Focusing on the slaveholding border state of Missouri, Houses Divided shows that congregational and local denominational schisms, which arose initially over the moral question of African-American bondage, played a central role in sectionalism, Civil War, and Reconstruction. [T]his work represents a crucial local piece to the national puzzle of how religious conflict featured in the sectional conflict. It contains a trove of state-level church-state conundrums that Volkman deftly unpacks. And it closes with an intriguing claim that white evangelical Missourians rejected prohibition in the late-19th century due to the lingering abolitionist taint on moral politics. Altogether, Volkman shows that, for some Americans, lasting sectional allegiances took shape within houses of worship-and they ventured out of them with a righteous vengeance.