Demographics

Thomas Jefferson disliked slavery, but not because he loved his African-American neighbors. There is good reason for believing that Thomas Jefferson held to the view that the various races of man were not of common descent, contrary to the Bible's testimony. Jefferson was fairly contemptuous of the Bible, although he esteemed the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth:

"According to [William] Linn, Jefferson held '. . .the opinion. . .that they [Indians] are a different race of man originally created and placed in America; contrary to the sacred history that all mankind have descended from a single pair.'" (William Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about our Third President, page 92).

He prepared his own version of the sacred text with what, to him, were the problematic passages,— anything connected with the miraculous, or certainly any suggestion that Jesus Christ is God incarnate,— snipped away and discarded. So here's the plan, dear Reader: start an intellectual movement borrowing from the thought of an Enlightenment luminary who was a Unitarian and Polygenecist. Make him your leader and follow here he goes. Then accuse your detractors, falsely, of doing just exactly what you just really did. Nobody will fall for it, you say? Just wait.

League of the South

When I read that Douglas Wilson's co-author on the pamphlet 'Southern Slavery as it Was' was affiliated with the League of the South, I visited their web-site, which was up at that time. There was nothing remarkable or unexpected about it. One thing I did notice was that they were quite fulsome in their praise of Thomas Jefferson; as they themselves described it, "The South's political ideals and principles are rooted in the Jeffersonian tradition as expressed in the Declaration of Independence." (League of the South website, Core Beliefs, copyright 1995-2008, retrieved 15 June 2008, archived). But is this surprising in a secessionist web-site? Of all the founding fathers, his vision of a decentralized confederation of states would naturally be the one they found most congenial. I wish I'd taken some screen-shots; I didn't know it wouldn't be around forever.

Now ask them, what is wrong with abolitionism, and they, or their spokesmen like Douglas Wilson, will tell you that it's tied up with Unitarianism. There is a kernel of truth to that, in that two small sects, the Unitarians and the Quakers, were vocal in their opposition to slavery and likely punched above their weight in the controversies surrounding it. It is also true that the Unitarians seized control of Harvard University, showing what a determined, cohesive cabal can accomplish, even swimming against the tide of majority sentiment. They did not thereby find themselves in a position to dictate to the American public what they should believe, because society is nowhere near as hierarchical as the Moscow, Idaho sect believes it ought to be. The great majority of anti-slavery voters were not members of these two small sects; large groups, like the Northern Baptists and Methodists, who were never Unitarian, contributed greatly to the numbers the movement could mobilize.

So Douglas Wilson's co-author on his infamous pamphlet, 'Southern Slavery as it Was,' was from the League of the South. The League of the South, for many years, maintained a web-site on which it celebrated the glories of Thomas Jefferson. Um, wait a minute. Their main guy, their leading light, is a Unitarian. But the other side is in error, only because some small number of those drawn to that side were Unitarians. How to make sense of this situation, which I am not inventing, I am not exaggerating? I have to believe so few of their number are literate that they do not know their guy is a Unitarian. This is such a big thing for them; when Douglas Wilson searches high and low to find what exactly is wrong with Northern abolitionism, this is the best he can come up with: they were Unitarians (and some were), but then without their founding Unitarian, they are nothing.

Neighborhood of Boston

They used to say that the Unitarians believed in the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston. This is a good laugh line, because Unitarianism was to a considerable extent a regional phenomenon; just as Mormons are more prevalent in Idaho than they are here in Maine, Unitarians were more prevalent in the Northeast than elsewhere. And this is the center-piece of Neoconfederate efforts to demonize the North:

Is this claim true? Was the North entirely given over to Unitarianism? How prevalent was this departure from the Christian faith in the North at the time of the Civil War?

"In 1835 there were slightly over fifteen million Americans. About four million—one in four—were Baptist adherents (about five hundred thousand of them were members of Baptist churches). Roughly three million—one in five—were Methodist adherents (about seven hundred thousand of them members). The next biggest Protestant group was the Presbyterians, with about two million adherents (three hundred thousand members). At that time there were about eight hundred thousand American Catholics and fewer than two hundred thousand Unitarians." (Richard W. Fox, Jesus in America, Kindle location 2698; sources cited, John Hayward, The Religious Creeds and Statistics of Every Christian Denomination in the United States (Boston: self-published, 1836); James D. Knowles, review of Hayward, Christian Review 2 (June 1837): 195-209.).

The heavy hitters, then as now, included the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians: "In church seating capacity, as reported in the 1860 Census of the United States, Methodists led, with accommodation for 6.25 million people (3.47 million in the free states). Second came Baptists, with 4.04 million seats (1.63 million in the free states), then Presbyterians of all types, with 2.56 million (1.62 million in the free states). (Andreasen, “ ‘As Good a Right to Pray,’ ” xiv., footnote 11, Carwardine, Richard. Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union (p. 618).) (For some reason, the Census thought it useful to count seating capacity versus membership.) These popular denominations, with substantial seating capacity at any rate, were never noted for their Unitarian preaching. Of course, it is always possible that some pew-warmers may have held squishy-soft views on the subject, even if the preacher took their views to be damnable heresy. It is not always possible for a minister to know he has a Thomas Jefferson seated in his congregation, perhaps he thinks there is some other reason the room smells of smoke. Repetitive singing of 'Holy, Holy, Holy' does not always drive them away.

Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that a democratic nation would embark upon a religious war in furtherance of the views of a sect which held the allegiance of a very small number of its citizens, as the Neoconfederates claim the Union did in the Civil War. But is it possible these people, these very Unitarians, were the 'elite,' that we are always hearing about from the conspiracy theorists? Certainly they thought they were. And they thought they were the vanguard of the future. They expected their viewpoint to prevail.

Thomas Jefferson's optimism that the Unitarians would win out in the end was not borne out by history; they remain a small sect to this very day. Did they go up or down from where they were in the mid-nineteenth century? To judge by the prevalence of these faiths in 1965, the date of my 'Handbook of Denominations in the United States,' by Frank S. Mead, the Unitarians are still not in the same league with the heavy hitters: "There are 164,474 members in 1,094 churches." (This was after the Unitarians, hoping to stave off further membership declines, had already merged with the Universalists). The Congregational churches, in some ways the mother denomination of an unwelcome Unitarian brood, and a big factor in New England, tallies up as follows: "As of 1959, there were 1,419,171 members and 5,500 churches in the Congregational Christian Churches. . ." (pp. 221-222). How about the American Baptist Convention (these are the non-slave-owning Baptists): "There are 6,276 churches and 1,559,103 members. . ." (p. 36). These two denominations, both big in New England, have already outnumbered the Unitarians by eighteen to one, and we haven't even begun to count the Methodists, to say nothing of the Episcopalians and the Roman Catholics!

The Unitarians are a small group, admittedly more prevalent in New England than elsewhere, but there was never a time when they were in a position to dominate the Union army. While this world has never seen a military battalion, on the ground, staffed by angels, nor was the Union army so populated, there has never yet been an armed force on the march in pursuit of a nobler or more magnificent goal than the Union host in the Civil War. Initially, the North's war aims were simply the restoration of the status quo ante: a slave-owning South re-attached to a free North, a paltry and meager war-aim if ever there was one, which incidentally gives the lie to all efforts to recast the Civil War as a 'war of northern aggression.' What aggressor has ever been willing to grant peace on the condition of restoration of the status quo?

But as the number of the war dead began to climb up into the hundreds of thousands, 'Status quo!' began to sound like an empty, hollow battle-cry. All this suffering and dying to maintain the status quo? And so as the shades of the cut and blasted Union dead crowded together in the hundreds of thousands, there was no answer to give them but emancipation, and thereupon the Northern forces became a liberating army such as the world had never hitherto seen. No thinking, feeling Christian need apologize for what these gallant Christian gentlemen did; it was our nation's finest hour.

If you go into a Unitarian Universalist church in the present day, you are more likely to encounter a self-professed atheist than anyone who will admit to being, or even aspiring to be, a Christian. However, when they started out, they were claiming the high road; they asserted it was they themselves who were the Bible-believers, not the others. On matters of practical morality like slavery, Unitarian or Quaker Bible research is not necessarily bad, careless, or to be rejected out of hand; however, say it is so, leave the discussion to those abolitionists who are undoubted Trinitarians. Fine: "It can be demonstrated absolutely, that slavery is unlawful, and ought to be repented of, and given up, like any other sin." (Charles G. Finney, Lectures to Professing Christians, Lecture 3, p. 44, Heritage Library).

Slavery.
“What! shall men be suffered to commit one of the most God-dishonoring and most heaven-daring sins on earth, and not be reproved? It is a sin against which all men should bear testimony, and lift up their voice like a trumpet, till this giant iniquity is banished from the land and from the world." (Charles G. Finney, Lectures to Professing Christians, Lecture 4, p. 56, Heritage Library)

“At the south, they have got themselves into a great rage because we at the north are trying to convince them of the wickedness of slavery. And they say it is none of our business, that slavery is a matter peculiarly their own, and they will not suffer anybody else to interfere with them, and they require us to let them alone, and will not even allow us to talk about the subject. And they want our northern legislatures to pass laws forbidding us to rebuke our southern neighbors for their sin in holding men in slavery. God forbid that we should be silent. Jehovah himself has commanded us to rebuke our neighbor in any wise, let the consequences be as they may. And we will rebuke them, though all hell should rise up against it.

“Are we to hold our peace and be partakers in the sin of slavery, by connivance, as we have been? God forbid. We will speak of it, and bear our testimony against it, and pray over it, and complain of it to God and man. Heaven shall know, and the world shall know, and hell shall know, that ye protest against the sin, and will continue to rebuke it, till it is broken up. God Almighty says, 'Thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbor,' and we must do it.” (Charles G. Finney, Lectures to Professing Christians, Lecture 4, pp. 58-59, Heritage Library)

What, after all, is the point of pretending it is only Unitarians who oppose slavery? That is counter-factual, and he knows it is counter-factual. His whole strategy may be compared to the measures taken in protecting military aircraft against missiles; they throw out chaff, little bits of reflective stuff, to confuse the targeting mechanism of pursuers. The Bible says, "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him." (Proverbs 26:27). Our author has sought to smear the North's war effort by pointing out that, although the vast majority of Northern Christians were not Unitarians, the Unitarians were a less tiny minority in the North than in the South, and indeed even aggregated in some places, making some academic establishments into little forts to defend their viewpoint. They are correct in pointing out that Harvard was taken over by the Unitarians, as part of its downward devolution from Christian school to what it is today. This one episode justifies demonizing an entire region of the country? Believe it or not, this is one of their main arguments against the Union war effort: there were Unitarians in the North.

Meanwhile, popular author Douglas Wilson, according to his own account, claims a heritage from the Southern agrarians, who confessed an intellectual debt to Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. Moreover, Thomas Jefferson is prominently quoted on the 'League of the South' web-site. Recall that this is Steve Wilkins' organization, who was Wilson's co-author on the pamphlet "Southern Slavery As it Was." The League describe themselves this way: "The South's political ideals and principles are rooted in the Jeffersonian tradition as expressed in the Declaration of Independence." (League of the South website, Core Beliefs, copyright 1995-2008, retrieved 15 June 2008, archived). And Thomas Jefferson, their main man, was of what religious persuasion? You guessed it!— Unitarian!

This man mocked the Trinity as a three-headed idol. This man is, naturally enough, idolized by the League of the South. But wait, Douglas Wilson's whole effort to smear the Union is premised upon his identification of the North with Unitarianism, a small sect which did have a foot-hold in that region. It turns out that Jefferson is one of his main guys: "I am a paleo-conservative. In my views on politics, government, social order, I have been affected in a thoroughly jumbled way by. . .T. S. Eliot. . .Thomas Jefferson. . .and Robert E. Lee." ('Black and Tan,' Douglas Wilson, Kindle location 1378).

Follow that logic, dear reader, if you can: the North is evil because some small number of Northerners were Unitarians. The entire Union war effort is discredited on this ground, because it only takes a sprinkling of Unitarians to spoil the barrel. The Confederates and their present-day fellow travellers, meanwhile, look to Unitarian Thomas Jefferson for inspiration. We must reject the abolitionism of the North because some few Northerners were Unitarians, and for that matter, while we're on the subject, lets march in lock-step behind the Unitarian Thomas Jefferson; aren't the Unitarians our natural leaders? Douglas Wilson himself champions one of that small sect's shining stars, Thomas Jefferson. I don't know if there has ever been a more incoherent thinker who has attracted a following as a Christian apologist. Douglas Wilson, who is not himself orthodox on the Trinity, can freely quote Unitarians Thomas Jefferson and John Adams because he agrees with them, and that's no problem; but the Union war effort is doomed to apostasy because Unitarians existed in the North (and in the South, though admittedly in smaller numbers).

Douglas Wilson has discovered that the Civil War was a religious war: "So I do believe that in the broad sense the War Between the States could be described as a religious war." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 1303),— merely because some in the North were theologically 'liberal.' After the 'League of the South' progresses from talk to overt action, will we be forced to conclude that whatever police action Janet Napolitano felt the need to take was a 'religious war' against Unitarianism? After all these Neoconfederates do like to quote Thomas Jefferson. Evidently there are good Unitarians, and then there are bad Unitarians. When it comes to the Trinity, Thomas Jefferson was as far removed from the Bible truth as any of his co-religionists.

Red Herring

But suppose someone says, 'we secessionists like Thomas Jefferson's politics, though we dislike his noisome theology.' What's wrong with that? Nothing, I would say.

But many of these people are bound to a methodology known as Presuppositionalism, which is a market basket of common fallacies, including the red herring fallacy. This is the fallacy that, when someone cites Thomas Jefferson's political views, the opponent responds with, 'yes, but he was a Unitarian.' So he was, but what has that got to do with the point under discussion? Everything, according to these people; it all flows from their 'world-view,' and so what had heretofore been considered bad logic has been discovered to be good logic, in their eyes. Except it still is bad logic.

If you walk into a UU church nowadays, and there are still some of them around, you are as likely to find yourself sitting next to a Wiccan, a Buddhist, or an atheist, as to anyone who would venture to describe himself as something so colonialist as a Christian. That is where they are now, but that is not where they started out. In the early nineteenth century, the Unitarians were describing themselves as the Bible believers. According to their view, the Bible taught Unitarianism; the Trinity was invented by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century A.D. Just like the Moscow cultists have their favorite verses, these people had a little stack of verses which they thought made for their cause. They were pried away from the Bible, reluctantly, unwillingly, only when the local parson had made it clear as daylight to everyone listening that the Bible teaches the deity of Jesus Christ:

Jewish Bolsheviks

Mr. Hitler complained about the Jewish Bolsheviks. Was it ever true that all Jews were Bolsheviks or that all Bolsheviks were Jews? Of course not. It was probably true, however, that Jews, and other national minorities, could be found in the Soviet Politburo in numbers disproportionate to their presence in the Russian population. Ethnic Russians were under-represented in the Politburo. It is also true that two small sects, the Unitarians and the Quakers, in spite of their small size relative to the population as a whole, were punching well above their weight in the pre-Civil War debates on slavery. What consequences follow from a situation like that?

Of course the Unitarians and the Quakers were not alone in expressing qualms about slavery. But why were these two sects so vocal? What motivated Benjamin Lay? Was it that these people didn't care about scripture? To the contrary, they did; it was their much later descendants, badly bruised in the battles of the Trinity, who decided that scripture really wasn't their thing. I don't know if you can find a sect of Christianity that had no abolitionist members at all; and it was to get away from these people that the South was obliged, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, to form their own denominational bodies.

In the present day, the South is the more religious part of the country. It is easy enough to convince a contemporary audience that this must always have been so; but in the nineteenth century, much of the South was saddled with a very nominal Anglican religious establishment that made little impression on anybody. The South is not likely to have launched any religious crusades before it 'got religion.' There have been five U.S. presidents who were Unitarian: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft. Now it's apparent that this small religious sect,— and it is small, it still exists to the present day, but is just hanging on by its fingernails,— is punching way above its weight in the presidential sweepstakes, because it has never represented close to 10 percent of the Christian population. And, of course, none of these candidates ever received any support from the South, which was staunchly Trinitarian, right? Remember, the Civil War was a religious crusade pitting Unitarians against Trinitarians? Thomas Jefferson, it's true, still felt that he had to lie about his religious convictions in order to get elected, but he carried the South. The Adamses, to their credit, were opposed to slavery. When you look at U.S. presidents who were Quakers, there are two: Herbert Hoover and Richard M. Nixon, making it somewhat difficult to generalize about Quakers in politics.

There is an entire profession, that of the pollsters, which exists to answer such questions as how do women over the age of 65 feel about Donald Trump? They voted against him,— except, of course, many of them voted for him. There is nothing wrong with asking these questions, and there are meaningful ways of arriving at answers; you can sit down and interview a sample of the over-65 women, or hand them a questionnaire, asking them why they (or more accurately, so many of them) don't like Trump. The demagogues will always try to bring people back to the 'Jewish Bolsheviks,' and there are Jewish Bolsheviks, though there are also Jews who are anti-Bolshevik. They want to characterize an entire large group by traits that actually are found in some members of the group. Thus, Blacks are a criminal element; well, some Black people are criminals. The North is Unitarian, the South Trinitarian, etc., meaning, Unitarians are a less tiny minority in the North than in the South. People should know better, and see this for what it is.

Evidence-Based

In order to substantiate a claim that a given conflict was religion-based, a 'holy war,' what sort of evidence would one be looking for, if one were the sort of person who is tempted to look for evidence? I think one would expect to see some evidence that the governing authorities care about the religious sentiments and practices of those they are governing, and after establishing control over territory, make some effort to conform the religious expression of the people to their own. This is what we see, for instance, in the Muslim conquests, in the Reconquista of Spain, in the Crusades. These 'holy wars' do not necessarily seek to achieve the impossible, by converting in an instant an entire population, nor do they necessarily give those conquered the choice of the conquerors' religion or the sword. You are not necessarily looking for large-scale massacres of the dissenters from the conquerors' 'orthodoxy,' although that certainly does happen, for instance with the Turkish re-conquest of the Greek island of Chios. But the demographics can be expected to change, if only subtly. That's the point of the war, after all.

In a country, like the United State of America in mid-nineteenth century, where there are strong constitutional protections for freedom of religion, religious war of that classic sort has lost much of its point. You can't make people join this sect or that sect, or make them confess this or that. The state lacks that power. So what exactly is the point?

While classical 'holy war' may have lost some of its raison d'etre in a free society, that's not to say that no war will ever have a religious dimension. You can be serving God, or some other power. And Julia Ward Howe, Unitarian that she was, has certainly sewn that down. The Civil War did have a religious dimension, at least from the time, half-way in, when the North enlarged its war aims to include the elimination of slavery. Unitarianism wasn't the issue, though.

The United States had not wanted this war and did everything humanly possible to avoid it. But once the South fired on Fort Sumter, the war was on. And as events unfolded, Abraham Lincoln, who had heretofore shown no evidence of being a moral giant,— he was a railroad lawyer,— stood at the crossroads and did the right thing, freeing millions from cruel and unjust bondage. Those who hate our country, in spite of all their raucous jibes, cannot get us to put aside our pride, our national identity, and join in their low and foul detraction.

Demographics

Our Unitarian

League of the South

Neighborhood of Boston

Red Herring

Jewish Bolsheviks

Evidence-Based