Michael Fellman, a preeminent scholar of the American Civil War and an expert on the guerilla warfare that characterized the conflict in the Missouri-Kansas borderlands, considers how perfectly ordinary Americans could revise their moral and religious beliefs to justify such extraordinary violence with relative ease. Selectively picking texts from Holy Scripture, they assembled a war God perfectly suited to their actions out of Christian belief.

Author of the path-breaking books Inside War, and In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History, Fellman, a professor of history emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, explicates a haunting and recurring theme that stalks American history.