Ever notice how 90% of trump supporters are Christians

Same could be said about the civil war... and yeas slaves were a part of that fight but that was certainly not the main reason for the conflict. They didn’t want the federal government dictating to the states how to govern, so they seceded from the union.

Thank you for your thought provoking comment. I would like, if I may, to comment on the one small point you made about slavery and the civil war.

I remember when I first heard the idea that "the civil war wasn't about slavery. It's about state's rights, including whether states had the right to have slaves." (which is how my friend stated it to me.)

Unexpectedly, I was surprised because that's not the traditional narrative. But I love the truth, and I know that official narratives are not always accurate, so I checked into it.

What I found was that slavery was a HUGE part of it. If you look in the documents of succession or whatever you call them -- the state's individual declarations of independence from the union -- you find that many of the southern states explicitly made very strong arguments that slavery was key to their existence and that their way of life would collapse without slavery.

Then looking a little farther, I found that the southern states were going to form their own "country", and they were drafting their own "constitution."

According to their "constitution," any state who wanted to be a member of the southern country would have to agree to a number of things. Yes, they would have the right to choose whether or not they held slaves.

HOWEVER - they would have to ALLOW THE TRANSPORT OF SLAVES through their states!

In other words, if a member of the southern states felt that slavery was illegal, they still had to allow other states to be able to transport slaves back and forth to sell slaves to other slave states, and to capture runaways.

In other words, southern member states would have to allow kidnapping and human trafficking within their borders as long as it was being done from out of state'ers. (And remember, slave owners could kill their slaves whenever they wanted too - so add murder to that list.)

In other words, member states would NOT have the right to prevent human trafficking, kidnapping, and murder within their borders.

And this brings us to the next problem - if there are non slave states, guess where the slaves will run away to? So then what happens is you have a non-free state with run-away slaves. That non-slave state recognizes those as human beings, who do not belong to another human being. Free men.

But then slave owner comes to free state and captures the run-away - but in the state that the capture happens, that is considered a free man - so it's kidnapping. And if the slave tries to flee from capture, possibly murder. Or if the slave is caught and took back, it's human trafficking.

So, let's just say the US divided, had a slave free half and a slavery side. What would happen?

War. No, really.

Slaves would run across the border to the free side. Slave owners would pursue - the free states would say "Hey. We don't allow slavery here. That's a free man, you can't touch him."

Before long, more and more and more slaves are gonna run away, till finally the south declares war on the north.

It would not have worked to have a slavery free and slavery laden halves. It had to be one way or the other, and it had to end in war.

Any dispute about whether people are humans or animals ends in war.