, never declared slavery right or wrong.

[00:18:27]If they did right in not deciding the question, then why are we not going to do right in not deciding the question as well? Right? We shouldn't decide something that's not in scripture.

[00:18:39]The brotherhood, by and large, held together during the Civil War, and that's very interesting.

[00:18:45]They agreed, they disagreed, but they did not split over the question of slavery.

[00:18:53]The second question was raised during the Civil War. Does a Christian have the right to take up arms and kill his fellow man?

[00:19:01]Or even worse, does a follower of Jesus who loves the Lord and has done everything that the Bible and scripture has asked of him, does he have the right to kill another child of God who has done the same thing?

[00:19:19]Well, on this one, the leading voices of the brotherhood were almost unanimous.

[00:19:25]They said, "No.

[00:19:27]You cannot kill other people."

[00:19:30]These men wrote in in the language of their time, so I'm going to put what they said into kind of a modern English.

[00:19:36]The meaning of this is theirs, but the words are mine. I'm just going to be honest with you. A lot of what they say, I'm telling you, I had to copy and paste it into some AIs to say, "What are These are some huge words. I don't get this."

[00:19:49]So, uh with the with the help of some AI, I have been able to get some of these um phrases and and uh uh uh paraphrases done, so I I hope you understand that. Alexander Campbell, he had been against Christian participation in war from the beginning.

[00:20:07]In the very first issue of the Christian Baptist in 1823, he painted a picture dripping with sarcasm.

[00:20:15]"Imagine a Christian general," Campbell said, "marching off to war with 10,000 soldiers and a chaplain at his side, creating enough widows and orphans to give the rest of the church a chance to prove how religious they are by taking care of the mess."

[00:20:31]Wow. Uh when the Civil War broke out, Campbell published the same article that he had published in 1823, but saying that his convictions had only grown stronger now.

[00:20:42]He wrote that um America calls itself civilized and calls itself Christian, and then it draws its swords and it fires its cannons, and it gorges itself on the blood of its own brothers.

[00:20:56]"That," Campbell said, "is the greatest hypocrisy of all human history."

[00:21:02]W. K. Pendleton, uh he pleaded with the brethren not to fight. I think about what you're doing, he wrote. Um you're you're picking up a gun and strapping on every tool of death that you can carry.

[00:21:15]Ask yourself, do you have the right to kill your brother?

[00:21:19]Who gave you that right?

[00:21:21]What has he done to you that you should shoot him?

[00:21:25]And Pendleton begged, do not let brother meet brother on the battlefield.

[00:21:30]A T M Allen, the the veteran of Missouri, put it in one sentence. I would rather be killed for refusing to fight than to go to my grave with my brother's blood on my hands.

[00:21:42]Wow.

[00:21:43]Ben Franklin said it plainly in the American Christian Review, no matter what happens, he wrote, there's one thing we will not do. We will not pick up weapons and kill the brethren that we have spent 21 years bringing into the kingdom of God.

[00:21:57]Our property can be destroyed, our safety can be threatened, our lives can be taken, but we belong to Jesus.

[00:22:03]And we will not kill.

[00:22:06]J W McGarvey, just days before Fort Sumter fell, wrote his views down.

[00:22:12]If war comes, McGarvey said, I will do everything in my power to keep my brethren from joining any military company. I would rather be killed 10,000 times for refusing to fight than to win a battle and come home with my brother's life on my hands.

[00:22:31]There were brethren on the other side, but fewer in number among the leading voices. There's one guy named B W Johnson who actually um off script here, his uh commentary on the New Testament was in line with the actual scriptures.

[00:22:46]Uh the very first commentary that I ever read on the New Testament. So, it's very popular for people in the Churches of Christ uh from probably the 1920s all the way through the 1960s.

[00:22:59]Um and he published an article in June of 1861 that was so cautious it was widely misunderstood so he had to write it again to clarify. Johnson's position was that the war question was political and not religious.

[00:23:14]Government was ordained of God he said and so Christians had a right to participate in that government and if the government is right then defending the government must also be right. So Johnson cited New Testament examples of believers who held political offices and then pointed out that the soldiers in the New Testament were never told to stop being soldiers after they became Christians.

[00:23:38]And then Johnson made his sharpest point. If a Christian cannot defend his country then a Christian is dead weight in that country. The more Christians that you have the weaker your country becomes militarily. Convert the whole nation to Christianity and the the whole nation then collapses because nobody will fight for the nation.

[00:23:58]Jacob Creath Jr. left the question to individual conscience.

[00:24:03]He had been asked to preach on it but had declined. He wanted nothing to do with the war. If if a Christian did go and kill then Creath thought that the guilt would fall on the rulers of the country not on the individual in the country. So one thing before we close uh this was a very interesting chapter.

[00:24:23]Uh West says that the brotherhood did not divide over slavery but he points out that the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians they all did.

[00:24:34]He says that it is a victory. It is a it is a victory I guess. It it it's also just a partial truth. The brotherhood absolutely had divisions running under the surface during these years. The American Christian Missionary Society had already passed the Civil War resolutions that branded Southerners as traitors right? And um the Southern brethren had already began losing trust in the northern institutions. The the the formal split would not happen for another 40 years, honestly.

[00:25:07]But the wound was opened in a large part during the Civil War.

[00:25:12]And West knows it. And and he could write, "We survived the war, but the division was already coming." Instead, he wrote, "We did not divide."

[00:25:21]And that's the kind of small choice that he makes, you know, he's a friendly historian to the American Restoration Movement, to the Stone-Campbell Movement. And and picking that framing uh, that's what makes his side look as healthy as possible. So, I hope you enjoyed today's episode on the church during the war, the church during the Civil War. Next time we are in volume 1, chapter 19, titled, "Trends of the Times."

[00:25:48]Make sure you go to thatjesus.org for this and all of my series playlists on YouTube. I like my 25 video fasting series. I've got a series on uh, church history that we call coach. I've also got a new series on baptism that's going to be 2 years in the making. If you have the time, please like and share and subscribe and comment. And and we always end with the same question. Are you trusting something to save you? Or are you trusting the savior? I'm Bob Balch with the That's Jesus channel. Have a great day.

[00:26:19]And be blessed.