Atrios reported today that a North Carolina Christian School is using a revisionist booklet on slavery in its curriculum. The booklet, “Southern Salvery, As It Was,” was published in 1996 and authored by the Reverends Steven Wilkins and Douglas Wilson. I’m familiar with the Presbyterian dynamic duo’s work, and it is jaw-dropping to say the least. Atrios highlighted some of the juicy excerpts:
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"Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care." (page 25)
"Nearly every slave in the South enjoyed a higher standard of living than the poor whites of the South -- and had a much easier existence." (page 30)
Fellow Presbyterian Pastor Jack Davidson has written an excellent and scholarly critique of this racialist manifesto. Reverend Davidson’s conclusion aptly sums up the revisionist tripe: “Like the opinions of Jefferson Davis, Wilkins and Wilson's booklet provokes incredulity and withers when it is exposed to the broader reality of slavery in the South.”
More needs to be written about this pair.
Let me begin with Reverend Wilkins of Monroe, Louisiana.
He is the founder of the Southern Heritage Society and a member of the League of the South’s board of directors. The names of these organizations send a shiver down my spine. Say those names out loud and you can't help but hear a band playing “Dixie“ in the background.
The Southern Heritage Society appears to be a think-tank organization of sorts; its members recently met for their 14th annual conference, which may or may not have included a good ol’ fashioned cross burnin’. The agenda of their first conference reveals all you need to know about the Southern Heritage Society:
Held in 1991, our guest speaker this year was Dr. Terry Rude, professor of theology, Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina. He spoke on the following topics:
- The Cause of the South
- The South Was Right
- Confederate Manhood
Confederate Manhood? Sounds like a Dixieland gay porn magazine.
What is the League of the South, you might ask? According to its president, Dr. Michael Hill, it is an organization founded in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that “seeks to advance the cultural, social, economic, and political well-being and independence of the Southern people by all honorable means.”
Dr. Hill fails to define “honorable,” but his missive tips his hand (Notice the doctor’s misspelling of the word recognizing: he uses the British form of the word. Yet before you conclude that Dr. Hill was making an editorial statement about the damned Yankees forcing Webster’s spelling on the brave learned men of the South, notice that he uses several –ize suffixes with the proper American spelling. Oops.).
“Recognising [sic] that cultural regeneration must precede political regeneration, our initial goal is to give form and direction to "The Community of the Southern People." Only when we begin to rediscover who we are as a people can we save our civilization. The people of the South must come to understand that they indeed are a "nation" in the organic, historical sense of the word. As individuals and communities, we must secede culturally from a world that is waging cultural genocide against our traditions, our heritage and our values. If we do this, and in the process revitalize our culture, then perhaps we will be able to successfully pursue a political course toward independence and freedom. Once The League of the South has made "The Community of the Southern People" a reality, then we can pursue our political objectives: a return to constitutional republicanism and true federalism, or if that should prove unattainable, secession.
Secession, or self-determination, is the ultimate right of free men; and in the spirit of our Founding and Confederate forefathers, we shall, if necessary, invoke that principle once again.”
Ah, Secession. What a lovely thought. Do these slack-jawed yokels really think we feel threatened by the prospect of Southern secession? Get on with it, Bubba.
Now lest I find Reverend Wilkins guilty by association, this comes straight from the horse’s mouth:
“We are all children today. Historian Barbara Tuchman made a most helpful observation concerning the relationship of a nation's history and its present direction. She said this: "A nation's history governs its present actions but only in terms of what its citizens believe their history to have been.
In other words, it's not so much what actually happened that influences the present course of a country, but what its citizens believe to have happened. A nation deceived about its past can easily be manipulated in the present.
For this reason, history is a powerful ally to revolutionaries. A nation deceived about its past can be easily manipulated in the present. Those who write the history books mold the thinking and set the agenda of the next generation (and sometimes a number of future generations). For this reason, one of the first things the communists seek to do is re-write history from their own perspective. To rob a nation of its history is to rob it of the strength and wisdom of the past. We have been robbed. And we are in grave danger as a consequence. Modern historians are, for the most part, revolutionaries. They have re-written history in order to discredit and defame Christianity and its influence in this nation. The battle for freedom and reformation is not going to be won apart from reclaiming our history. If we are deceived about our past, it will be a tremendous hindrance to reformation in the future.
What most Americans believe to have happened, never did, at least not in the way they think. We have been taught mythology for fact, fiction for truth. And one the keys in our present struggle for reformation is how well we are able to recapture the heritage which has been taken from us by unbelieving historians.“
This monologue is the perfect segue way to Wilkin’s vision of the Civil War. Historians have duped Americans.
“We must understand the epochal effects of the Northern victory in the War of 1861. The victory of the revolutionary party (the Republicans) spelled the doom of Constitution government in this country.”
The War of 1861? Don’t you mean the Civil War?
“A more accurate term for the "Civil War" would be the War for Southern Independence. A Civil War is a war between two factions within the same nation; the War that took place in 1861 was a war between two nations - The USA and the CSA.”
Silly me. But the Civil, er, War of 1861 was over slavery, right?
“Slavery was of course a factor in the War of 1861 (notice how diplomatic I am being here!), but I don't believe it was THE cause.
In 1861 President Lincoln made it clear that slavery was not really the main issue (at least in his view). The main concern for him was preserving the union and he didn't care how that happened (i.e. by freeing slaves or by allowing slavery to continue) - he was only concerned to preserve the union.
In January of 1863 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation which made the war more or less "officially" a war to free the slaves. Many northerners rebelled over the proclamation. Numerous northern soldiers threatened to return home and northern state legislatures passed resolutions denouncing it, but it accomplished its purpose (keeping any European nation, chiefly England) from entering the war on the side of the South.
The proclamation only applied to slaves held in Southern states and only in those Southern states which were NOT occupied by Federal troops (thus, Louisiana was excluded). It had no effect on those slaves held in northern states or in those areas of the South which were under Federal control. In other words, it was a purely symbolic action intended for propaganda purposes.”
I see. And the Underground Railroad was simply a means of stealing the South’s labor base to bring about its economic ruin.
Wilkins is also an authority on the Salem Witch Trials, and is quick to defend the Puritans from that pesky Jewish playwright, Arthur Miller, who transmuted the good people from Massachusetts into monsters.
“The entire Salem episode lasted less than a year (1692). There was no "witch-hunting frenzy" prior to 1692 (only 12 people were ever tried for witchcraft). By contrast, the witch hunting which occurred in Europe lasted over two hundred years.
The Salem "hysteria" of 1692 did not see hundreds burned at the stake as is often imagined. Only 23 people died as a direct result of the trials. . . . In all, only around 100 people were ever accused of witchcraft in Salem, of whom 50 (by some counts) confessed their guilt. Some of these confessions were coerced and others may have been motivated by self-interest, as confessors were not tried or executed. Still, the fact remains, that many were in fact guilty of occult practices.”
Come on people! Only 23 people were executed! Show some perspective!
Wilkins’ words eerily remind me of the vitriol spewed by racist “scholar” Revilo Oliver, the longtime University of Illinois professor with the palindrome appellation. Unlike Wilkins, Oliver completely rejected Christianity, but he shared the Reverend Wilkins’ zeal for revisionist history and love for the white race. Here is Professor Oliver's view on American historians:
“[R]emember that for generations venal "American historians," most of them also Anglo-Saxons, have been as ready as the Fathers of the Church to lie and forge for sweet righteousness's sake, and "educators" have injected their lies into the minds of school children, who are told about our glorious "Civil War" and how noble it was to emancipate those darling savages by killing so many of the young men who included the best blood of our race and thus genetically impoverishing our nation and our race forever.
As a result of that great catastrophe, the level of intelligence in America sank so low that, instead of learning from the terrible Holy War against the South, hordes of nitwits rushed to Europe in 1917 and 1941 to fight more insane Holy Wars and destroy what was left of civilization.”
Now after you swallow a Pepcid, read Professor Oliver’s take on the Puritans and their link to the Civil, er, War of 1861. Notice how he essentially skips discussion of the Salem Witch Trials.
“In the seventeenth Century a considerable number of Englishmen, who had read the Jew-book until their minds were so warped they couldn't get along with their neighbors in England, migrated to what is now New England. We have all heard about the "stern and rockbound coast" and the land they made "holy ground" by their determination to worship their god in their own way, and it is true that they bore many hardships bravely and that, although they wasted some time by preaching to Indians instead of killing them, they did acquire the territory they wanted. They are said to have shown a certain admirable commercial honesty, although it is not clear how that is to be reconciled to the reputation of Yankees as being second only to Jews in diddling unwary customers. The Puritans had an especially Judaic form of Christianity, but so long as they were content to harass only each other with their righteousness, we have no reason for censuring them. De gustibus and all that.
The Puritans, however, soon felt the religious itch to spread their holiness by meddling in other people's affairs, and they doubtless have some responsibility for accelerating the progress of the disease in this country and bringing it to the stage of high fever and delirium. When their malice and envy was excited by the prosperity and culture of the southern states and, no doubt, the contrast between the climate of the South and the harsh winters of the bleak land they had chosen for themselves, their Christian lust to destroy became acute, and from New England came the plague of Abolitionists, who hypocritically pretended love for niggers to cover their yearning to impoverish and ruin the South.
The hate-crazed fanatics were eventually able to instigate an armed invasion of the Southern states, with, of course, the clandestine but powerful help of the Jews, who know how to profit richly from every disaster to the nation in which they have lodged themselves. And they do so righteously, for, as all Christians know, old Yahweh promised (Exod. 23.27-30 et passim) to help his pet bandits destroy every people whose territory they infiltrate, and to do it by stages until the Jews have multiplied sufficiently to take the whole territory for themselves.“
Now as for Reverend Douglas Wilson: he is pastor of Christ Church in Moscow (of all places), Idaho, and teaches theology at New St. Andrews College. To his chagrin, his namesake is a somewhat effete designer on TLC’s show Trading Spaces. Aside from his revisionist booklet on slavery, I haven’t found as much evidence of racialism. However, here is Reverend Wilson’s view on sexual mores and how parents should discuss sex with their teenage sons:
“My wife and I first encountered this when my son was a little boy and they were at the supermarket checkout counter. There was a magazine there with a woman almost wearing something and my wife was using her as a teaching opportunity.
She started to explain to my son that this was an awful, gross thing. I told my wife afterwards that a woman might look at that and see nothing but the grotesque nature of it, but for a guy there's all sorts of pleasant things that strike him initially. Even mothers need to say to their sons, "That looks good, doesn't it? The Bible says it looks good at the beginning, but at the end is death."
I’ve a feeling he’s the guy who keeps ratting out Howard Stern to the FCC. I feel a bit sorry for the guy. I mean, look at him.
He seems happy enough, but since his wife views the female body as an “awful, gross thing,“ things can't be too peachy in the Wilson bedroom.
So these are the people educating the young impressionable minds of Cary, North Carolina. Thank you, Atrios, for reminding us all of these crusaders for hate.