Moore, Christopher C. Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2019. 300 pp. $50.00
J. William Jones (1836–1909) was a well-known Baptist minister and southern historian of the nineteenth century. Jones studied at the University of Virginia and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, SC, before taking a pastorate in Louisa County, VA. He felt called to become a missionary to China, but the American Civil War erupted, prompting him to join the 13th Virginia Infantry, first as a private and then as the regimental chaplain. He eventually became a missionary chaplain to the Third Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) and also helped form the Chaplains’ Association in the ANV. During his time in the service, he participated in several interdenominational revivals, preaching the good news of salvation by faith alone in Christ alone.
After the war, Jones took up pastorates and chaplaincies in Virginia and North Carolina and served as the secretary of the Southern Historical Society (1875–1887), the Assistant Corresponding Secretary of the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (1887–1893), and the chaplain-general of the United Confederate Veterans (1890–1909). He also published two biographies of his former commander (Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Robert E. Lee and Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee: Soldier and Man), a history of the wartime revivals (Christ in the Camp, or, Religion in Lee’s Army; later revised and republished with the subtitle Religion in the Confederate Army), and a classroom textbook (School History of the United States).
Christopher C. Moore evaluates Jones’s legacy in his recent dissertation turned book, titled Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory. Taking a cue from Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, Moore portrays Jones as a follower of an additional “gospel”: the “Lost Cause religion.” According to Moore’s description of this “religion,” “Lee was a Christ-figure, [and] Jones was his Apostle Paul… commissioned…to preserve a faithful narrative of the Confederacy” and to “point his readers to those he believed were incarnations of Southern virtue” (17) or “tangible representations of God’s presence” (326). Moore believes that Jones, in order to advance this “religion,” even engaged in “relic veneration” by treating Lee’s office at Washington College as “sacred space” and his letters as “holy writ” (291, 326).
Historian William Earl Brown contends in his own dissertation that Wilson’s (and thereby Moore’s) “perception is based on a secular understanding of Jones’s intense burden for Confederate veterans…. Contrary to Wilson’s view, it was not Jones’s objective to glorify the Civil War (or any of its participants). However, the Civil War was a means to glorify Christ” (14, 121–22). The heartbeat of Jones’s ministry throughout his entire life was to spread of gospel of Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures. General Lee’s testimony as a sinner saved by grace (185) was a means for Jones to point others to the Savior. Jones said as much in Christ in the Camp: Religion in the Confederate Army (3, 8, 50) and the Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee (449, 473, 476).
Jones simply desired to obey the biblical injunction to observe and imitate those who follow Christ’s doctrine and example (1 Cor 11:1; Phil 3:17). Jones therefore respected Lee and his possessions as memorials of Christian virtue, not as sacred relics which could impart a mystic grace to worshippers. At times, Jones may have idealized southern history, but he cannot rightly be accused of promoting another gospel (Gal 1:6–9) according to the traditional sense of the term.
Moore, however, fails to identify an actual false gospel in his study. He denigrates Jones for “limiting” Catholics from his ecumenism (12, 72, 104–130), but he gives no details of the doctrinal aberrations of this religion. Rome teaches salvation by faith plus works (including relic veneration), contrary to the Scriptures (Eph 2:8–9). Any union with Rome would be an unbiblical ecumenism forbidden by the apostles. Abstaining from an unholy alliance then is not being schismatic or unnecessarily limited but faithful to God’s Word.
Had Moore evaluated Jones’s life and legacy according to the timeless standards of Scripture, he could have properly assessed his subject’s virtues and vices. Confederates were unquestionably prejudiced against those of African descent and blind to this failing. But by God’s grace, Jones looked unto Jesus Christ for salvation from all of his sin, even sins he could not perceive. Jones and his fellow chaplains diligently preached this truth in the Confederate camps during the Civil War, to the conversion of thousands. Christians would do well to commend and emulate their zeal for the gospel. Thankfully, Moore refers readers to another dissertation which seeks to do this very thing: William Earl Brown, “Pastoral Evangelism: A Model for Effective Evangelism as Demonstrated by the Ministries of John Albert Broadus, Alfred Elijah Dickinson, and John William Jones in the Revival of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1863” (PhD diss., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1999).
