Christ, Church, and Country
A history of the home mission movement and a window on the roots of Christian nationalism
In the decades after the American Civil War, men, women, and children across the Northern United States bankrolled a continental effort to create a homogenous Protestant republic through the home mission movement—a domestic counterpart to foreign missions abroad. This book provides the first multidenominational account of post–Civil War home missions by focusing on the thousands of ordinary Americans who supported them spiritually, emotionally, and—above all—financially. These benefactors believed that through subsidizing the soul saving of their fellow countrymen, they would receive spiritual blessings of their own. Millions of dollars’ worth of this so-called moral capital crisscrossed the nation, creating a “spiritual economy” that Northern Protestants hoped would reunite the republic and bind it for all time.
Christ, Church, and Country tells the story of a nation still reeling from the shock of the Civil War embarking upon a period of unprecedented economic growth and demographic transformation—convulsions that encouraged many Americans to use religious benevolence as a tool to bring greater coherence not only to the republic but also to their own disordered selves.
- Richard Carwardine, Oxford University, author of Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union, winner of the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln PrizeAn original and engaging study of the millennialist Protestant purpose driving American home missions in the era of the “Greater Reconstruction.” Gwion Wyn Jones shows how Northern benefactors’ project fell short of the nationwide religious homogeneity they craved yet shaped a powerful spiritual-moral economy of mutual exchange between the donors themselves and the missionaries they funded. An exquisite gem of a book that significantly enriches our understanding of post-Civil War America.
- Edward J. Blum, San Diego State University, author of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American NationalismGwion Wyn Jones’s Christ, Church, and Country is a bold and deeply researched study that uses home missions to illuminate the entwined rise of Protestantism, business culture, and American nationalism. With rich archival detail and sweeping interpretive power, Jones reveals how religion helped construct the moral, material, and political architecture of modern America.
- Emily Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University, author of Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign RelationsIn Christ, Church, and Country, Gwion Wyn Jones reveals how home missions became a powerful venue for reconstructing the spiritual economy of American society in the decades after the Civil War. Through funding missions in the West and South, Northern Protestants across denominations sought to redeem the spiritual unity of their country and create their own moral capital. Beautifully written and drawing on materials from multiple denominations, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in religion and the economy in Reconstruction and Gilded Age America.
Gwion Wyn Jones is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.
