This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moller your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in

Louisville, Kentucky.

As America now commemorates the 150th anniversary of the onset of the Civil War, there is a different

kind of struggle that is now undertaken, and that is the struggle to explain the Civil War.

Its causation, its effects, and the arguments that were a part of the political and

cultural and even theological discussion of the time. Now add to this conversation a book

by David Goldfield. The book is America Affflame, how the Civil War created a nation.

Professor Goldfield has a startling thesis and that is that the causation of the Civil War

has to be explained at least in part by the influence

of evangelical Christianity and you know right now that's going to lead to a most

interesting conversation.

David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, an editor of the Journal of Urban

History.

He's the author of books including Black, White, and Southern, Race Relations and Southern

Culture, which received the Mayflower Award for Non- and the Alsandy Book Award from the

Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights. He's also the author of

still fighting the Civil War, the American South and Southern History, Southern

Histories public personal and sacred, and most recently the book America A Flame,

How the Civil War Created a Nation.

Professor Goldfield, welcome to Thinking in Public.

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