This dissertation examines the complex interconnections among local church discipline, competitive party politics, and the ordering of public morality in the nineteenth-century upper South, illuminating southern evangelicals' once-ambivalent view of the state and their contested path to supporting moral legislation. Historians have long noted an apolitical strain in southern religious life, citing anti-abolitionism as well as a variety of theological tendencies to explain evangelicals' disengagement from public matters. More recent accounts have revised this one-dimensional narrative by drawing attention to a more publicly assertive religious impulse. Yet this literature has not addressed how the regional persistence of church discipline shaped fundamental conflicts over the public moral order, including the authority of churches over civil matters, the place of ministers and religious rhetoric in public life, and the role of the state in enforcing morality. This dissertation argues that as regulatory bodies in their own right, churches were both sites of political conflict over what constituted 'sin' and local, voluntary governing institutions that fostered resistance to the political tactics and statist paternalism of moral reformers. The pathway to viewing breaches of public morality as 'crimes' was conflicted; it passed through intense denominational and political strife before the Civil War, strategic changes in allegiance during the war, and new political-religious alliances after the conflict. Local churches therefore provide crucial context for understanding the anti-abolitionist rhetoric of apolitical Christianity and the region?s long struggle between moral paternalism and 'republican' liberty. Indeed, only after the decline of church discipline did formerly resistant evangelicals embrace the state as a necessary ally in the fight against sin. Research that combines extensive examination of local church records with wide use of published material from church and secular sources explains a great deal about the singular history of religion and politics for a divided region in tortuous times.