This book presents insight into religion and slavery from a leading southern scholar. ""A Consuming Fire"" focuses on the religious dimensions of the South's response to slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation. Eugene D. Genovese looks at how southern proslavery theorists, both clergy and lay, struggled with the intellectual and theological quandaries posed by slavery. To many, defeat in the Civil War was God's punishment not for slavery itself but for the failure to reform it into a 'scripturally sanctioned' system. Although the reform spirit carried over into the postwar years, it was eventually overwhelmed by open racism and segregationist ideology.