Answering
 Paleo-Confederate 
Douglas Wilson

Happy Slaves

Douglas Wilson has become a prominent Christian apologist, and no doubt the atheists with whom he interacts feel they have good reason to build him up. Why such 'Reformed' luminaries as R. C. Sproul and John Piper also want to build him up is less clear. Atheists like Christopher Hitchens are always trying to discredit Christianity by asserting that the Bible supports slavery. Nowadays, they will rarely find a Christian pastor or apologist who will agree with them on that point. But Doug Wilson does agree with them, and no doubt they are grateful for his validation of their claim. Though he was obliged to start his own denomination to become ordained, he is the pastor of a church in Moscow, Idaho whose membership numbers in the low thousands, and he is a popular author and speaker whose works are read outside the bounds of his own organization, being popular also with Reformed Baptists for example.

This Reformed author wrote a book called 'Black and Tan' in which he shares his enthusiasm for alcohol consumption and the antebellum South, including its peculiar institution of chattel slavery. Wilson makes the case that the secessionist Southerners were the 'good guys' in the Civil War, whereas the benighted North was simply evil, and the abolitionists were "driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God." (Southern Slavery As It Was, p. 5).. This author believes that the South was right about the central issues in the Civil War, even though the South, God's favorites, were punished by an ungodly nation (the North) who were then and remain God's enemies:

"And although the South was correct about the central issues of that war, southern diehards must learn the hard lesson of Habbakuk [sic], who had to accept that God can use an ungodly nation to judge another nation which is 'not as bad' (Hab. 1:13)." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 1211).

Just as God used the wicked Assyrians to chastise Israel, God used the wicked Northerners to punish the South for its minor deflections from a purported Biblical paradigm of godly slavery: "'A righteous God, for our sins towards Him, has permitted us to be overthrown by our enemies and His.'" (quote of R. L. Dabney, Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 232). He fancies that he, today, is fighting the same fight as the righteous Confederates did in their day:

"The war was over the meaning of constitutional government, the nature of federalism, the life of republics, and the definition of civil liberty. . . .We cannot hope to fight the good fight now while repudiating those who fought the same fight earlier." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 948).

With what weapons does our brave and valiant soldier fight? Not with rapier or minie ball, but with alternative facts. He makes stuff up. Did you know that blacks offered their "ardent support" to the Confederacy? "The wave of patriotic fervor which swept the South clearly included the black population. Across the South, blacks frequently and publicly offered their whole-hearted service to the cause of the Confederacy." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 905). I didn't either. The 'consensus trance' version of history reports jubilant, newly liberated slaves greeting William Tecumseh Sherman's forces as they marched to the sea, bringing with them the jubilee. Who wouldn't welcome freedom?

Why invent pro-Confederate fervor amongst Southern slaves, even to the point of inventing 40,000 Black soldiers bearing arms for the Confederacy? Because the Neoconfederates imagine they see a sliver of day-light, a chance to avoid the charge of racism frequently levelled against them, if African-American slaves were the biggest supporters of secession. Moscow, Idaho slumbers, it would seem, under a bubble which allows, not only the still malleable future and present, but the past even, to morph and transmute itself into wondrous and strange forms not hitherto seen.

According to Wilson, the Southern slave-owners won the Bible debate with the abolitionists, because the "Christian defenders of antebellum slavery" ". . .knew the apostolic instructions precisely, had their exegesis in hand, and consistently bested the abolitionists in debate." (Black and Tan, Kindle location 305). He reiterates his verdict of victory: "Did the Christian apologists for slavery in the antebellum South have the advantage over the abolitionists when it came to their debates on the subject of slavery? Again, there is no question: 'The God-fearing southern people turned to the Bible to justify slavery, and the Bible did not disappoint them.'" (Black and Tan, Kindle location 850). So you see, Wilson is on record as averring that the Bible supports slavery. Does it? The Northern abolitionists did not think so. And as we will see, they held the Biblical high ground. The slave-owners responded, for the most part, with arrant nonsense like the 'Curse of Ham.' There is no 'Curse of Ham' known to the Bible.

Wilson's book 'Black and Tan' reprises and attempts to reframe the debate from an earlier pamphlet called 'Southern Slavery As It Was,' which he wrote with co-author Steve Wilkins, of the League of the South, in 1996. This pamphlet waxes positively rhapsodic about the simple joys of slave life in the antebellum South. It was withdrawn from publication due to plagiarism concerns. The League of the South is a Neoconfederate organization which would like to see secession finally be achieved, even at this late date. The two authors are willing to condemn such incidentals to antebellum Southern slavery as the frequent whippings and family break-ups which slaves had to endure. They admit such brutality did occur, but claim it was very rare. Their stalwart defender, though, Robert Lewis Dabney, realized that you can't have slavery without the willingness to utilize a degree of force to make it happen.

The American abolitionists were not seeking to reform slavery but to abolish it. They knew of comparative degrees of cruelty within the system: "Perhaps the mildest form of the system of slavery is to be seen in the State of Kentucky. The general prevalence of agricultural pursuits of a quiet and gradual nature, not requiring those periodic seasons of hurry and pressure that are called for in the business of more southern districts, makes the task of the Negro a more healthful and reasonable one. . ." (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 3). But as Wilson's guiding light, Robert Lewis Dabney explains, the system ultimately rests on the basis of force. If the slave, unpaid, just sits on the ground, how to make him work? Dabney identifies "the essential features of slavery among us" as "the right to the slave's labor for life without his consent, property in that labor, the right to buy, sell and bequeath it; the right to enforce it on the slave by corporal punishments, which might have any degree of severity short of death." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1498-1499). The Neoconfederates adore this man, and that's his definition. Forced labor is inherent in the slavery system.

On the question of who is to speak for the slave, certainly the slave ought to speak for himself. Did the slave-owners have a legitimate point in complaining about the New England abolitionists, or those in Ohio, contending for the rights of the slave? What did they know about it? These people had probably never met or spoken to a slave in their lives. Why didn't these busy-bodies keep their nose out of other people's business? Conceding the point to an extent, the abolitionists welcomed escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass, who offered an invaluable slave's eye view of how the slave system crushed human hopes and aspirations.

But ultimately, for Bible believers, however valuable this personal testimony may have been, the question must still be raised, what saith the scriptures? Even if the slaves had, imagine the impossible for a moment, been content with the system, the abolitionists would have been discontent, because God had legislated against it. But as it turns out, the evidence for Wilson's mutual affection and harmony exists more in his own fertile mind than in any historical record. The slave system was neither Biblical nor were the slaves themselves enthralled with it, as he imaginatively reports.

Wilson's book 'Black and Tan' incorporates in part an earlier pamphlet which Wilson wrote along with his collaborator Steve Wilkins, asserting that the Black slaves in the antebellum South were happy and content with their lot. The original pamphlet, as the reader can gather from its republication on his blog, was fairly clear-cut and straight-forward in its thesis:

"Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since."

"Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world."

"One could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery. It was certainly stronger under the southern slave system that it is today under our modern destructive welfare state."

"Ironically, if slavery had not been so pleasant an experience for the majority, this mentality would not likely have such a strong hold upon the minds of some of their descendants today."

"And nothing is clearer — the New Testament opposes anything like the abolitionism of our country prior to the War Between the States. The New Testament contains many instructions for Christian slave owners, and requires a respectful submissive demeanor for Christian slaves. "

"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."
(Southern Slavery as It Was, as quoted on Wilson's blog).

Douglas Wilson has never withdrawn nor renounced this viewpoint; he has, however, hedged it round with pro forma disclaimers and confusing attempts to misrepresent what are the sources of controversy. Characteristically, most of his surviving defense of the original thesis consists of venomous attacks on those who do not subscribe to it. This glowing vision of slavery is by no means a new or unfamiliar perspective; surely it did not originate with him. It's an integral part of the pro-slavery case, the meat and potatoes of pro-slavery rhetoric, which has been published so long as slaves dwelt in America. Even after the South's defeat in the Civil War made slavery a moot point, the 'Lost Cause' mythology took up the same claim. Who has not heard,

It's a shame such a lilting, lovely tune is weighted down by unspeakable lyrics. Usually I myself try to rescue Stephen Foster by bowdlerization: say 'neighbors,' as in 'It's summer, the neighbors are gay.' It's not clear how to salvage this one. Douglas Wilson did not invent this point of view, he is only the latest in a long line of slavery apologists who adopt it. The argument runs, abolitionism is quite beside the point, because the slaves enjoy their current status and do not wish to change it. If this were so, what need is there to delve into the abolitionists' quibbles? They produced this type of material then, and shameful to say, they still do: "George Fleming of Laurens, South Carolina said: 'I longed to see Marse Sam Fleming. Lawd, chile, dat's de best white man what ever breathed de good air. I still goes to see whar he buried every time I gits a chance to venture t'wards Laurens. As old as I is, I still draps a tear when I sees his grave, fer he sho' was good to me and all his other n*ggers.'" (Southern Slavery As It was, Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson, p. 18).

Who speaks for the slave, after all? It's hard to imagine why the answer should be, not the slaves themselves, some of whom like Frederick Douglass left memories or testimonies, not the slaves' descendants, not reputable historians, but just precisely Douglas Wilson. Yet 'Black & Tan' is just such an exercise in ventriloquism. His school has ascertained that empathy is a sin; indeed, "untethered empathy" is the sin which caused Adam's fall. It might strike the reader this problem could be solved very simply by asking, 'how would you like it if you were a slave,' but that, you see, is empathy, and empathy is a sin.

Robert Lewis Dabney, the undaunted Southern defender of the Confederacy, whom Wilson follows and champions, took the tack that slavery was beneficial for the slave, even if he did not himself realize it: "So, every intelligent master defends his slaveholding because it was, in the main, as preferable for the slave's interest as for his own." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3130). He left open the possibility that the slaves did not themselves realize this was so, and historical developments ultimately forced his retreat into the cul-de-sac of bitter and unfeigned hostility against the South's Black inhabitants. According to Dabney's thesis, the slaves' irremediable lack of executive skills is made good by the masters' wealth of such ability, to the benefit of both classes; it is a mutually beneficial social division of labor running right down the racial divide.

Wilson's original pamphlet was withdrawn from publication, not because the authors became wiser and realized they had erred in their glowing, rhapsodic account of Southern slavery, but because of issues with plagiarism. Sources were cited in the pamphlet in such a fashion as to suggest the authors had consulted primary sources; when it was pointed out they had not, instead of correcting the citations, they withdrew the pamphlet. Though the pamphlet has been withdrawn, it remains the thesis Douglas Wilson intends to defend, swamp it round as he may with muddy waters of obfuscation. It ascribed to the institution of southern slavery the production of a "mutual intimacy and harmony" between the races:

"Wilson's and Wilkins' booklet, published by Wilson's 'Canon Press' in Moscow, argues that southern slavery was not only sanctioned by the Bible but, thanks to the patriarchal kindness of their wise evangelical masters, a positive, happy, and pleasant experience for the majority of southern blacks. Wilson and Wilkins are quite specific about the many benefits of slavery for African-Americans, and they conclude that southern slaves genuinely appreciated those benefits and supported the system that provided them. As such, they claim that 'slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War [the Civil War] or since.' (p. 38). Their praise of the institution is almost unbounded in places. 'There has never been,' they argue, 'a multi-racial society that has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.' (p. 24). ('The Late Unpleasantness in Idaho: Southern Slavery and the Culture Wars,' by William L. Ramsey, December 19, 2004, History News Network).

While by no means unfamiliar, having become part and parcel of the 'Lost Cause' mythology justifying the secessionist cause in the Civil War, the 'happy slave' case must strike modern readers as retrograde, in that an abundance of evidence survives, in the form of diaries, autobiographies, and oral history transcripts, suggesting that the slaves were only as content with their lot as one would expect from people who, glancing around the plantation, noticed that they were the only ones doing any work, but not the primary beneficiaries of the work product. One would imagine they were about as happy as were the Russian kulaks, upon demand from the Soviet Commissar that they surrender their grain reserves, without compensation.

Communism is the closest analogue, nearer to our own times, of the Southern plantation system. Antebellum slavery defenders themselves noticed the parallel: ". . .'we slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best, the most common form of Socialism'" (quoted in James M. McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 196). People are human after all, we can feel one another's pain, and so there likely were some Commissars who did not take all the grain. Those who did left the farm families to perish from hunger, as indeed entire villages did in that sad and starving land. However even the Commissars who did not take all the grain were probably never described by the villagers, however grateful they may have been to the man who permitted, for a time, their survival, as "kind," because what is so kind about not stealing everything? That's not quite the right word. When you do all the work, and someone else appropriates all your work product, you tend not to burst into song.

People who work, but don't get paid, are not customarily a happy lot, and so it is not difficult to believe the ex-slaves' own testimony that they were not especially happy under the slave system. And it is to their own testimony we should look, not that of the ever-imaginative Douglas Wilson. A case in point is the story about the slave who used to go and pray under the persimmon tree in slavery time, found on page 89 of 'Mules and Men,' a folklore compilation by Zora Neale Hurston: "He'd go up dere and pray to God and beg Him to kill all de white folks. Ole Massa heard about it and so de next day he got hisself a armload of sizeable rocks and went up the 'simmon tree. . ." Sure enough, when "he began to pray and beg de Lawd to kill all de white folks, Ole Massa let one of dese rocks fall" on his head, knocking him down. "So when he got up he looked up and said: 'Lawd, I ast you to kill all the white folk,'" can't you tell a white man from a black man? Happy, grateful to the kindly white folk? Apparently not. Mutual affection, moreover, must be a two-way street. If we take the time and trouble to read Robert Lewis Dabney's thoughts on slavery, from which Douglas Wilson takes inspiration, we will discover only the most scorching hatred. If slavery is imagined to produce mutual affection, manifestly it doesn't work.

Robert Lewis Dabney, Douglas Wilson's mainstay for all things Confederate, himself admits that the slaves, who had welcomed the Yankee armies when they came to emancipate them from slavery, under Reconstruction were happy to work with Northerners who were unquestionably Dabney's enemies. The former slaves understood very clearly that these people were Dabney's enemies, but not theirs:

"I have had enough of declarations and manifestations of special interest in, and love for, the souls of 'the freedmen,' under existing circumstances. When I see them almost universally banded to make themselves the eager tools of the remorseless enemies of my country, to assail my vital rights, and to threaten the very existence of civil society and the church, at once; I must beg leave to think the time rather mal apropos for demanding of me an expression of particular affection." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Speech Against the Ecclesiastical Equality of Negro Preachers in our Church, p. 4).

So where is the mutual harmony Wilson pretends to find in slavery, realizing that Dabney himself accuses the Black population of the South of treason, essentially? When you come right down to it, the African-Americans enslaved in the South were not loyal to the Confederate cause. Not only those who enlisted in the Union Army and fought for freedom, but those who stayed home and cheered when the Union armies came to liberate them, were not loyal sons of the Confederacy. Dabney could not forgive them for that. Looking open-eyed at reality, it would seem the system produced more of mutual hatred and a hearty desire for the other' destruction than harmony and affection. It is hardly surprising that oppression should produce lasting rancor. The Neoconfederate case is premised upon pure fantasy.

When slavery first came to the European colonies established in the New World, some observers were understandably skeptical about the institution, which had long been suppressed domestically by Christian Europe on religious and humanitarian motives. Wasn't it backward and inefficient? Wasn't it likely to collapse under its own weight? In fact it turned out to be a money-making dynamo, a cash generating machine that was a wonder to behold. We do not tend to think of agriculture as a way to get rich quick; the farmer who can keep his head above water today is doing well. Invest in a few slaves, and the equation changes. Not only an advocate but a participant in the slave economy, Robert Lewis Dabney was able to set himself up financially for life by brief participation in farming with slaves. Being able to coerce others' labor, for life, for the expenditure of a relatively small sum, often borrowed, was an investment multiplier like no other.

While at the start abolitionist voices were heard even in the South,— originally the state of Georgia prohibited slavery,— the sheer profit-making potential of this system where it was allowed by public sentiment to catch on, came in time to silence these voices, and the conflict became a sectional one. People who talk about how a Southern slavery defender like Robert Lewis Dabney cannot be blamed for his views, because he was a child of his times, are so off-base as to leave their hearers scratching their heads in wonderment. Robert Lewis Dabney lived during the Golden Age of abolitionist literature, at the very peak of the full flowering of that prolific genre of anti-slavery pamphlets and novels. And he read at least some of it. Few people today have read even a fraction as much. Certainly Douglas Wilson has not; how could he misrepresent this literature so flagrantly if he had? It is not because Dabney was a child of his times that he chose the side he did.

Further evidence of trouble in paradise are the draconian gun-control laws that were prevalent in the antebellum South. If you love and trust someone, what is the problem with him possessing a gun? Perhaps you would even be encouraged, thinking that now he can protect you when the motorcycle gang roars into town. But the Southern slave-owners were not encouraged when they thought about their slaves obtaining firearms, rather they feared being murdered in their beds. It was this atavistic fear that John Brown tapped into when he raided the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. He intended to distribute the looted weapons to Southern slaves. Now, if you support the Second Amendment, what exactly is the problem with that? The fact is, these people were perfectly well aware that their slaves were not singing songs about how devoted they were to Old Master and Missus. They harbored other thoughts.

So the 'Happy Slaves' concept does not pass the reality test, and it is actually ludicrous in the present day that anyone should still be trying to retail it. I'm not Black, and I can barely stand to read 'Black and Tan.' Having come across echoes of it on the internet, I bought a copy of the book, and steam started coming out of my ears as I read. How did such a thing get published, I wondered. I don't think I realized at first that Canon Press is a family-owned, vanity publisher. How African Americans are expected to read through this book, without wishing to physically assault its author, is a mystery to me, and why Reformed congregations want to insult their (few) African American members by lionizing the author, is a further mystery. Why they then hold conferences lamenting how few African Americans adhere to their tendency, leaves one in despair about the capabilities of the human race.

Racial Insensitivity

Some critics accuse Douglas Wilson of racial insensitivity. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict defined 'racism,' back in 1940, as "an unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another." The Southern racists who defended slavery in the Civil War era did most unarguably believe in the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another. But this conception has lost favor, so Wilson believes he can resurrect their arguments and rehabilitate their society by substituting the notion of cultural superiority for inherent biological superiority. That racists believe in biological determinism follows from the old definition. Contemporary antiracists have redefined the term 'racism' in such a wide variety of ways, which need not include any commitment to biological determinism, though, that it seems unlikely a term of such uncertain meaning will continue to be used in any context.

Wilson insists he is not a racist. Indeed he dislikes racists for their less than sleek and glossy appearance and manner of personal presentation (he thinks they only have one tooth. . .like a narwhal, maybe?): "'What is the most effective pick-up line at white supremacist conventions?' 'I don't know, what is it?' 'Hey, nice tooth.'" (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 1059). Evidently there are social gradations even here. How can Wilson be a racist when he has such contempt for them? He agrees with his Neoconfederate brethren, of course, on the central issue of the Civil War:

"So I also take it as a given that the South was right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the war, and this is my reason for calling myself unreconstructed." (Douglas Wilson, 'Black and Tan,' Kindle location 267).

His son wrote the forward to this book, for what reason I'm not sure — to humanize his Dad, over against the Southern Poverty Law Center, who think he ought to be watched? To appeal to that sliver of the readership who finds it heart-warming that the father his passed on his penchant for alcoholic beverages to the son? In any event, the son explains that this used to be a "white country":

This makes the reader wonder: when was this ever a "white country"? Thomas Jefferson's America probably had more real multi-culturalism than we have today. The Native Americans, then a force to be reckoned with, were still mostly pagan. The African-Americans, whose unwilling importation ceased early in the nineteenth century, were as numerous relative to other groups as they would ever be. The majority of this group were originally pagan animists, though some were Muslims, as John Wesley pointed out in his 'Thoughts on Slavery.' When, in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution denied to opera singer Marian Anderson the opportunity to sing at their Constitution Hall, many pointed out the irony, that African-Americans were more, not less, likely than others in our society to have had an ancestor present in this country at the time of the Revolution. So why does young Wilson, who likes peanut butter, think this used to be a white country?

Can it be these people agree with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who determined in the Dred Scott case that, whatever a black man might be, whether free or slave, he could never be a citizen, because that population were "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect?" From time to time Southern defenders of slavery, aware that their society was nominally Christian, sought to find a place for their peculiar institution within the confines of the Bible, and indeed even within the Mosaic legislation, which required Hebrew slaves to be freed after six years.

How to find space for life-long slavery in a system which allows servitude for six years? You can't, so instead they latched with desperate fury onto Moses' permission to hold foreign slaves. Moses was only commissioned to legislate for Israel, not for the whole world, and in certain areas like lending money, the usages of the children of Israel were allowed to default to those in force in the larger world. And so we discover that the Southern slaves were foreigners. Were they really? By what logic or standard? By the time of the Civil War the vast majority of these people were native born. Could they be heathen? Most were baptized Christians. Why were they perpetually aliens, rather than citizens like similarly circumstanced European migrants? Is there anyone who does not know the answer, as it pertains to American history?

In case you are wondering how African-American citizens come to be classed by Southern defenders of slavery as foreigners, no matter what their country of residence or birth, while white persons identically circumstanced are citizens beyond question, Justice Taney gives your answer, and it is not pretty. It is of course racist, having to do with the biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another. Douglas Wilson despises above all things the fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, which was enacted to prevent the Southern States from depriving the newly liberated slaves of their civil rights. By Justice Taney's logic, Blacks must be foreigners perpetually, and only whites can be citizens. In other words, only whites can be Israelites, to find any point of entry into the Mosaic system. Evidently African Americans are just here the way piping plovers are here, not like residents, and certainly not like citizens. But even piping plovers are where they are. By the time of the Civil War, most African-Americans were native born, and so how the Wilsons can imagine our nation was at the time a "white country" defies analysis.

What is this once "white country"? It is a country of the mind, and I think this is what people mean by 'racial insensitivity:' no African-American would ever talk about this country being a once "white country." It sounds like these folks don't get out much, and don't talk to very many African-Americans.

Douglas Wilson gets accused of racism a lot, a charge which he meets head-on, as he does all criticism, by accusing other people, not party to the conversation, of racism and various other kinds of malfeasance. According to him, the abolitionists were racist,— "Not only was the historical practice of slavery all bound up with racism, so was abolitionism," ('Black and Tan,' Kindle location 1266); in his eyes the North was if anything more racist than the South. This is not historically defensible, but falsely accusing others of what his side is guilty of is his way of taking racism off the table as an accusation against the Southern slavers. He does seem to understand that racism is sinful and deeply unbiblical, which leaves the reader wondering when he proceeds to minimize and down-play this fault upon finding it in his heroes. When racism is the issue, he leaps onto the Bible bus; on this topic, he simply appropriates the abolitionists' familiar Bible arguments, without attribution, and gives them his endorsement:

"And so we as Christians, and especially as American Christians, must denounce as a matter of biblical principle every form of racism, racial animosity, or racial vainglory. God created man in His own image and has made from one blood all the nations of the earth (Acts 17:26)." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 503).

But then he falls off when it comes to slavery, because he is pro-slavery, this despite the fact that, unlike his atheist fellow-travelers in this matter, he is aware of Bible institutions like the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee. If he understands that racism is unbiblical, then why is he eager to commend the testimony of Southern slavers he freely acknowledges are racists, when the Bible says, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20). He insists the Southern slavers' arguments against abolition are determinative, even though these same arguments are not only shot through with racism, they are in fact premised upon racism and nothing but racism.

If we subtract the connective tissue holding the classic pro-slavery arguments together, which is racism, which he concedes is unbiblical, we are left with a pile of dust. Nevertheless, as far as he is concerned, the slavers won the debate; he calls "their exegesis on slavery" "solid and compelling." ('Black and Tan,' Kindle location 1278). This wildly illogical conclusion leaves the reader wondering whether he actually means what he says when he condemns racism, or whether we are in the realm of code words and dog whistles. Some people find the Golden Rule a sufficient rebuttal to slavery. Dabney did not, because he felt Blacks were like children, better off under the tutelage of those wiser and better than they, i.e., the white folks:

"The whole reasoning of the Abolitionists proceeds on the absurd idea, that any caprice or vain desire we might entertain towards our fellowman, if we were in his place, and he in ours, must be the rule of our conduct towards him, whether the desire would be in itself right or not. This absurdity has been illustrated by a thousand instances. On this rule, a parent who, were he a child again, would be wayward and self-indulgent, commits a clear sin in restraining or punishing the waywardness of his child, for this is doing the opposite of what he would wish were he again the child.  . .In a word, whatever ill-regulated desire we are conscious of having, or of being likely to have, in reversed circumstances, that desire we are bound to make the rule of our action in granting the parallel caprice of any other man, be he bore, beggar, highwayman, or what not. On this understanding, the Golden Rule would become anything but golden; it would be a rule of iniquity; for instead of making impartial equity our regulating principle, it would make the accidents of man's criminal caprice the law of his acts. It would become every man's duty to enable all other men to do whatever his own sinful heart, mutatis mutandis, might prompt."
(Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South, Annotated. (Kindle Locations 2330-2340). Booker House Publishing, Incorporated.).

Is this the reasoning Wilson finds solid and compelling? That black slaves want freedom, but this is a childish caprice, because they are really better off under the wise governance of the plantation owner, and thus the Golden Rule does not apply? He expresses great indignation when people conclude, from his admiration for Dabney, that he must be a racist himself. Why, hasn't he expressly condemned racism! But there is nothing to Dabney's arguments for slavery's beneficial character but racism. Just as the Cheshire Cat deprived of his smile fades away to nothing, so a renovated Dabney cleansed of his racism disappears from view.

Dabney believes that Black folk are incapable of freedom: "They will not see that, as it may be strictly moral to punish one who is guilty because of his guilt, and yet suffering is not intrinsic good in itself; so it may be perfectly righteous to hold a class in bondage, which is incapable of freedom, and yet it may be true still that bondage is not a good in itself." (Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South, Annotated. (Kindle Locations 2466-2468). Booker House Publishing, Incorporated). Wilson makes much of the fact that he does not see slavery as a positive good in itself; this is why he bitterly denies that he is pro-slavery, as people often, and correctly, say. So did Dabney. It means only that, in a perfect world,— a world in which Black people were not perpetual children requiring tutelage, we would not need to have it. Does Wilson agree that blacks are "incapable of freedom," and thus that slavery is a blessing to them, or if not, why does he find the argument compelling? If he does not find the argument compelling, why does he say Dabney won the debate?

Looked at objectively, was Robert Lewis Dabney a Christian gentleman, as Wilson fulsomely rhapsodizes, or no more honest and ethical than would be expected for a slave-owner and a Confederate officer? An honest investigation of the case can produce no other answer than, the latter:

My intention in quoting Dabney at such length is not to trigger people, nor to increase the sum total of ignorance in the world. Rather, I hope to provide a context for Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson's claim that the antebellum South was a time of unheralded racial harmony and "mutual affection" between the races. If this is how Robert Lewis Dabney talks about people he feels affection for, then what is left for him to say about people he hates? Bear in mind that the Neoconfederates cannot be surprised by Dabney's volcanic hatred of African-Americans, if you quote him. They hang on this man's every word; they've read it, stored it in their hearts. To them, expressing raw hatred for other human beings does not mean that the society you and like-minded confederates crafted falls short of "mutual intimacy and harmony." Or maybe they are just brazen liars who don't expect you to read Dabney. Or perhaps it is an Orwellian inversion of the truth, so that a Confederate state founded on white supremacy can become a beacon, not of hate, but of affection. All you have to do is redefine 'hate' to mean 'love.'

The stated aim of Dabney and Wilson's historical story-telling is to correct purported distortions of the record perpetrated by the abolitionists. To the contrary, they create a fantasy-land that never was. And Douglas Wilson is a man devoted to living in fantasy-lands of various types. The Confederate South is one of his Shangri-Las, Medieval feudalism is another. Is there some occult connection between Christianity and feudalism, as Dabney's acolyte Douglas Wilson perceives, failing to notice that Moses' law criminalized this system of land tenure? Moses wanted the land in the possession of the free farmer, which is the opposite of what they want. Dabney perceives there to be a natural tendency toward the concentration of land ownership:

"That the land shall be owned by the very persons who cultivate it, is an exceptional condition of things, resulting, to some extent in New England, from a very peculiar history, origin and condition of society, and not destined to continue general even there. It is as true of hireling as of slave States, that the tendency of civilized institutions is, and ever has been, and ever will be, generally, to collect the lands in larger properties, in the hands of a richer class than that which actually tills them."
(Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South, Annotated. (Kindle Locations 3800-3804). Booker House Publishing, Incorporated.)

It is likely true, that land tends to accumulate; the rich tend to get richer and the poor poorer; and this is the reason for the Jubilee. Does Moses, legislating at the command of God, allow land to accumulate in the hands of the wealthy, i.e., to join field to field? He does not:

Sound familiar?: "Woe to those who join house to house; they add field to field, till there is no place where they may dwell alone in the midst of the land!" (Isaiah 5:8). It does happen, and God roundly condemns it. He made provision in His law to keep it from happening, and to rectify it when it did happen.

Does Dabney care that Moses legislated against the system of land tenure he finds natural and inevitable? Not in the least. The plain fact is, these people care no more what the Bible says than to pull it out when they think it will be helpful, put it back when it's not. Wherever they get their vision of a just society, it is not from the Bible. Under Moses, the farmer owns the land he tills. This is not "an exceptional condition of things"; it is what is lawful. Joining field to field is what is unlawful. You can believe the Bible, or not; it's a free country. But to pretend there is some natural connection between feudalism and Christianity, requires not only nailing the book to the altar, but nailing it shut.

Douglas Wilson perceives Robert Lewis Dabney as a spiritual Magellan, opening up as yet unseen and unconquered realms, with his pessimistic forecast of the country's future. Dabney thought that things had gone disastrously wrong with the liberation of the slaves by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Having once gone wrong, things could never again go right; the only question between conservatism and liberalism was the speed of the collapse remaining to go to ground. In Douglas Wilson's mind, no one had ever thought such a profound thought. In reality, the conceptual framework of the slippery slope, the descent which begins slowly then picks up speed, of the rock rolling down the hill, was already hoary in ancient Egypt. Who could think its discovery awaited 19th century America? It's a cliché, a truism, which has at no time been unavailable to the 'wordsmith,' as Mr. Wilson fancies himself.

Mr. Wilson repeatedly tries to establish a connection in the reader's mind between Christian abolitionism and scientific Darwinian racism. In reality there is no nexus there at all. However his own hero, Dabney, seems to be tending in that direction: "But while we believe that 'God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens,' we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated from the white man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus." (Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South, Annotated. (Kindle Locations 4214-4216). Booker House Publishing, Incorporated.) What abolitionist ever believed that black and white were "different, fixed species"? Again and again, Wilson's pro-Southern case is based on blatant misrepresentation of the facts.

'North' and 'South' are geographic terms, not ideological ones, but in the history of America they evolved into states of mind, one benign, the other evil. In what region did eugenic ideology achieve its greatest popular penetration? 'Social Darwinism' was the policy arm of evolutionary racism; this was the policy perspective which wanted to withhold assistance from the poor, lest they breed. In what region of the country did this set of policy objectives find its greatest success and acceptance? In what part of the country was the policy of sterilizing feeble-minded women (which in practice meant poor, Black women; they were rarely given an IQ test) enshrined in law, and actually applied to large numbers of helpless, indigent women who often were not even told what was being done to them? He says, "In the nineteenth century when Darwin first made his appearance, no one had any problem with the racist implications of his theory." (Douglas Wilson, 'Black and Tan,' Kindle location 418). Who is the "no one" who had no problem with racism? Not the North, which did not generally adopt these racist, eugenic measures; surely it must be the South, which did generally adopt them:

The level and magnitude of illogic that insists on blaming the adversary for what your own side is actually, and demonstrably, guilty of, takes one's breath away. But this is normal for this author. Some people, when they encounter a difference of opinion, proceed as they have been taught and run down a check list they may have been given, say the Socratic questions. They use tools of logical analysis to uncover the root of the conflict, so as to strike at the root and not to waste time hacking away at the luxuriant overgrowth. But this is not the thought-world which our author inhabits. There is a way of handling ideas here which owes nothing to logic, but is more characteristic of literary criticism perhaps. When plutonium contamination was found in a sandwich in Karen Silkwood's refrigerator, her employer accused her of deliberately pilfering the material. Extreme precautions were taken at the plant to avoid workers coming into contact with plutonium; they handled the material only with lead-lined rubber gloves, in specially lined boxes; never did an employee's hand touch plutonium. That stuff can kill you!

Likewise there is a way of 'handling' ideas whereby your hands are never soiled nor seared by contact with the ideas themselves: they are dangerous! Handling them may cause cancer! The analogue to lead-lined gloves, in this methodology, is adjectives. By piling up heaps and heaps of insulating adjectives around the ideas themselves, we form our lead-lined gloves; and this insulating layer renders the otherwise toxic, dangerous ideas safe to handle. And so the whole matter of evaluating ideas comes to rest upon aesthetics; a 'thinker' like Douglas Wilson chooses the pile of adjectives he likes best, and the adjectives he likes best are 'feudal,' 'paternalistic,' etc. In one fell swoop, we have eliminated logic in favor of taste and literary criticism.

Even though Moses legislated precisely against feudalism, joining field to field, Doug Wilson nevertheless finds, infiltrating through some convoluted tunnel in time, a kinship between feudalism and Christianity. Perhaps this comes from one of his leading lights, G. K. Chesterton, a Roman Catholic who was nostalgic for the Middle Ages. What is there in the Middle Ages to pine for? Dancing manias? Plague? Illiteracy? Admittedly the architecture is divine, but it was achieved at a terrible cost. The Cathedral of St. Peter of Beauvais, France, was the tallest building in the world for a period of time. But then, on April 30, 1573, the spire collapsed. Did they forget to run the numbers? What numbers? It would have been helpful if they had equations to tell them how high was too high. They had trial and error. The errors fell down.

The French tried to develop their New World possessions on the basis of fuedalism. It didn't work, which is why they ended up selling us the Louisiana Purchase. The king would grant one of his nobles title to vast lands, and this worthy would then sit back,— far back, like in France,— and prepare to welcome in his tenants, serfs who were expected to do the back-breaking job of clearing the land, prying out the rocks, and planting crops. In return they'd receive the privilege serfs have always enjoyed, of watching their betters live it up at their expense. But they were no-shows, who knows why. Maybe people do not like undergoing rigorous hardship for the sake of gaining nothing.

By contrast, look at the Northern states of the U.S. Free men guided the plow that broke the plains. They worked for themselves, they were their own masters. And that did work. Doug Wilson has lately, in one of the lunatic flights of fancy that are characteristic of him, decided it really was feudalism, after all, that triumphed in America, because, you see, feudalism is local. Or something. Like, what could be more local than a serf? You're actually attached to the real estate. Don't try to run away, though. They'll hunt you like a rabbit. "The basic localism of feudalism took deep root here." (Isildur, the Ring, and the Glory of Limited Government, Blog & Mablog, February 21, 2024). When we talk about 'local people,' we don't actually mean it, because those people are free to leave. Serfs are local people for real. You can't make this nonsense up. Our system is just about the opposite of feudalism, not an instance of it, but remember, the Looney Tunes perspective he is trying to sell starts with the premise that feudalism is good.

Doug Wilson's other influences, people like H. L. Mencken and P. G. Wodehouse, are even further away from evangelical Christianity than is Chesterton. A few words about Mencken: H. L. Mencken was a fatuous drunken atheist who believed that third world peoples do not know anything about the father's role in reproduction, and therefore most human societies were organized along matriarchal lines: "The mother was the head of the family. Her relationship to her children was known to all, but the relationship of their father, for long ages, was not so much as suspected; as we have seen, it is not suspected by many savage tribes to this day." (H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods, Kindle location 926). Mencken was a misanthrope whose hatred for humanity was real and unfeigned: “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” (H.L. Mencken, Prejudices First Series.)

He despised democracy as much as Wilson himself: “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” (H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy.) He responded to people who did not share his views with choleric rage. His drunken rants against them used to appear in the newspaper, striking a chord with his fellow drunkards during a bleak time in their collective lives, prohibition. One must admit he came up with a few zingers; Christians were a favorite target of his. He was the originator of the proposal for social renewal that Douglas Wilson enthusiastically seconded on his blog, of burning all the schools and hanging all the teachers. On the topic of hierarchy, he is a poor man's Nietzsche, which probably goes a long way toward explaining his attraction to Wilson:

"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both." (H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy).

Who is it who believes that the Middle Ages are, not an unfortunate chapter in church history when few people had access to a Bible, but a period that was definitional for Christianity itself? The atheists, of course: "Well, having described how the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie has destroyed feudal property relations, has made old religious superstitions redundant, has broken up with Marx called the idiocy of rural life, the millennial stagnant village existence . ." (Christopher Hitchens interview, Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, PBS).

Wilson describes himself not only as a "paleo-Confederate," but as a "paleo-medieval":

"At the same time, it is important for me to emphasize that by using the term paleo-Confederate I do not wish to limit my historical allegiances to anything so provincially American, and so I would also want to identify myself as a paleo-medieval, a paleo-conservative, a paleo-Constantinian, a paleo-Puritan, a paleo-Chestertonian, and a paleo-spear Dane." (Douglas Wilson, Black & Tan, Kindle location 225-227).

The reader should not make the charitable assumption that, of course he does not mean to endorse the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade or Peter the Hermit's atrocities against the Jews. In point of fact, the worst aspect of the Middle Ages, the absence of religious liberty, is the very thing he likes best about the period. Are the atheists like Hitchens right, that feudalism itself constitutes Christianity and that consequently the Christianity of the Middle Ages is the truest Christianity there ever was or ever could be? Moses replies, it's illegal, it's illegal, it's illegal. Truly we know that the law was nailed to the cross; but still, when there was a law, it was illegal. And here is the genesis of many of Wilson's errors; he follows a predecessor heresiarch, Rousas Rushdoony.

How does this worthy dispose of inconvenient scripture? With a wave of the hand. They dislike Jesus' teaching of turning the other cheek. Rousas Rushdoony disliked it, and traced it back, or claimed to have traced it back, to peculiar and unusual conditions existing during the Roman occupation of the holy land, from which he concluded it could safely be ignored during all other circumstances. Turning the other cheek does not seem conducive to world domination. If someone challenges this cult's ideals of world domination,— because they do expect to dominate the planet, even though at present they only can count about 10% of Moscow, Idaho's population in their fold, and Moscow, Idaho is not very big,— they respond by quoting Luke 22:36, "Then He said to them, 'But now, he who has a money bag, let him take it, and likewise a knapsack; and he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.'" This one verse, in their minds, invalidates everything else Jesus taught on this topic! Instead of thinking that Jesus is predicting a fierce persecution, and giving them leave to defend themselves, they take this passage as negating the whole concept of non-violent resistance. Setting the Bible at variance with itself, and declaring one verse the winner over another, is not the way to deal with scriptural problems, harmonizing is. Error begets error, and this is the man who got this particular ball rolling:

What Saith the Scripture?

By definition, the neo-Confederates are disloyal, seditious, and unpatriotic. History must admit, with weeping eyes, that treason happened, but woe to those who celebrate and glorify treason. The worst thing about this man is the way he keeps spitting upon the graves of the brave Union dead, and upon the American flag. To clean up the mess, the custodians of every tidy little New England cemetery had better get out the cleaning buckets:

"On a thousand small-town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic." (For the Union Dead, by Robert Lowell).

After this man gets done spray-painting his hateful graffiti and strewing trash around, they are going to need a clean-up job. To be sure, when God listened to the cries of African-Americans held in bitter bondage in the South and determined to act, he used imperfect men as His instruments; what other kind of men are ever available? We must never forget the terrible cost at which the liberty of the bond-servant was bought:

"We had three million slaves in this country, and before they could be set free, half a million men had to lay down their lives. The choicest of the nation marched to their graves before our slaves gained their deliverance." (Dwight L. Moody, A Life for Christ, Kindle location 1114).

But the second worst thing is the way he keeps propagandizing in favor of the claim that the Bible does, really and truly, support slavery, just like the atheists say. The crux of the dispute is his claim that the abolitionist interpretation of the Bible failed, blown away by the far superior Southern slave-owners' rival interpretation, which he admits was founded upon racism, which he admits is unbiblical. There is an evident synergy here between this author and his atheist friends; both agree the Bible sanctions slavery, the atheist because he wants to discredit the Bible, Douglas Wilson because he wants to vindicate the Southern slave-owners. But is this true? Did the abolitionist interpretation really fail, or did it prevail amongst those open to persuasion, and with very good reason?:

So you see, the blood libel this scoundrel is publishing against the abolitionists,— that they hate God's word and are in rebellion against Him,— is the reverse of the truth. It's the rapacious slave-owners Doug Wilson defends who see no need to do it God's way.

The Bible contains various types of material; an entire law code is embedded in the Old Testament; there is also moral exhortation and practical advice. Wilson tosses it all into the same hopper, unable to differentiate any of it; it's all "law" to him. This reflects a tendency already noticeable in Rousas John Rushdoony, the founder of theonomy. Doug Wilson's inability to distinguish basic legal categories descends from his teacher.

According to Wilson, it would be "wicked" if Christian folk, noticing themselves having come into the majority, were to say, 'You know, let's amend our local ordinances respecting slavery, to more closely conform to Moses' legislation on the matter.' Think I'm kidding?: "As far as the apostle was concerned, nothing can be plainer than the fact that it Christian could simultaneously be a slave owner and a member in good standing in a Christian church. . .But if our churches had existed in the antebellum South, and a godly slave owner who treated his slaves with kindness sought membership, I could not refuse him without seeking to be holier than Christ. Such a desire would be wicked, and this wickedness was at the heart of the radical abolitionist dogma." (Douglas Wilson. Black & Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America (Kindle Locations 667-672).)

In other words, the only legislation permissible in this, or any other, area could never go beyond the usages common in the pagan Roman world,— for which Moses was not commissioned to legislate,— because it is 'wicked' to establish any laws on which a randomly selected church-goer of the first century might find himself on the south side. You cannot legislate against 'insider trading,' because no apostle ever suggested insider traders should be subject to church discipline. To be sure, sick people belong in a hospital, and sinners belong in church, but what reason is there in suggesting that you cannot legislate against polluting water resources, because no New Testament writer ever suggested polluters should be subject to church discipline? And why exactly should they? This is daffy, cultic reasoning, which jumbles and confuses two different realms, civil legislation and church discipline. This is quite characteristic of these 'Reformed' authors, for whom the coupling 'sin' versus 'innocence,' is indistinguishable from 'lawful' versus 'unlawful.' That the law may look to desiderata of public good unrelated to who will spend eternity in glory and who will mourn in fire, they have no vocabulary to express.

Once a member of our church got into a dispute with the Code Enforcement Officer, who threatened to fine him five hundred dollars a day, every day, for as long as he allowed the conditions the Code Enforcement Officer considered as contrary to code to continue. We prayed about it, but we did not even think of expelling him. The reason was not that we disputed the right of the municipality to formulate, and enforce, building codes. Nor were we even tripped up by the fact that the building code in one municipality may allow what is expressly forbidden in the neighboring one. It's just that the municipalities can enforce their own ordinances if they want to, it's got nothing to do with the church. One can always pray for a conflict to be resolved, without making oneself a party to the conflict. The building codes do not determine who gets to heaven; whoever thought they did? These are different realms. Not to say there isn't a foundation in 'equity' for building codes in Moses' legislation on parapets; buildings must be made safe. But the church is in receipt of no special revelation on this topic.

It's not only this author who cannot make any distinction between 'lawful versus unlawful' and 'sinful versus innocent.' These misunderstanding attained critical mass in the internet squabble over 'restitution.' Kindly note, I'm not advocating slavery reparations; but people belonging to this faction want to insist that restitution of any sort is prohibited by the Bible. It may be in their tradition, but not in others. Anyone who has ever attended church in the Wesleyan tradition, like a Pentecostal church, has heard stories about the efforts of the newly saved to make restitution for misdeeds committed before salvation. Wesley defined 'restitution' as an element of repentance:

"Now, repentance is not one work alone, but is, as it were, a collection of many others: For in its compass the following works are comprehended:
—
(1.) Sorrow on account of sin:
(2.) Humiliation under the hand of God:
(3.) Hatred to sin:
(4.) Confession of sin:
(5.) Ardent supplication of the divine mercy:
(6.) The love of God:
(7.) Ceasing from sin:
(8.) Firm purpose of new obedience:
(9.) Restitution of ill-gotten goods:
(10.) Forgiving our neighbor his transgressions against us:
(11.) Works of beneficence, or almsgiving." (John Wesley, Collected Works, Volume 7, Page 504, Sermon CXXXIV, True Christianity Defended).

Who that attends a church in the Wesleyan tradition has not heard lengthy tales about someone who years ago worked as a maid in a summer resort, and purloined several silver spoons, and once their soul caught fire upon hearing the gospel set about searching for a successor entity to the big hotel, which long ago went out of business owing to changing tastes in leisure travel, to whom restitution might be made. Some of these stories go on and on. Are they all altogether alien to the Calvinist tradition? Some exponents of this tradition seem to consider it blasphemous for a new Christian to apologize to anyone at all, other than God. Thus Douglas Wilson finds ready defenders to uphold his mocking of African-Americans who expect him to apologize for his misguided writings.

The Reformed cadre expound this principle, "You can't make sin go away by making people pay something other than the blood of Jesus." (Douglas Wilson, CrossPolitic Live at NSA, A Discussion on Church and Race, with Douglas Wilson and Voddie Bauckham, 57:51-57:58), which is a way of doing church without ever having to say you're sorry. But restitution is a Biblical principle after all, as even the unwilling must acknowledge: "Restitution is God's appointed way of justice. . .In effect, we deny the cross of Christ if we fail to see how essential restitution is to all of life. Man can never make restitution to God; this only God the Son can do and has done. Man can and must make restitution to man." (Rousas J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 2, Kindle location 4416, The Inheritance of Freedom).

Certainly in any given instance where reparations are demanded, one can argue the justice and propriety of the claim; but to argue, as these people do, that restitution is anti-gospel as a matter of principle, is strange indeed. If the Tutsi population of Rwanda demands reparations from the Hutu majority government, they really think the Bible is against that? When Jimmy Carter was President, the United States government began making payments of $20,000 to surviving Japanese-Americans interned in camps during World War II. There is something wrong with that? In the instance under discussion, of reparations for African-American slavery, I agree with them that no such sums are owed, but not because no compensation is ever owed by one Christian to another. Enunciating such a 'Biblical principle' makes nonsense out of the whole discussion. The U.S. government is not the appropriate counter-party against which to make such demands, among other reasons because the U.S. government did not enslave this population, nor even draft the slave codes governing their status; nor did the U.S. government ever stand in the way of states like Vermont and Pennsylvania which abolished slavery immediately after independence.

Mr. Wilson's latest stroke of genius is to tell people not to wear face-masks, which has nothing directly to do with African slavery, but, given the differential in the case fatality rate, will likely reduce the complaining population:

The atheists like Christopher Hitchens, who seem to be Wilson's biggest fans, have found in Mr. Wilson a 'useful idiot,' one suspects, because he repeats their loudest claim against the Bible, that it is pro-slavery: "But you're cherry picking the good parts. Explain to me how a book that is written by God, who is perfect, there's so much — it's pro-slavery, pro-polygamy, it's homophobic. God in the Old Testament is a psychotic mass murderer — I mean, there's so many things in it." (Atheist Bill Maher, quoted in My Christianity Daily, 'Talk Show Host and Panel Bash Bible: God is a 'Psychotic Mass Murderer,' July 31, 2013, Christian News Network.) Leaving out the modern, nonsense word 'homophobic,'— the names of the phobias are formed from the Greek, and 'homophobia' means 'fear of the same [...],'— we are left with the accusation that the Bible is "pro-slavery" and "pro-polygamy."

The Bible makes its points by telling stories. We hear, in the Bible, about Joseph, unjustly sold into slavery, and the children of Israel groaning under Egyptian captivity. What we don't hear is the slave-owner's perspective. Thus God cannot be assumed to have infinite patience for hearing that viewpoint. It would be different if the liberation of Israel from slavery in Egypt were not one of the central points about which the whole construction pivots:

"It was necessary also as a preparation for the later history of Israel, when the Lord God would bring them out from their house of bondage by His outstretched arm, and with signs and wonders. As this grand event was to form the foundation and beginning of the history of Israel as a nation, so the servitude and the low estate which preceded it were typical, and that not only of the whole history of Israel, but of the Church itself, and of every individual believer also, whom God delivers from spiritual bondage by His mighty grace."

(Edersheim, Alfred. Bible History: Old Testament: Books One Through Four (The Works of Alfred Edersheim Book 4) (Kindle Locations 2690-2694). www.DelmarvaPublications.com.)

To this oft-heard atheist accusation, 'The Bible is pro-slavery,' Douglas Wilson's rejoinder is, 'You're right.' But they are not right. The most that can be conceded to this entire crew is that, while the Bible is undeniably anti-slavery, God's perspective on this institution is not presented in the immediate programmatic political dimension they demand. The Lord left the political work to be accomplished by His followers. The atheists leave the impression that the Bible falls into the same literary category as the platform planks put out by the political parties every four years. But this is, if not a category error, at least a misapplication of the Dewey decimal system, because the Bible is a book which proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ, not a set of finite, secular policy demands. Nevertheless, the gospel does indeed have political consequences.

Is it true, as our author claims, that the abolitionists hated the word of God: "It is simply the recognition that on the slavery issue the drums of war were being beaten by the abolitionists, who were in turn driven by a zealous hatred of the word of God." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 602),— or were the abolitionists the very ones who wanted to follow the word of God, and studied it diligently to find out how to do that?:

People are expected to believe John Wesley was a free-thinker? Wilson is reviving the mythology of the South's victimization: "The idea that the South as a region had been crucified by a materially superior but spiritually degenerate North became one platform of the white myth of the Lost Cause. Southern loyalists repeated it into the twentieth century." (Richard W. Fox, Jesus in America, Kindle location 3916), with all the willingness to defame and falsify that this agenda requires.

According to the atheists, the Southern slavers read the Bible 'literally,' while their abolitionist opponents read it, how?— spiritually? In historical reality, some defenders of Southern race-based slavery contended that blacks were not even human beings: "In The History of Jamaica (1774) Edward Long developed the outrageous argument that in the Creator's 'series or progression from a lump of dirt to a perfect man,' African negroes were inferior to human beings. 'When we reflect on. . .their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not conclude that they are a different species of the same genus?'" (quoted from Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, pp. 351-356, in Issues Facing Christians Today, John R. W. Stott and John Wyatt, pp. 271-272). This is patently unbiblical,— the Bible teaches we are all children of Adam and Eve,— so Wilson flips it, making the Northern abolitionists to argue in favor of polygenesis and the Southern slavers to defend Biblical monogenesis.

Wilson quotes with approval, "'The religiously orthodox Old South, in contradistinction to the religiously liberal Northeast, stood on its prejudice in favor of a literal reading of the Bible's account of the monogenesis of the human race. . .' 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 1301). In reality there were never lacking defenders of Southern slavery who believed in polygenesis, like Josiah Nott, born to a prominent South Carolina family in 1804, founder of the University of Alabama School of Medicine. He was an agnostic who denied that the Biblical account of creation applied to non-whites. He was an admirer of the arch-racist Arthur de Gobineau, from whom Hitler took inspiration, who also denied the universal validity of the Genesis account. "Dr. Josiah C. Nott of Mobile, Alabama, came to the rescue in the American Journal of Medical Science in 1843. In 'The Mulatto — A Hybrid,' the distinguished surgeon contended that biracial women were 'bad breeders,' because they were the product of 'two distinct species,' the same way the mule was 'from the horse and the ass.'" (Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, Chapter 14, p. 9 of 34). The fact Wilson is addressing here: that people in the North believed in polygenesis, whereas in the South they stuck with monogenesis: is simply not factual. That's par for the course with this author.

The fiction he presents is that it was only those heathenish Northerners who were the polygenecists. There were, it is true, Northern polygenecists, like Louis Agassiz, and before there were formal, scientific polygenecists, there were informal ones, wherever there was slavery, even in the North. Speaking of Rhode Island, before independence and abolition of slavery there, Bishop Berkeley accuses the planters of this perversion of Biblical truth: ". . .together with an irrational contempt of the Blacks, as creatures of another species. . ." (Bishop Berkeley, quoted in Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, p. 19). So were there Southern polygenecists, both assumptive and scientific.

The reality is that his own mainstay, Robert Lewis Dabney, has this to say on that very topic: "But while we believe that 'God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens,' we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated from the white man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus." (Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South, Annotated. (Kindle Locations 4214-4216). Booker House Publishing, Incorporated.). His own north star, Dabney, seems to be saying here that monogenesis was correct at the beginning, but given the inevitable evolution of species, Black folk have by now become an entirely different species! If Wilson cannot be trusted to tell the truth on this point, what can he ever be expected to tell the truth about?

What can you say to this willingness to make stuff up: to conjure up, out of vapor, 40,000 black Confederate soldiers, to put words in Dabney's mouth which directly contradict those coming up the other way? This man is not honestly mistaken. There is nothing honest about him. He likes to posture and preen in front of the mirror. He cannot see why he cannot be a writer in the Southern agrarian tradition: "I wrote to McKenzie once that 'there really is a Southern intellectual 'paradigm, and I am in it.'" (Douglas Wilson. Black & Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America (Kindle Locations 1373-1374)). He is not a Southerner,— though he spent part of his childhood in Maryland, which is not really a Southern state,— and he is not a farmer. But since this is all a matter of striking poses before the mirror, why can't he be whatever he wants to be? So welcome him into the Southern Agrarian tradition, why not? Isn't this all just make-believe, like a youth playing 'Guitar Hero'? He is firmly convinced that his intellectual autobiography must be fascinating: how could any one's reaction conceivably be anything but 'isn't he brilliant'? When the reaction from his readers comes back as thumbs down, he lets out a bellow of wounded vanity.

Were the abolitionists, or their detractors, disposed to make a literal or spiritual reading of scripture? Let's take an example. On the subject of fugitive slaves, God's word says, what?— literally and exactly,

“You shall not give back to his master the slave who has escaped from his master to you. He may dwell with you in your midst, in the place which he chooses within one of your gates, where it seems best to him; you shall not oppress him.” (Deuteronomy 23:15-16).

God's word says, literally and exactly, not to return him. And so the Northern abolitionists said, in response to the slavers' demands, shall we follow God, or man? We cannot return the fugitive slave. What did the slavers care what the Bible said? They wanted him back. And this pattern recurs over and over again. In fact, Mr. Wilson, not being altogether illiterate, is aware of some of these provisions of the Mosaic law; so what is his solution to the dilemma? He claims that nineteenth century America was a pagan country, and so it doesn't matter that they weren't following the law of Moses! "The Bible teaches that a man may be a faithful Christian and a slave owner in a pagan slave system." (Douglas Wilson. Black & Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America (Kindle Locations 662-663).)

Whenever people point out to him, echoing the abolitionists, that the Bible really is not favorable to slavery, he starts up with this amazingly intricate clog dancing performance. To arrive where he ends up, you must repeat the same sequence of moves; but no one ever will who is not a follower of heresiarch Rousas Rushdoony. Rushdoony believed that the law of Moses was intended to be a universal law, sort of like a one-world government. And even though we know of only one theocracy, that being ancient Israel, ever acknowledged as such by God, the proffer is on the table for any nation that wants to be a theocracy. You just have to perform the correct voodoo ritual, which they have devised. They used to advertise about an 'Army of one;' the wonders which the cult world has thrown up to us in the present day include a covenant of one, a theocracy lacking any invitation from God. Bu they can work around that, or so they think.

But nineteenth century America, though a country in which Christians were numerically predominant, had not performed this ritual nor even known of its existence, and thus it's a 'pagan country.' Otherwise they'd be obligated to observe the Mosaic law. What if they said, 'though we don't have to observe the Mosaic law, let's! We'll have a jubilee and free the slaves!' Well, if they say that, they are wicked, wicked, wicked. Why wicked I don't know. If they do take up the voodoo ritual, then they're stuck observing the Mosaic law, Sabbaticals and Jubilees and all, not because Abraham Lincoln said so, but because Moses said so. If any of this makes sense to you, dear Reader, you're on your own.

The Westminster Confession and the London Baptist Confession of Faith enjoin Christians, acknowledged as not directly bound by the Mosaic civil legislation, nonetheless to respect that law as a standard of "equity": "To them also he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any now by virtue of that institution; their general equity only being of moral use." (London Baptist Confession of Faith, 1689, Chapter 19). The "equity" of freeing slaves every Sabbatical year, this purported theonomist tosses in the trash bin, preferring a sentimental ideal of happy slaves in a sunny, albeit pagan, South. Non-pagan readers may enjoy discovering the truth in this matter; this external site maintains a treasure trove of abolitionist literature:

Test Case

Douglas Wilson proposes a test case, to prove the abolitionists wrong, of a contemporary slaver presenting himself for membership in a church:

"Suppose a man presented himself for membership in your church. . .And if he is refused membership, then what are you going to do when he (his name was Philemon) goes back and tells the apostle Paul what you did to him?" (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 561).

To this author, as to N. T. Wright, a liberal author he champions, church membership is hugely important, and might almost substitute for salvation. That is one of the stepping stones to the heresy known as Federal Vision. There is a little bit of a 'cheat' in this test case, because the time stream starts slip-sliding away in the middle of it for some reason. For the sake of clarity, let us hold that constant, please. Now, what should you do when a man comes to your church and applies for membership; and when you start chatting with him and ask him what he does for a living, he explains that he has a shipping container full of Indonesian ladies he has smuggled into the country, who are busily sewing garments, for no wages, and they are forbidden to leave the locked shipping container? Such cases actually happen, though thankfully not often. What do you do? You call the cops, of course. What possible scriptural justification can you find for doing such a thing; how dare you defy Peter and Paul, who said nothing about calling the cops on Philemon and his peers? Because Christians are to be good citizens, and slavery is against the law: "For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same." (Romans 13:3).

And why is slavery illegal? Because this is a democratic republic, and the people, whose Christian consciences were formed in part by study of Moses' law, made it so. Moses freed the slaves, at the Sabbatical and the Jubilee; realizing this, Christian folk might understandably be nervous that defying God's law, by not ever freeing those unlawfully and unwillingly kidnapped from Africa, might bring down a curse. And what if they were originally kidnapped by other Africans, as our authors insist?: "With the slave trade, the vast majority of the slaves had already been enslaved in Africa by other blacks." (Southern Slavery As It Was, p. 8). Resale can't make a bad title good.

Wilson's luminary Dabney is hostile to democracy: "And both the French and the Yankee Jacobins, deriving from it an impious deification of the will of the mob which happens to be the larger, as the supreme law, have reduced their theory to practice in the most violent, ruthless, and mischievous oppressions ever perpetrated on civilized communities." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3031). Wilson shares this hostility: "God was to be toppled, and a new god, the god demos, was to be honored in His place." (Douglas Wilson, The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 31).

They say history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The first collision between the patriarchalists and the champions of popular sovereignty was the literary debate between Robert Filmer and John Locke. John Locke wrote Two Treatises on Government; the First Treatise answers Filmer's claims for patriarchy, and the second develops his own ideas on the subject. No flying monkeys put in an appearance; but not to give the ending away, John Locke won, and convinced the American colonists that no, the Bible is not anti-freedom and democracy.

According to Douglas Wilson, the political ideal found in scripture is the divine right of kings, and thus democracy represents human rebellion against God: "'. . .the government schools were a rebellious idea from the start.' The nature of this rebellion was democracy— the rule of demos, the people." (Douglas Wilson, The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 34). Proponents of democracy are idolaters, in short, and he looks forward to the day when "that fundamental faith [in democracy] is rattled and abandoned in repentance." (ibid. p. 36). The anti-democracy zealots of Moscow, Idaho do not disguise their hostility, not only to democracy, but to the basic freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights: Doug Wilson's family-owned vanity press has published a book calling on the government to re-criminalize heresy, heresy defined, presumably, by themselves, the heretics. They want to begin over, it would appear, in the Year Zero:

This new book also recommends violent revolution as the means by which a determined minority can impose its will on a non-consenting majority. But again, making terroristic threats is not a new departure for Mr. Wilson:

“H.L. Mencken once suggested a shrewd educational reform that has somehow not caught on. He said that there was nothing wrong with our current education establishment that could not be fixed by burning all the schools, and hanging all the teachers. Now some might want to dismiss this as an extreme measure, but visionaries are often dismissed in their own day. 'You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one . . .'” (Douglas Wilson, "Burn All the Schools," Blog & Mablog, November 1, 2018).

Mr. Wilson has since written his own book on these topics, which I have not read. He wishes to uphold 'Christendom,' which is a sort of halfway-house between paganism and the Christian faith. The church started out persecuted by the state, but grew to immense size using only the approved retail means of individual conversion. Once, however, the church was so 'successful' that it could dominate the state, it willingly used state sponsored coercion, to its shame. Entire people groups were ushered into the fold who were still pagans in their hearts; Christianity was imposed upon them from the top down, and none too successfully.

The pagan peoples of Northern Europe defended their autonomy with great valor and self-sacrifice, including the largest mass suicide in recorded history, of the Lithuanian defenders of Pilenai. Apparently these pagan peoples expected to live again, as explained with regard to a similar but smaller situation: "Johann, a Livonian priest captured by Lithuanians, was eyewitness to a massive suicide by women in 1205 after they learned that their men, in a raid together with the duke Svelgates, had been killed: 'Because of the men's death, fifty women hanged themselves because Lithuanians believe that they will soon live in the other life.'" (Suicide in Pagan Lithuania, lithuaniantribune.com). At Pilenai, 4,000 men, along with women and children, died rather then become Christians, unfortunately:

"In 1336, the Teutonic Order set its eyes on the fortress of Pilėnai, located in present day Lithuania. On the 25 of February, the Teutonic Knights began besieging the fortress. Leading Pilėnai’s defence was Margiris, the Duke of Samogitia.

"When the defenders and inhabitants realized that they were outnumbered and stood no chance of attaining victory, they decided to drastic action. Instead of surrendering to the knights, the people of Pilėnai chose to commit mass suicide. After burning their possessions and the fortress, the men, women and children committed suicide. By doing so, the people of Pilėnai hoped to prevent the knights from gaining anything from their victory.

"According to written sources, the number of men, not including the women and children, who were in the fortress was said to be 4,000." (3 April, 2015, Mass suicide at Pilenai: Lithuanian Defenders Choose Death over Enslavement, Ancient Origins website, retrieved 3/25/24).

Depending on your point of view, this is either a horrible thing that never should have happened, or a glorious incident in the victorious march of Christianity over Northern Europe, which did happen rather violently. Christendom, truth to tell, was never much to brag about; it limped between two legs, it was neither hot nor cold:

"The unknowing zeal of Constantine and other emperors, did more hurt to Christ Jesus’s crown and kingdom, than the raging fury of the most bloody Neros. In the persecutions of the latter, Christians were sweet and fragrant, like spice pounded and beaten in mortars. But these good emperors, persecuting some erroneous persons, Arius, &c., and advancing the professors of some truths of Christ—for there was no small number of truths lost in those times—and maintaining their religion by the material sword—I say, by this means Christianity was eclipsed, and the professors of it fell asleep, Cant. v. 2. Babel, or confusion, was ushered in, and by degrees the gardens of the churches of saints were turned into the wilderness of whole nations, until the whole world became Christian, or Christendom, Rev. xii. and xiii.

"Doubtless those holy men, emperors and bishops, intended and aimed right to exalt Christ; but not attending to the command of Christ Jesus, to permit the tares to grow in the field of the world, they make the garden of the church and field of the world to be all one; and might not only sometimes, in their zealous mistakes, persecute good wheat instead of tares, but also pluck up thousands of those precious stalks by commotions and combustions about religion, as hath been since practised in the great and wonderful changes wrought by such wars in many great and mighty states and kingdoms. . ." (Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed, p. 155).

Perhaps Mr. Wilson only published Wolfe's book in order to lay down a marker, to establish an extreme by comparison with which he could appear moderate? They like to lead with an extreme case, which they imagine moves the 'Overton window,' but a more accurate description might be 'poisoning the well.' This is how Douglas Wilson taints everything he touches. Once a potentially popular tag-line like 'Christian nationalism' becomes associated with restoration of monarchy and violent revolution, people naturally inch away. The neofascist themes found in Wolfe's book are not new departures for Wilson; he has always been anti-democracy, he has always been opposed to religious liberty. He has always been anti-Constitution, anti-American, and anti-patriotic.

But hating the world as it is does not make it otherwise. In the debate over American slavery, the abolitionists had tradition on their side, because it had been a long time since any Christian European had been sold as a slave. Playing the race card confused the issue for a time, though that ultimately got corrected, and not by his side. So after all the excitement dies down and the cops and immigration agents stop swarming around the place, you visit the man in prison and explain that your church has a vibrant prison outreach.

John Brown's Body

Reformed author Douglas Wilson, at the outset of his book 'Black and Tan' telegraphs his paradigm for changing the debate. Since his earlier claims that slavery was benign did not set people's heads to nodding, he wants now to claim that a social movement, abolitionism, the vast majority of whose adherents were scrupulously non-violent and committed to lawful transformation through the democratic political process, was actually a campaign of violent terrorism. How do you do that? By making the one violent man representative of the whole:

See how it's done. He has seen it done, he knows how to do it, and he intends to proceed with it. Just as one killer, Paul Hill, shoves aside a whole populace of law-abiding pro-lifers, so one killer, John Brown, will be made into the face of abolitionism. Predictably, mainstream politicians disavowed Brown's abortive guerrilla war: "Even though Brown 'agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong,' said Lincoln, 'that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.'" (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 212). Those abolitionists whose views were altogether based on the Bible followed Jesus in preferring non-violence. It's not like there was no precedent for escalation, nor readily available slogan: "The name of peace is sweet, the thing itself is most salutary. But between peace and slavery there is a wide difference. Peace is liberty in tranquillity; slavery is the worst of all evils, — to be repelled, if need be, not only by war, but even by death." (Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Delphi Complete Works of Cicero (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics) (Kindle Locations 27874-27875). Second Philippic, Section 113.)  But it's not the New Testament way of proceeding. . .and so he will pretend it's what American abolitionism was all about:

Now you see, children, how we transform the debate, not like it's honest or fair or anything. But in truth, the debate between the Southern slavers and the abolitionists was not over the mode, timing and method by which abolition was to be achieved, but whether there was to be any such thing at all. Eliminating slavery was ruled out by the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, not only at the time of drafting but on into the future. The idea that the Confederacy wanted to get rid of slavery, either near or long term, is a mirage. Wilson's guiding light on slavery, Southern racist Robert Lewis Dabney, looked down time's alley before that nasty Civil War and saw a bright future unfolding: "Thus did African slavery among us solve this hard problem; and place before us a hopeful prospect of a long career of freedom and stability." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3595).

No amount of slaver violence and terrorism,— and there was plenty enough of that, in the years leading up to the Civil War, for instance in the struggles over slavery in territories such as Kansas,— can discredit the slavery cause, but one act of terrorism discredits all of abolitionism. ". . .[Senator] Atchinson was confident of their ability to give free soilers the same treatment in Kansas. 'We are organizing,' he told Jefferson Davis. 'We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over.'" (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 146). Why not carry one set of weights in your bag? Acts of terror and violence committed by Southerners who share his love for slavery, he passes over in silence. One atypical act by an abolitionist, he makes central to his case. What is this but shrill, tinny special pleading?

Certainly for Christians violence can never be any other than a last resort. John Brown, rejected by almost all at the time of his raid on Harper's Ferry,— neither did the slave rise up in Spartacus rebellion, nor did the abolitionist rally to his cause,— was recognized posthumously as a sort of prophet, the one man who had understood Southern intransigence, and realized that only when Northern armies of liberation swept through the South and pried the key to the slave's chains from the cold, dead hand of the Southern slaver would abolition be accomplished. That, tragically, is just how it happened. Would it have happened otherwise? As his friend Frederick Douglass said, "They could kill him, but they could not answer him." (John Brown: An Address at the 14th Anniversary of Storer College).

Let's pose the hypothetical question, had the South won the war, and gone on their way as a separate country, what ultimately would have happened with slavery? Gullible youngsters might be imposed upon to think that, because Robert E. Lee and others personally disliked slavery, surely that grim institution would have been done away with. But the recalcitrant Southern racists had no intention of freeing the slaves, nor was it happening, either visibly or invisibly, quickly or slowly. At the time of the Civil War, only about 10% of the African-American population in the country were free. If any individual slaves were being freed, it was only at a glacial pace, and as Wilson's guiding light, Southern racist Robert Lewis Dabney, malevolently observes, a freed slave in the American Southland was "still debarred as much as ever from social equality by his color and caste. . ." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1901).

The Constitution adopted by the secessionist Confederate States of America forbade any effort to eliminate slavery: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed." (Article I, Constitution of the Confederate States, March 11, 1861). They had closed that door, locked and barred it. The Neoconfederates should drop the pretense that the Confederate States of America might very well have freed the slaves themselves, knowing that that option had been pushed off the table quite deliberately.

Economic historians Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, in their 'Time on the Cross,' kicked over the rock from under which the current crop of neo-Confederates scampered. While avoiding tendentious over-statement of their case, the useful points they make should not be overlooked. As noted, there were various streams in anti-slavery thought; some concerned citizens only asked, 'What saith the scriptures?', whereas others concentrated on political and legal paradigms. Then there was the argument centering around economic efficiency.

The economic argument against slavery, again, makes some valid points, but should not be overplayed, as it often is, into an anodyne expectation that the slavery system, owing to its inefficiency, is ever and anon just on the verge of crumbling under its own weight and disappearing. When did this happen in the Roman empire? The free farmers of Italy found themselves in competition, from early on, with huge factory farms worked by slaves. It was these sturdy citizen-soldiers who built the empire, but they found it difficult to compete with large-scale operators whose work force had been acquired for little or nothing, and who were maintained on the barest sustenance. Economies of scale and unlimited access to credit tipped the scales in favor of the aristocrat owners, as did a political system that catered to their needs. So long as the political will existed, the community fought back with land reform, but once the will flagged, the small farmer became an endangered species.

Most observers who were around when slavery was a living system report that slave labor is less efficient than free labor, and there is no good reason for modern revisionists, who will never see a plantation in operation, to 'correct' their perception. Human nature would be, not better, but worse, if the lash were after all the most convincing motivator. These same observers also report the system as wildly profitable to the proprietors, though not to the community, which must watch helplessly as wages fall when people are brought in who will work for nothing, who indeed have no choice in the matter. The uniformity of observers' description of the 'slave-character' is striking, from antiquity to the twilight of the system in the 1860's. No one is paying Africans any compliment to represent them as more servile and cringing than Teutons or Celts; they reacted to slavery, with its brutal and dehumanizing indignities and extortionate demand for unrecompensed labor, just the same way as did everyone else, with the same stubborn recalcitrance and mute resistance that marks out a free man. The New Testament does show a better way; however, apostolic strictures for slaves to maximize productivity even in the absence of any positive incentive, were likely in practice 'counsels of perfection,' not universally nor perfectly observed.

The valid and worthwhile observation that slavery was not an efficient system became, in time, hardened and exaggerated into a prediction, that slavery, because of its inefficiency, would lose the competition with the free market and fade away. Karl Marx would later make a name for himself by taking this oft-repeated, whimsical prediction of slavery's demise and applying it to capitalism instead. The fact is, it never happened nor ever would have happened, absent external political pressure. While individual effort was not and could not be maximized under the slavery system, the slave-drivers had their ways of compensating: for instance, labor force participation ran close to 100 percent, as it never does in a free society. In the North, the little children went to school. What a waste, cried the slave-drivers! In the South, they worked out in the fields just as soon as they were able to hold a hoe in their small hands. In the North, the social compact between men and women in farming communities mostly left hard physical labor in the fields to the men, and inside work to the women; not so in the South. So the slave-drivers, in the end, were able to 'coax' back some of the lost productivity into their cruel and amoral system. And labor that costs next to nothing can tolerate a little inefficiency.

In sum, the economic argument against slavery, while correctly pointing out coercion is not the optimal way of organizing the labor force, falls very far short of proving that slavery's collapse was inevitable or imminent at the time of the Civil War. If Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had not come down, which Wilson despises, nor the following thirteenth amendment, which he also despises, nor the fourteenth amendment, which he despises even more, there is no reason to expect slavery would have come to halt at the time it did, rather than on his preferred schedule, according to which it would perhaps still be with us. The economic argument has turned into a drug, a soporific, which prevents people from seeing the hard truth, that the victorious Union armies ended slavery, no one else. The system never collapsed under its own weight. Fogel and Engerman should be thanked for pointing this out. Christians should come to terms with it, and acknowledge that, if you're pro-Confederate, you're pro-slavery.

Whosoever Will

Douglas Wilson is a Reformed pastor, who has by no means been ostracized by his peers over his unorthodox understanding of antebellum slavery,— unorthodox by the standards of most Americans, at any rate, and one would hope by the standards of the Christian fold, outside of the Calvinist hot-house. For the most part he remains within the Calvinist mainstream, a respected brother and esteemed teacher, which makes you wonder. While he is not the thought-leader of evangelicalism, as he imagines himself to be, neither is he on the outside looking in, which is where he ought to be. There are honorable exceptions, of course, Calvinist authors and bloggers who perceive just how dangerous the man is. One could wish they were more numerous. The case is complicated by Wilson's embrace, then backing away from, 'Federal Vision,' a revision of Calvinism along Wesleyan or Catholic lines, which orthodox Calvinists perceive as heresy. But many in the Calvinist fold, like James White, continue to defend him, no matter what. Whereas, to my mind, Calvinism is not the least of this man's errors.

Calvinism holds that God's freedom cannot be preserved and vindicated, unless only God is free. Some contemporary Calvinists do not believe there is any human freedom at all, even for regenerate persons to make morally indifferent choices such as whether to wear the blue socks or the brown socks. This may or may not have been John Calvin's original doctrine, or perhaps a subsequent development therefrom. Karl Marx found himself obliged to deny that he was a Marxist; it is not uncommon for later adherents of a particular teaching to erect a hedge around it, as seems to have happened here. But then, as happened with Karl Marx, the founder himself may not be able to see his way back in through that hedge. Against this doctrine are various Bible testimonies that ascribe 'grace failures' to human agency:

“Will they fall and not rise? Will one turn away and not return? Why has this people slidden back, Jerusalem, in a perpetual backsliding? They hold fast to deceit, they refuse to return.” (Jeremiah 8:4-5).

Do they refuse to return, as it says, or has God refused to return them, and this verse is empty mockery? Who is willing, and who is not willing?:

One place where you see the influence of Calvinism on Douglas Wilson's role model, Robert Lewis Dabney, is on the question of minimalism or under-achievement. Calvinists vigorously deny the charge of antinomianism sometimes levelled against them. However, under no other system will you see this type of ethical reasoning, whether on the topic of slavery or any other: unless you can prove Biblically that all slave-owners go to hell, which of course you cannot, then slave-owning is okay. What about God's will as expressed in His law, in His hatred of oppression, His desire to break the captive's yoke? They have a tendency to defend a kind of aggressive slacking as a consequence of their system, not to mention Dabney's category of racial 'inherited sinfulness,' unknown to other schools of interpretation: not our common inheritance from Adam, but rather an invidious distinction between differing people-groups. The imperative to do the bare minimum we can get away with is simply not understood by other schools of thought.

In fairness to Calvinism, some Calvinists perceive their school of thought as uniquely incompatible with slavery and oppression:

"If Calvinism places our entire human life immediately before God, then it follows that all men or women, rich or poor, weak or strong, dull or talented, as creatures of God, and as lost sinners, have no claim whatsoever to lord over one another, and that we stand as equals before God, and consequently equal as man to man. . .Hence Calvinism condemns not merely all open slavery and systems of caste, but also all covert slavery of woman and of the poor; it is opposed to all hierarchy among men. . ." (Abraham Kuyper, Six Lectures Delivered in the Theological Seminary at Princeton, pp. 25-26).

On one point it is strange that Calvinism, with its teaching of Total Depravity, should testify on behalf of allowing one (totally depraved) man to hold total, uncontested, absolute dominion over another (totally depraved) man. Is this really such a good idea? Granville Sharp, in his treatise against slavery, brings up the frequently heard claim that Christianity is incompatible with slavery: "The honorable Mr. Justice Barrington (in his observations on the more ancient statutes, p. 280.) mentions a notion originally inculcated by Wycliff and his followers, which began to prevail so early as the time of the great lawyer Fitzherbert, 'OF ITS BEING CONTRARY TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, THAT ANY ONE SHOULD BE A SLAVE,' and from hence, (says he) 'in more modern times, Slavery hath been supposed to be inconsistent with the common law, which is said to be founded on Christianity.'" (Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in England, pp. 161-162). In his discussion of this point, Granville Sharp mentions, not only that slavery is inconsistent with charity, but also that it assigns immense power to "worldly minded men":

"For mankind in general, howsoever religious they may esteem themselves, are not so perfect as to be safely entrusted with absolute power. Avarice, choler, lust, revenge, caprice, and all other human infirmities, according to the different dispositions of men, will too frequently enslave the master himself, as as to render him entirely unfit to be entrusted with an absolute power over others." (Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in England, pp. 162-163).

So on this one point, of entrusting one man with total dominion over another, it does tend to run against the current of Calvinism to advance full speed ahead, although no less a Calvinist than Robert Lewis Dabney responds to the self-evident problem of evil and malevolent slave-owners with a shrug of the shoulders. On other points, however, it may be there is synergy.

Robert Lewis Dabney was not stupid, and he realized that some of the popular pro-slavery arguments heard before the Civil War: that 'black skin'='the mark of Cain,' for example, were good for nothing but to give giggling fits to Northern abolitionists. And so he should have razed that structure and built again from the ground up, and might have had better material come to hand. He retains 'curse of Ham,' though the Bible knows of no 'curse of Ham.' One might wonder at his timing: what is the need for a defense of slavery, first published after the war, when slavery was gone, other than to provide a rationale for the deprivation of civil liberties of the newly-liberated slaves?

Much of his 'Defense of Virginia' consists of a negative argument, hacking through the thicket of abolitionist anti-slavery argumentation, seeking to demolish the abolitionists' claim that slavery was not compatible with the Bible. But there is also a positive, pro-slavery argument as well, resting upon the purportedly 'Biblical' concept that the Black race is cursed, that God has no intention of saving these people, and that society must think in terms of control and damage limitation when dealing with this population. It is unsurprising, given this framework, that the man was skeptical when hearing testimonies from African-American Christians. But this new and improved argument, while it is not as silly as some prior pro-slavery argumentation, cuts its target constituency right down the middle. What Methodist or 'Free-Will' Baptist is likely to sit still while hearing that God does not intend to save a certain population? They will fidget and protest, 'But if they repent, God will surely accept them; God has never said 'nay' to the repentant sinner.' This is a pro-slavery 'Bible argument' fit only for Calvinists, and not even all of those.

One of the underlying failures of Biblical interpretation that undergirds Calvinism is over this very issue: is God for the slave, or for the slave-owner? Recall that the central narrative of the Old Testament is the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt. Who is God for: the oppressed Hebrew, or the Egyptian? The Calvinist says, God says He is for the slave, but of course, like the rest of us, He is really more impressed by the slave-owner; therefore His election of the slave is only intended to demonstrate His arbitrary power. Some people continually fail to see the main point, ever looking instead for some loop-hole, anomaly or exception.

This author calls to mind an imprisoned man seated before a massive cement wall. He squints: why, there are little cracks in the cement wall! Perhaps I can take my spoon and work at these cracks; surely the wall-builder would not have left them there, if he did not really want me to undermine this useless wall! But the wall is, after all, the main point; sometimes it is helpful to notice the obvious. That God is for the burdened Hebrew slave and against the mighty, powerful and wealthy Egyptian is another point; God leans to hear the cry of the oppressed, not the blurted self-satisfaction of the oppressor. They have turned the Bible inside-out, yet they're convinced they're doing an excellent job of explicating God's will; they are teachers in their own eyes. Is 'Reformed' doctrine biblical, either in its original form as John Calvin propounded it, or in the form in which it is held today by its modern-day salesmen?:

Douglas Wilson is no voice crying in the wilderness; he has a community, and a supportive community at that. It's a mystery to me why he does not find himself on the outside looking in, a scary and disreputable cult leader from whom people sidle away. But that is far from the case, he is a respected and beloved leader in some segments of the 'Reformed' community. The system's founder is John Calvin, who created a structure of admirable, if imperfect, internal consistency. The main points of their teaching, however, are not taught in scripture and do not arise from scripture; this is man-made doctrine if anything is. And some of the problems arising out of Moscow, Idaho are really intrinsic to the Calvinist structure; Calvinism is always trying to break free of its misclassification as a religion and to reconfigure itself into an ethnic group. You see this happen over and over; the children of believers must be grafted into the covenant, which then loses its connection to faith. Would that the whole structure came crashing down, and not just this attention-seeking false teacher at its periphery:

Hobgoblin of Little Minds

They say that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and no one can accuse our author of being in bondage to any such nagging little demon.

Casus Belli

On the one hand, the Civil War was not about slavery:

"We have been told many times that the war was over slavery, but in my view it was actually over the biblical meaning of constitutional government." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 581).

"You have been told many times that the war was over slavery, but in reality it was over the biblical meaning of constitutional government." (Southern Slavery As It Was, Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson).

Nevertheless, even though the Civil War was not fought over slavery, the abolitionists, who had no other issue than slavery, are responsible for six hundred thousand lives:

Inasmuch as the known Civil War was not over slavery, was there some other not known Civil War, this one started by abolitionists firing on Fort Sumter, which actually was about slavery, in which case it would be rational and to the point to say, "Jesus Christ really is the ultimate Jubilee. But this is not accomplished through revolutionary means, through the bloodletting of social cataclysm." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 591). Who is he chiding here? There was no abolitionist war, according to him, therefore no abolitionist revolution. This is a man, by the way, whose family-owned vanity publishing house, Canon Press, published a manifesto by 'Christian Nationalist' Stephen Wolfe calling precisely for the overthrow of the U.S. government by "revolutionary means." If any one pays attention to these prophets without honor, and please God, may it never be so, on whose hands will the blood splatter of the resultant "bloodletting of social cataclysm"?

Readers of Douglas Wilson are aware that he obsesses about the "feds" who, he believes, follow him around; they populate, he believes, the responses to his Twitter threads. This paranoid looking around his shoulder for the feds plays into his boundless wells of self-pity, that he is not appreciated everywhere he goes; his penchant for urinating on the graves of the Union dead turns some people off. While I think there's a considerable element of paranoia to his conviction that the feds are all around him, doubtless they are aware of him. Why would the federal government of the United States take an interest in a small-town pastor from Moscow, Idaho? Because he advocates for violence as a means to achieve political goals or because he does not? Because he advocates burning all the schools and hanging or the teachers or because he does not? He does believe in violence as a means of achieving political goals, as most American abolitionists did not. He does not object in principle to political violence. It's just that these goals are not his goals, they're somebody else's goals.

The reader who consults neo-Confederate web-sites will find this to be a constant, the Civil War was always about something other than slavery: tariffs, economic exploitation, good government, or whatever. Our author, in some moods, is no exception:

"The war was over the meaning of constitutional government, the nature of federalism, the life of republics, and the definition of civic liberty." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 949).

But then, suppress it how you will, the truth comes bubbling up, and it turns out that the abolitionists, who qua abolitionists take no common or distinctive position on federalism, constitutionalism, tariffs, or the like, are responsible for the loss of 600,000 human lives. Where does our author's hero, slavery apologist Robert Lewis Dabney, stand on this issue?

"Then the North, having ceased to find its own interest in the slave trade and slavery, changed its ground, and began to cast about, merely from a desire of sectional power in the confederacy, for means to destroy the institution. It is unnecessary to argue that the whole free-soil controversy, and the war which grew out of it, were really designed by them to destroy slavery in the States: for they themselves, in the pride of success, have long ceased to conceal that fact." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 4178).

Hmmm. . .the Civil War was a clever Northern plot to destroy slavery. But it wasn't about slavery. Come again? The truth of the matter is, secession was all about slavery, namely preserving slavery; it was never about anything else, as its proponents repeatedly and explicitly stated. But the Northern war effort was not about abolishing slavery, not until midway in the conflict. At first it was about preserving the Union, nothing else. People in the South have imbibed a mythology according to which the Civil War was the War of Northern Aggression. But the North did not want war, and was willing to purchase peace at an extravagant price: the indefinite continuation of slavery in the Old South. The Republicans wanted the territories to be free, that is all. What aggressor has ever dangled the prospect of peace before his victims, on the terms of maintenance of the status quo ante? If he had liked the status quo ante, he would not be an aggressor. So what is blameable in Abraham Lincoln: his willingness to abandon the Southern slave in order to secure peace, becomes the seed-bed for all manner of conspiracy theories as to what the war was 'really' about.

Some Christians espouse pacifism, Biblically and consistently; our author, whose heroes are Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, is not one of them. Only in the case of slavery does he insist on the necessity of pacifism. . .for the other side! Hmmm. . .what's that von Clausewitz said, “The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.” Wouldn't it have been more helpful to preach pacifism to the men who fired on Fort Sumter? It is not clear why people he dislikes have to be pacifists, while people he likes are free to celebrate their glorious military tradition; there is a certain asymmetry here. Our author does not understand the Sermon on the Mount's protocol of non-resistance to evil; to him, if there is no command to resist at arms, then, he concludes, there is no evil. This is partly why he imagines there must be a 'Biblical' form of slavery; it is as if someone hearing, in the Sermon on the Mount, that one should hand over to the expropriator the cloak as well as the coat, should say, 'Aha! There is a Biblical form of stealing!'

Truly no historian could deny that the Civil War was fought over, among other things, the right of American states to secede from the federal union. But it was not fought over this right in a vacuum. Suppose passers-by should tackle a man, shot-gun in hand, chasing his wife down the street while yelling, 'I'm going to kill you!' These 'gun-grabbers' grab his gun away and sit on him until the cops come. In a sense the fight was over the right to bear arms, but not only over that. We cannot be sure of the actual position of these Good Samaritans vis-a-vis the Second Amendment, because the real-life conflict was not over the right to 'open carry' in a vacuum, but over the right to bear arms if it is evident you intend to shoot somebody, an innocent person, right here and now. As the signing statements of the Southern states at the time of secession made clear, they wished to secede from the union in order to keep millions of human beings in perpetual bondage. That, and nothing else, was the 'state's right' for which they contended. For such a nefarious and unbiblical purpose, most in the North perceived no right to secede.

Gratitude

In a like vein, our author is "grateful" slavery is over and done with:

"I am profoundly grateful that chattel slavery no longer exists in our nation." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 589).

He is profoundly grateful that it's gone, though he wants it understood that the people who got rid of it are moral monsters. He's not grateful to the brave Northern soldiers, Black and white, who breathed out their last breath into the bubbling mud of the battle-field so that the slaves could walk free. If Southern slavery was really so wonderful as he says, why isn't nostalgia called for rather than gratitude for its demise? Put on your hip boots before you wade through this morass of contradictory impulses interspersed with publishable denials. Our author keeps circling around the ideas, clear at their source in the original pamphlet, returning, one might almost say, like a dog to its vomit, convinced that if he can just 'frame' them properly, others will see what he sees. He cannot stop whining that people are not nice to him, though what he and his collaborator, with the 'Anglo-Celtic'-centric 'League of the South,' are proposing is treason, and nobody has to be nice to traitors.

It is difficult to fathom the depths of shamelessness and dishonor from which this man is looking up at us, from which a man would venture to slander brave men who died for freedom, a value of which he has no conception, and who are not here to defend themselves against his raucous taunts. This self-indulgent, confessional book does not display any tendency toward clear thinking or sound logic. He wants to trace his roots; but when he does so, the current propels him towards slave-owning Southerners. (Or does it? He is guru-in-residence for a small neo-Confederate cult in Idaho; why Idaho? Last time I checked a map, this state was north of the Mason-Dixon line. He explains, in his book, that he grew up in Maryland, which has at least this much in common with Idaho, that it was not originally one of the Confederate states.) The Southern slave-owners must, therefore, after all and in spite of everything, have been good people, because he is a good person and they are his people; his narcissism will allow no other conclusion. The reader cannot remain aboard for the journey, because who, after all, has any reason to believe our author is a good person?

Revisionism

The book 'Black and Tan' is a multi-layered journey through time, with the earliest content being the unapologetically pro-slavery pamphlet (his half of it, at any rate) that started the controversy. Words have meanings, and this pamphlet is not very difficult to decode; it is frankly pro-slavery. When a writer comes to believe he spoke in error, he is always free to retract; but this our arrogant author will never do. Instead, he envelops and encases the material in an opaque sheath of confused, garbled 'explanations' that seem intended only to conceal the original, perfectly clear intent. Just as the Soviet revisionists used to air-brush Trotsky out of the photographs spoiled by his smiling visage, so here, a minimalist project, an improved method of eliminating slavery, is substituted for the original unabashed defense of slavery.

Given the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, the new and improved project is a historical impossibility; it's swamp gas, glittering unreal lights. You cannot introduce retroactive 'context' in this way, simply by including the original material in an anthology; yet he and the troop of flying monkeys who follow him on the internet attack all who quote the original pamphlet, a stand-alone publication, without adding, or rather substituting, the later revisions and clarifications, for quoting 'out of context.' The actual 'context,' it turns out, is not what the pamphlet said, but everything and anything he has ever said on the matter, at whatever time and in whatever forum.

This author, who recommends the pagan warrior Sun Tzu on the matter of truth-telling, often seems to want to conceal rather than clarify. For example, he, like his mentor Robert Lewis Dabney, is willing to condemn certain aspects of slavery, namely the "attendant evils": "It is obvious that in a fallen world, an institution like slavery will be accompanied by many attendant evils." (Douglas Wilson, 'Black and Tan,' Kindle location 559). Wilson, numbering himself among those who "so strongly identify" with Dabney, (Kindle location 1359), cannot really be distinguished from Dabney on this point. For both, their willingness to decry these "attendant evils" represents only a partial, strictly limited, and circumscribed critique of certain aspects of slavery, not any global condemnation of the institution.

They are willing to condemn incidental circumstances, like the habit certain slave-owners fell into, of using their slaves as a harem. Slavery they think benign, the 'attendant evils' deplorable; they imagine these evils might have been reformed, though in actual history they were not. These, in their mind, were blemishes upon an otherwise blameless and attractive institution. Yet some readers, driven by confirmation bias mainly, prefer to 'hear' Mr. Wilson issuing a categorical condemnation of slavery when he condemns the "attendant evils"; instead of correcting this error, he, and his rambunctious crowd of internet followers, encourage it, indeed seem to want to make it mandatory.

Secret Plan

Readers getting on in years may recall that Richard M. Nixon won election to the presidency in part by claiming he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. This plan was so secret, no one ever found out what it was! The war dragged on for years. Likewise, our intrepid author has a secret plan to free the slaves, without the loss of 600,000 lives. Thus his critics want to kill 600,000 people! Alas, the secret plan turns out to be no more and no less than a Confederate victory in the Civil War. Let's say the Union had simply given up, cried 'Uncle' in this war the South started, some time prior to hitting the 600,000-life mark, then, according to our author, slavery would have painlessly withered away of its own accord, much as the Marxists talk of the withering away of the state.

This wonderful prospect is a deus ex machina, because no such natural tendency was visible in process of occurring. His proposed wondrously irenic Confederate victory is no road-map for a better emancipation, but rather no emancipation at all. The viciously racist slave-owners known to history (Gosh, isn't it a shame they were racists; racism is bad, don't you know) are to be transformed into benevolent Christian gentlemen; how does this happen? The pagan Roman slave looked upward, not to a glass ceiling, but at an achievable if arduous climb, a career path; he could escape slavery, become a client to his master as patron, and ultimately live as a free man. The slave trapped in race-based Southern slavery had no such expectation of upward mobility; manumissions were few, and in many cases even discouraged by civil law. Sprinkle pixie dust, and slavery ends as if by magic? It wasn't happening; it is sheer fantasy.

In real life, the slave-owners wrote the Constitution for their Confederate States of America to preclude any possibility that it would ever happen: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed." (Article I, Constitution of the Confederate States, March 11, 1861).

Universal Law

The reader who inspects Douglas Wilson's (bizarrely respectful) Wikipedia profile will discover that he is a theonomist. While it's certainly true you can't believe everything you read on the web, this designation evidently has some merit. . .some of the time. The theonomists believe Moses' law was intended as universal legislation binding on all persons in all places at all times. However, not even the Jews believe that all provisions of the law are binding on Israel at all times and in all places, because why otherwise is it said, 'When you come into the land"? Mohammed ibn Abdallah, the unlettered Arabian 'prophet,' complained that when the Jews of Medina read out the law to him, they blocked a portion with a finger. I would suspect this was to avoid explaining what is in reality a very complicated situation.

Jews in the diaspora observe some but not all of Moses' legislation. This is not simply because the civil authorities of the places where they reside claim a monopoly on the use of force; in seventh century Arabia there was no central government enforcing law and order. As there was no civil authority above the level of the tribe, the Jews of Medina could have punished (Jewish) adulterers with stoning if they so chose. No one would have arrested them for murder. However, they did not so choose, probably for complicated reasons including the fact there was no Sanhedrin then sitting, Moses' designated appellate court for capital cases. With no Sanhedrin, there was no possibility of appeal. With no possibility of appeal, there could be no lawful capital verdict.

Whether Douglas Wilson is still even a nominal theonomist I couldn't say; he has been boosting author Stephen Wolfe, who writes,

“The civil law of the Mosaic law did not in itself foreshadow Christ and so did not undergo a change as to their righteousness—they are, in other words, not deadly. But they are dead; they are 'no longer living in such a way as to obligate,' says Junius. He continues, speaking of civil law in general: 'In circumstances it undergoes as many changes as possible, and varies according to time, place, person, deeds, modes, causes, and supports—in the past, the present, or the future—as well as in public and private matters.' In other words, whether any civil law is good depends on circumstances, which requires the discernment and prudence of man. Calvin writes, '[E]ach nation has been left at liberty to enact the laws which it judges as beneficial.' Nothing about this disparages the Mosaic law—a law of God. It is a perfect example of law. But it is not a universal body of law.” (Wolfe, Stephen. The Case for Christian Nationalism (pp. 267-268).)

This is the traditional view of the matter and there's no objection to find with it, other than that it contradicts all prior cult doctrine on this point,— namely of the very same cult which publishes and promotes Stephen Wolfe's writings. Do the people sitting in the pews in Moscow, Idaho have any memory function left? How do they accommodate these wild shifts and reversals of field?

The church conference in Acts 15 refused to obligate Christians to follow the Mosaic law in all respects, including its civil, social, economic and political enactments; however, Christians do understand that the Bible, inspired of God, incorporates within its covers a proposal for a model, exemplary commonwealth, albeit one from long ago. While Christians are not bound directly to Moses' polity, any majority Christian society that legislates for itself institutions markedly less just than those of Moses has got a lot of explaining to do, as Ricky used to tell Lucy, because God is still a God of justice, just as He was under the Old Testament. In some cases, King Jesus' direct commands come into play; but Jesus never rescinded the Sabbatical or the Jubilee. The people of the American Southland lived as a quasi-democratically self-governing polity (though the slaves of course were disenfranchised, as were, often, landless whites); the laws they lived under were the laws they themselves chose to live under. Their legislation was not imposed from outside. They had slavery so long as they wanted it, not one second longer. They said they were Christians.

There is a little-bitty problem with slavery as practiced in the American Southland versus the Mosaic law: namely, it is altogether illegal. Persons held in bondage must be liberated every seventh year. By some interpretations, this recurrent Sabbatical year may occur on a fixed, not a relative, schedule, and so a Hebrew man or woman can only be held in a condition of involuntary servitude for a period of up to six years:

“If your brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and serves you six years, then in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you. And when you send him away free from you, you shall not let him go away empty-handed; you shall supply him liberally from your flock, from your threshing floor, and from your winepress. From what the Lord has blessed you with, you shall give to him. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this thing today.” (Deuteronomy 15:12-15).

Uh-oh, there's trouble down on the plantation! There is no provision in Moses' law for permanent, life-long involuntary servitude, although those pagan idolaters who are so attached to pagan idolatry that they refuse to renounce it, even understanding that renouncing idolatry will win them their freedom within six years, may have to wait as long as forty-nine years for their liberty. Incidentally, King Jesus legislated on this very question of 'Who is the neighbor.' He delivers His judgment in the parable of the Good Samaritan. His verdict is not favorable to the racialist, as even John Calvin realized: "To make any person our neighbor, therefore, it is enough that he be, a man; for it is not in our power to blot out our common nature. . .But here, as I have said, the chief design is to show that the neighborhood, which lays us under obligation to mutual offices of kindness, is not confined to friends or relatives, but extends to the whole human race." (John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, Volume 3, p. 43). So what is the theonomist who wishes to excuse Southern slavery to do, realizing that it is simply illegal? Or are we to adopt the Mosaic legislation, which we are not obligated to do, but then class ourselves as foreigners?

What do they do? They discover that, Hallelujah, we're not under law, we're under grace!:

"A common confusion blurs an important distinction between Hebrew slavery— i.e. slavery in a nation covenanted with God, with laws received from His hand— and the slavery that is seen in the pages of the New Testament. In the former, we see how God's laws govern and regulate the practice of slavery in a nation called by His name and covenanted with Him. In the latter, we see God's laws as they teach His people how to live within a culture having ungodly laws concerning slavery." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 633).

Usually you would expect, if a nation is a theocracy, that God has made a proffer to that nation which was accepted. How to become a theocracy when God hasn't made the offer? The theocratic choreographers at Moscow, Idaho are working on some powerful voodoo to make that happen, I'd expect, so that whether God wants it or not, whether it fits into His salvation plan or not, Idaho will be a theocracy. The Anglicans can advise on costuming. Who has ever heard of a covenant with only one party? But Wilson's mentor, the racist Confederate Robert Lewis Dabney, was no theonomist. He did not even nod in the direction of 'general equity.' Perhaps more astute than his student, he realized that if you want to retain slavery, you will just have to send Moses packing, and so he does: ". . .and he [God] also gave, by the intervention of Moses, various religious and civil laws, which were peculiar to the Jews, and were never intended to be observed after the resurrection of Jesus Christ." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1364).

If we allow Moses' law code to remain relevant, even if only as exemplary, 'model' legislation, then slavery is out, for any term greater than six years. If the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycle is fixed, not relative, the maximum term allowable in servitude is six years; someone who falls into that condition one year before the year of release, spends only one year in that condition. If the six years in this case is relative, the maximum term is still six years. Of course the only way an innocent Hebrew can have fallen into this condition is if other things Moses commanded,— redeeming captives, assisting the indigent,— did not happen, whether as a result of hard times or recalcitrance. God did not intend for there to be slavery in Israel and erected a series of fire-breaks to prevent it.

Moses liberated a great company of slaves, and enslaved none, save the indigent thief who could not repay what he stole. Moses' law requires that the down-on-his-luck slave be liberated, not that he ever should have been enslaved; Moses was a great liberator, like Solon of Athens or Abraham Lincoln. (It takes a special attitude to conclude from Moses' command to liberate slaves that, "The relation then, must be innocent in itself" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1405); as if divorce, also permitted, must be "innocent in itself"!) So why were there any Africans remaining in bondage past the year 1806, if the 'Anglo-Celtic' inhabitants of the South were, as they say, Christians, who look to God's word for instruction in how they are to live?

Learning from Wilson that the South labored under "ungodly" laws, the reader must be left wondering how the democratically governed (though the slaves and poor whites were disenfranchised) South came to be bound under ungodly laws, when our author keeps trying to pretend that those worldly cavaliers were actually evangelical Christians, which they were not but their descendants might become. In historical fact, their way out of their Biblical dilemma was to propose that 'Hebrew'='Anglo-Saxon,' whereas 'African' was to equate to, not 'Hebrew,' nor even to resident alien, but to 'Canaanite.' Both of these American population sub-groups, the 'Anglo-Celtics' as they now style themselves and the 'African-Americans,' had arrived in the country at about the same time, and both groups consisted overwhelmingly of baptized Christians. Because further importation of slaves had early on been banned, African-Americans, as of the time of the Civil War, were more likely to be native-born than were European-Americans. By virtue of what are they to be classed as 'foreigners'?

The reader who hopes to understand our author's antipathy to the fourteenth amendment may begin by realizing that that amendment says all persons born in the United States are citizens, versus the infamous Dred Scott decision which declared no African, not even a free man, was ever a citizen: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." (Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Section 1.). These 'Canaanites' were not found in the land, under God's judgment of expulsion and death; rather ships traversed the sea to a distant land, to import these people, precisely so that they could be mistreated. And how did they come to be identified as 'Canaanites' in the first place?

The 'Bible arguments' which have been advanced on this score over the years, like 'black skin = mark of Cain,' range from the unconvincing to the preposterous. Our author knows this, and will not venture to repeat the frighteningly racist arguments which are the only known route by which to arrive at the sought-after destination, no doubt because these arguments are also absurd; and yet he will pretend that the Southern racists won the debate against the Northern abolitionists, even if he does not dare to repeat, in detail, their 'winning' arguments. One might expect those champions who conducted the 'winning' side of the argument to run a victory lap around the track, or do a little victory dance in the end-zone, with their victorious arguments held high above their heads. But these are 'winning' arguments which dare not speak their name. He will not repeat them, nor will the atheists, if they even know what they are.

Judgment

Out of one side of his mouth, our author says perfectly acceptable things about slavery: that God judged the South for this sin, etc. Out of the other side of his mouth, he says deplorable things: that the slaves were happy and content (so what was all that fuss about 'fugitive slaves,' if they would gladly have chosen to stay?) He pops up, shouts something provocative, then crouches back down where, level with the terrain, he cannot be targeted, and pretends to deplore all the things other people deplore. This vaudeville act rapidly grows old.

It may be objected: but this tome, 'Black and Tan,' is 'shovel-ware,' how consistent do you expect it to be? These are essays written at different times from different perspectives, not a unified composition. True, but he should not have shovelled this mess into the public's face. This man's robust self-esteem leaves him astonished that the authorities ever issued his critics a driver's license: "As I have read editorials, letters to the editor, and heard outrageous statements made by people who actually have drivers' licenses. . ." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 981). This Great Oz runs his own little kingdom up in Idaho, and he can't be bothered to edit his material, which astonishes him by its brilliance, for consistency, for uniformity of voice or of viewpoint.

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 the author's Idaho than they are here in Maine, Unitarians were more prevalent in the Northeast than elsewhere. And this is the center-piece of his efforts to demonize the North:

Now this is it for this author, here he reveals the content of the garbage bags he is scattering around in the Union cemeteries, hoping the stench will drive away those who have come to leave flower garlands: they were Unitarians. He, too is a heretic on the Trinity, but this is not his heresy; he's a semi-Arian, so he has no sympathy for Unitarians, except Thomas Jefferson. Were they, really? 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. . .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). 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, our 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).

Our author 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, what did Thomas Jefferson actually say?:

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 did.

The French Revolution

In recent years, the South has polled as a the more religious part of our country, in part because of the presence there in large numbers of those people whose testimony against slavery Douglas Wilson refuses to accept, the African-Americans. The Northeast, by contrast, shows up as the less religious part of the country: when asked how often they pray, how often they read the Bible, and how important their religion is in their daily lives, their testimony is wan and lackluster. Upon closer examination, much of the reason for this is the presence in the Northeast of a disproportionately large number of Roman Catholics, whose lack of enthusiasm for their faith tradition anomalously does not trigger desire for departure. People in the Northeast are not necessarily globally or generally 'secular,' but this is, at present, the less religious part of the country.

It would be ahistorical and anachronistic to project back into the past this current pattern. Certainly when we go back to the beginning, and compare the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth Rock with the commercial Jamestown colony, the North was not the more secular part of the country at that time. The Jamestown colonists were not trying to found a city on the hill, and it's not like the moral tone of the continent was not already low enough, without importing a cannibal into the country to lower it still further! Our author wants to 'back-date' the South's current relative religiosity back into the nineteenth century. He helpfully explains that the North's crusade against slavery in the Civil War was not only very much like the atheistic French Revolution, but was actually the very same thing:

Who ever suspected that Francis Asbury was a Jacobin? It is normal, in present-day 'Reformed' circles, to respond in disputation, not to what people have actually ever said, but to their presumed 'world-view,' which is assigned to them more or less at random. Evidently this tendency goes all the way back to Robert Lewis Dabney, because Wilson is following his guiding light, Dabney, in his expectation that there must have been a guillotine set up on every village green in New England. Dabney traces the abolitionists' conviction that all men are "mechanically equal in rights" to the Jacobins:

"Your true abolitionist is then, of course, a Red-Republican, a Jacobin. Is not this strikingly illustrated by the fact, that the first wholesale abolition in the world was that enacted for the French colonies by the frantic democrats of the 'Reign of Terror?'" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3140).

Why, no, as it happens, this tangible historical claim is no more accurate than usual. The first wholesale abolition in the world took place when Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, and an entire people who had been held in bondage were set free by God, a celebrated Abolitionist. Subsequent abolitions were scheduled every seven and forty-nine years, though they did not always take place as scheduled. Another took place in the Middle Ages when Christian communities decided slavery was not really very Christian.

Setting slaves free is not altogether a Judaeo-Christian thing; several pagans, including Solon and the Emperor Nero in his dealings with the Greeks, also set free sizeable numbers of persons, though without striking or intending to strike at the root of this widespread institution. According to the (not very reliable) 'Letter of Aristeas,' King Ptolemy II Philadelphus had the honor of being a pagan emancipator of the large population of Jewish slaves then resident in Egypt, who had been carried there captive by his father,

"'Wherefore since it is acknowledged that we are accustomed to render justice to all men and especially to those who are unfairly in a condition of servitude, and since we strive to deal fairly with all men according to the demands of justice and piety, we have decreed, in reference to the persons of the Jews who are in any condition of bondage in any part of our dominion, that those who possess them shall receive the stipulated sum of money and set them at liberty and that no man shall show any tardiness in discharging his obligations.'" (Copy of Ptolemy's emancipation decree, Letter of Aristeas, 24).

Long years later the American states of the North, whose colonial legislatures had been unable to act on slavery while under the veto power of King George III, liberated their slaves, out of Christian impulses not felt by their Southern brethren. At the time of the Civil War, the South was not the religious part of our country, and it most emphatically was not the democratic, small-d, section. Both these concerns are sometimes retrojected back into the antebellum South by modern sentimentalists. The wealthy, slave-owning planters, through their representatives, voted for secession, because it served their interests. They voted, as impecunious, propertyless white men could not. Why are there still, to this day, people defending this as if it were meritorious?

The time-line in this effort at establishing a historical causal link is not exactly laser sharp, because as white supremacist Abraham Lincoln noted in his 'Gettysburg Address,' it was "four score and seven years ago" that the American experiment began, "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal"; do the math, that's before the Jacobins. Neither was the spirit animating the American Revolution at all on a wavelength with the bloody and vindictive French Revolution. By their fruits you shall know them:

Certainly one can imagine, in a parallel universe, that there might have been a Civil War like that; after all, it's true to an extent that Haiti's slave rebellion was inspired by the French Revolution, though the guardians of the Republic were far from being of one mind as to how to respond. When I was a child, though I grew up in an irreligious environment and did not become a Christian until I was in my twenties, as I recall they were always making us sing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' separation of church and state be damned. Certainly no child can understand the country he or she is living in without singing that song. Personally it never made me think about the French Revolution, though what it makes him think of, I can't say. I imagine he must hate it. Whether those patriotic Americans who reside in his community cannot help themselves from humming it as he goes by, for all that its author was a Unitarian, I can't say; Lord knows I would. As a child I found the lyrics frankly perplexing, though it is a rousing song and it certainly makes you want to march out there and free the slaves:

Again, as with this author's atheist friends, there is a certain synergy here between different groups who want to make similar claims, mostly on a wish fulfillment basis. Those modern academics who strongly identify with the European enlightenment but can't make heads nor tails out of 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' might be tempted to rewrite history so that the abolitionists were inspired by the Enlightenment rather than by the Bible. Our author will eagerly agree with them, because he hates the abolitionists, and only cares about what the Bible says long enough to skirt around it. The actual history, which is by no means shameful nor discreditable to the Bible, gets left in the dust by both parties of fellow travellers.

Just as Douglas Wilson claims that, in the American Civil War, the North was fighting for godless atheism and the triumph of the French revolution, he also claims that the South was fighting to preserve Christian civilization. What, pray tell, was the Confederates' concept of Christian civilization and its demands? What did they think they were doing? What did they say that they were doing? If you must know, they said that they were fighting to preserve slavery. That's what they said, not the 'woke,' not the Marxists, not the Shining Path. They said they were fighting to position the Black man solidly beneath the boot of the white man. That's what they said they were doing, not Rachel Held Evans:

Spoiling the Egyptians

When God heard the cries of the children of Israel and led them out of bitter bondage in Egypt, He instructed them to spoil their Egyptian slave-masters:

“And I will give this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians; and it shall be, when you go, that you shall not go empty-handed. But every woman shall ask of her neighbor, namely, of her who dwells near her house, articles of silver, articles of gold, and clothing; and you shall put them on your sons and on your daughters. So you shall plunder the Egyptians.” (Exodus 3:21-22).

“Now the children of Israel had done according to the word of Moses, and they had asked from the Egyptians articles of silver, articles of gold, and clothing. And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they granted them what they requested. Thus they plundered the Egyptians.” (Exodus 12:35-36).

Now one might almost complain that the children of Israel have not mastered the hierarchical and patriarchal concept that Douglas Wilson finds at the heart of Bible slavery, because here they are just blatantly taking Massa's stuff. But God says this is justice:

“Then He said to Abram: 'Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions.'” (Genesis 15:13-14).

Nothing bothers some angry white men more than the concept of reparations, but don't tell that to God. God is committed to justice, including compensation, and made it happen:

"So they, being now driven out of the land and pursued, coming at last to a proper notion of their own nobility and worth, ventured upon a deed of daring such as became the free to dare, as men who were not forgetful of the iniquitous plots that had been laid against them; for they carried off abundant booty, which they themselves collected, by means of the hatred in which they were held, and some of it they carried themselves, submitting to heavy burdens, and some they placed upon their beasts of burden, not in order to gratify any love of money, or, as any usurer might say, because they coveted their neighbors' goods. (How should they do so?) But, first of all, because they were thus receiving the necessary wages from those whom they had served for so long a time; and, secondly, because they had a right to afflict those at whose hands they had suffered wrong with afflictions slighter than, and by no means equal to, what they had endured.

"For how can the deprivation of money and treasures be equivalent to the loss of liberty? on behalf of which those who are in possession of their senses dare not only to cast away all their property, but even to venture their lives? So they now prospered in both particulars: whether in that they received wages as if in price, which they now exacted from unwilling paymasters, who for a long period had not paid them at all; and, also, as if they were at war, they looked upon it as fitting to carry off the treasures of the enemy, according to the laws of conquerors; for it was the Egyptians who had set the example of acts of injustice, having, as I said before, enslaved foreigners and suppliants, as if they had been prisoners taken in war. And so they now, when an opportunity offered, avenged themselves without any preparation of arms, justice itself holding a shield over them, and stretching forth its hand to help them." (Philo Judaeus, A Treatise on the Life of Moses, Book I, Chapter XXV).

Please realize, I'm not in favor of the contemporary reparations movement, which does not represent exact justice but rather an arbitrary assignment of blame on the basis of pigmentation. The assumption behind it is that the entire white population of the United States profited from slavery. I think that  is not likely to be the case. Did poor, white dirt farmers benefit from proximity to farms using the plantation system? To the contrary, they were obliged to sell their produce at a low price to match what slave-owners could offer for the products of unrequited toil. I would say slavery is an institution which tends to impoverish the community as a whole rather than enriching it, although it certainly does enrich one class of persons, namely that minority who are slave-owners. But the Neo-confederate railing against the principle is pointless, given that God has himself endorsed that approach in the past under other circumstances.

The challenge facing the pro-slavery Bible expositor is to find some way of identifying a part of the American public with Israel,— the people they used to call 'Anglo-Saxons;' to judge from contemporary neo-Confederate and White Supremacist web-sites, the preferred term nowadays is 'Anglo-Celtic,'— and a part, those of African heritage, most of them by the time of the Civil War native-born, with Canaan and other enemies of Israel. In place of the Pledge's 'one nation under God, indivisible,' the racist expositor must sunder the united people into at least two sub-populations, one favored and one disfavored; indeed, in reality, these people had in view an elaborate apartheid layer-cake, with 'Anglo-Celtics' on top the pile, persons of non-Anglo European heritage beneath them, all the way down to persons of African heritage at rock-bottom.

Now there is no mention of any 'Anglo-Celtic' people in the Bible, much less any special signs of favor; the Ethiopians are mentioned, without any note of animosity. How are you going to do it? Don't ask Douglas Wilson, he remains mum. Though he surely knows what all the old answers are, and he assures us the Old South won the slavery debate by using the old answers, he also fancies himself a 'scholar,' if you please, and is not going to repeat them in public. 'British Israelitism' is one popular model; this identifies the British people as the lost tribes of Israel, because 'Brit-Ish' means 'man of the covenant,' get it? Never mind it's the wrong language and the wrong part of speech. He's not going to say this in public, because he will just be laughed at; but what is he going to say, to make those old pro-slavery arguments take wing and fly anew?

Racialism is an uneasy fit into the Bible, partly because the boundary between the people of God and the outsiders is permeable, by reason of conversion. The people who call themselves kinists are on a parallel track to Douglas Wilson, though he condemns them harshly. Tweedledum and Tweedledee?:

Slippery Slope

This author is fond of consequentialist arguments of the 'slippery slope' variety. Consequentialism, also known as utilitarianism, was exhaustively defined by cradle atheist John Stuart Mill, although it has ancient antecedents. This ethical theory says, to know what is good and what is bad, we must look to the anticipated consequences of various courses f action; those which have bad consequences are bad, those which have good consequences are virtuous. This ethical theory appeals to modern atheists like Sam Harris, who see in it a magic box which can produce ethical maxims without any command of God. However it has its limitations. Is it actually possible for a good thing to have bad consequences? Let's see.

Our author explains that the Northern victory in the Civil War was evil because it led to the adoption of the fourteenth amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the laws, which had the effect of tending to bind the states under the Bill of Rights. The framers of this amendment did not intend to legalize abortion, but intended rather to secure the liberty of the newly-freed slaves against any state efforts to downgrade their citizenship status. Many years after the Civil War, the Supreme Court took it upon themselves in Roe v. Wade to de-criminalize abortion, finding a constitutional right to abortion not readily discernible by most readers of that document. The fourteenth amendment says nothing about abortion, nor has anyone ever ventured to find an abortion doctrine in its penumbra.

More recently, Roe has been overturned, without anything happening in the meantime to the fourteenth amendment, showing that there is no necessary connection there. It is however involved tangentially with this Supreme Court decision, which without the amendment would not have had the scope that it did. There is no question that Roe v. Wade was decided wrongly; so in other words, for the framers of this amendment to correctly evaluate its moral worth at the time, they must have been able to predict its future use in a court decision wrongfully decided! It is certainly true that without the fourteenth amendment, this Supreme Court decision could not have struck down abortion laws in all fifty states. Does it therefore follow that the Union victory in the Civil War was an unmitigated evil? This is too shaky of a house of cards, and consequentialism too barren and impoverished of an ethical system, to agree with the author's reasoning.

It isn't really possible to rid ethics of consequentialist thinking altogether, but believe it or not, many Christian thinkers do not like it or trust it. Some people apparently know nothing better:

What is the problem with evaluating the moral good or evil of a present action by weighing the anticipated consequences down the road? Well, for starters, this requires us to divine the future, which is not easy. The Bible flat-out says you can't do it:

"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit;' whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away." (James 4:13-14).

Those unwilling to take God's word on it should reflect, large sums of money are spent on predicting the future: think of the weather forecast, or the industry devoted to predicting future trends on Wall Street. If you knew how to do it, you could make a killing! Alas, it's easier said than done. Weather forecasts have improved immensely since I was a kid, when no one used to take them seriously. But five or six days out, they are not that reliable. To be sure once the weather is upon us, the weatherman can 'predict' it accurately enough: he can stick his hand out the window to see whether it is raining or not.

Abortion takes a human life, but not everything indirectly or tangentially connected to it can therefore be classed as an evil. Certainly at the time the fourteenth amendment was adopted, no one could have foreseen that, a century later, this measure might play a role in decriminalizing abortion. To offer an analogy: the reader of Celsus' On Medicine is struck by the boldness of the ancient surgeons, who were willing to give just about anything a try; one must imagine they lost a lot of patients. In some cases their audacity extended even to surgical abortion, though Celsus does not mention the procedure.

However abortion in antiquity was not without its risks; as an antiseptic, honey is not in a league with carbolic acid. Joseph Lister, a Christian, developed aseptic methods of surgery in the nineteenth century, including hand-washing, sterilizing surgical instruments, scrubbing down the surgical theater, etc. These inventive techniques reduced post-surgery mortality greatly; one did not hear so often, 'the operation was a success, but the patient died.' One consequence of Lister's reforms is that surgical abortion, which existed in antiquity but was not widely practiced, became feasible as a commercial product offered to the masses. Unless your doctor is Kermit Gosnell, you will not likely suffer harm from obtaining an abortion; the baby, of course, will die. Do we therefore conclude, aseptic surgery is an evil? Of course not, aseptic surgery is a good, though it did, in time, by meandering and circuitous routes, lead to an evil result.

It used to be that predictions, of necessity, became accurate when the future crashed into the present, but even that doesn't tend to happen any more, at least not in the political realm. The TV meteorologist can stick his hand out the window and tell if it is raining; but a charlatan like Doug Wilson has no problem telling people that COVID-19 is a "shamdemic," even while over a million Americans are dying of the disease. Present reality has been dissolved and dissipated by conspiracy theory, which, although totally fake, is realer than real to millions of gullible people. He did the same thing with HIV which, according to him, does not cause AIDS.

From the Christian perspective, consequentialism suffers from a myriad of problems and difficulties. Certainly when the fourteenth amendment was adopted, people could have foreseen that Southern white supremacists would try to deprive Black Americans of their civil rights. They did try, time and again, and unfortunately, succeeded all too often, in spite of the fourteenth amendment being on the books. Of course, from the standpoint of the Neoconfederates, the fact that the fourteenth amendment did provide a measure of protection against this inexorable force is not a good thing but a bad thing. So the harm the people who drafted the amendment could anticipate, they did guard against.

A harm they could not conceivably anticipate, a distant and indirect link with decriminalizing abortion, they cannot be held to account for. You must ascend a lengthy, rickety ladder of cause-and-effects. If any link in the chain is, hypothetically, broken, you could arrive at a different outcome. Along with all the other problems, this way of determining good and evil suffers from the defect of an arbitrary start point. The Civil War led to an increase in federal power (true); but secession led to the Civil War; no secession, no Civil War. Therefore secession was evil. Moreover, slavery led to secession. Therefore slavery is evil! This is where we came in. Better to adopt a certain standard in God's word, instead of constructing lengthy and uncertain chains of cause and effect which no one at the time could have imagined.

The right balance between the power of the federal government and that of the states is a subject of legitimate controversy. When Richard Nixon proposed a federal war on crime, many liberals objected that crime was, for the most part, strictly a local matter,— when you call the cops and complain that your purse was stolen, the person who responds is likely an employee of the municipality. These liberals mistrusted Nixon's motives, and so they did not want to see the power to determine goals, standards, and guidelines turned over to the federal government rather than retained by the states, counties and municipalities. When George W. Bush imposed national standards on education, some people protested that control over the educational system had always been vested in local elected school boards, not in Washington. Certainly a responsible citizen can argue that the balance has shifted too far; but to follow this meandering trail of cause and effect back to the source and say it was evil for the Union army to free the slaves because this would lead many years later to the possibility of a bad Supreme Court decision, though the slaves' emancipation by no means required any such decision to be rendered, is really too hypothetical and indirect. This is not how we determine good and ill. The correct way: the Bible condemns slavery, therefore it is bad; therefore, get rid of it if you can.

League of the South

Douglas Wilson's collaborator in 'Southern Slavery as It Was,' and fellow Presbyterian minister, Steven Wilkins, is reportedly one the founders of the 'League of the South.' Douglas Wilson is not and was not a member, however, according to his own testimony, the reason for this is not owing to any fundamental disagreement with the objectives of this organization, but rather because they are too optimistic. What is the League all about? They want to protect the "Anglo-Celtic" population of the South against any and all threats, whether real, perceived or imaginary:

"Q: Why does the L[eague of the] S[outh] seek to protect the Anglo-Celtic core population and culture of the historic South?
"A: The Anglo-Celtic peoples settled the South and gave it its dominate [sic] culture and civilisation. We believe that the advancement of Anglo-Celtic culture and civilisation is vital in order to preserve our region as we know it. Should this core be destroyed or displaced the South would be made over in an alien image — unfamiliar and inhospitable to our children and grandchildren. We, as Anglo-Celtic Southerners, have a duty to protect that which our ancestors bequeathed to us. If we do not promote our interests then no one will do it for us." (from Dixienet, the website of the League of the South).

I'm not sure when or why these groups dropped 'Anglo-Saxon,' which you used to hear from the old Ku Klux Klan, and went over to 'Anglo-Celtic;' did they finally decide Irish-Americans are okay, which they didn't used to think? These people envisioned American society as a hierarchical layer-cake with a sub-portion of the population, those of Anglo-Saxon heritage, perched atop the heap, those of Irish and Italian heritage down lower, the Polish side of my own family down lower still, then you slide on down to Americans of Oriental or Hispanic origin, and down at rock-bottom are the African-Americans. Those of us, white or black, who do not want to end up as second-class citizens in our own country might want to beware of this organization, which is not in favor of secession immediately (for legal reasons?), though that is their ultimate goal.

The actual Southern slave-owners whose moral vindication is Mr. Wilson's pole star were racists. They never sought any race-neutral defense of slavery, because their view-point was not race neutral. When Mr. Wilson leaps to their defense by providing a moral rationale for slavery based not on racism but on cultural inferiority, then we have already hopped the tracks from actual history into the science fiction 'history' of alternative universes. Yet their moral innocence must at all costs be upheld, even if it means subtracting all the views they actually held, and substituting altogether different ones. Who, then, is being defended, other than hypothetical people who never actually existed?

Birds of a Feather

The late Senator Joe McCarthy used to say, 'Birds of a feather flock together.' The Commies he was hunting indignantly objected that the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of association, as indeed it does. The government cannot ever conduct a drag-net operation, rounding up all the members of the Communist party, nor can anyone seeking the overthrow of the U.S. Government ever be sent up the river on no better evidence than guilt by association, to the tremendous relief no doubt of this crew.

However, Tail-gunner Joe had a point, in a way: if you are not a Commie, why are all your friends Commies? If you are actually a Rotarian, how come you don't hang with a Rotarian crowd? If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, can it be anything but a duck? Our author responds indignantly, with outraged innocence, in all apparent sincerity, when anyone accuses him of racism. Then he flings in the reader's face a venomous snake named Robert Lewis Dabney as the very model of a Christian pastor. For this man, race hatred is what oxygen is to other people. We learn from him that blacks are an "alien and savage race" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 687). The generation after the Revolution "deprecated the slave trade, because it was peopling their soil so largely with an inferior and savage race, incapable of union, instead of with civilized Englishmen." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 641). He explains that ". . .the civilized master uses his authority against and over that of the semi-civilized, or savage parent, to train the slave child to habits of decency, industry, intelligence, and virtue, which his degraded natural guardians are unable or unwilling to inculcate. . ." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 2772) (that's why it's okay for slave-masters to separate slave families), etc., ad nauseam. It is distinctly difficult to find evidence of the "mutual affection" our authors claim to find in Southern slavery, because all you hear from him is odious and hateful trash-talking:

"Once more: If the society contains a class of adult members, so deficient in virtue and intelligence that they would only abuse the fuller privileges of other citizens to their own and others' detriment, it is just to withhold so many of these privileges, and to impose so much restraint, as may be necessary for the highest equity to the whole body, inclusive of this subject class. And how much restraint is just, must be determined by facts and experience." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3069).

Who do you suppose, dear reader, it is who is "deficient in virtue and intelligence"? 'Anglo-Celtics,' perhaps? Why, no, it is who it always is with this author, African-Americans, whom he hates with a perfect hatred. If mutual affection is a two-way street, we won't find any of it here. Evidently slavery failed to deliver the goods it's advertised by its boosters as being capable of delivering.

But this obnoxious trash-talking is not gratuitous or incidental; without it there is no 'argument' for slavery. Throughout physical categories like heredity are mixed with moral ones; did you know one can be a pagan by 'descent,' a blot which evidently conversion cannot wipe away?: "If it appear that the Africans in these States were by recent descent pagans and barbarians, men in bodily strength and appetite, with the reason and morals of children, constitutionally prone to improvidence, so that their possession of all the franchises of a free white citizen would make them a nuisance to society and early victims to their own degradation; and if sound experience teaches that this ruin cannot be prevented without a degree of restraint approaching that proper for children; that is, by giving to a guardian the control of their involuntary labor, and the expenditure of the fruits for the joint benefit of the parties; how can we be condemned for it?" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3080).

Where is any such assertion made in the Bible? Of course it isn't there, and he doesn't even pretend to find it there; rather, he bases his claim on "facts and experience": "And how much restraint is just, must be determined by facts and experience." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3067). What is advertised and promised, by Dabney's modern acolyte Douglas Wilson, is Bible, what is delivered is not Bible, just bigotry. This kind of thing goes on for pages: in Africa, the people were "living but one remove above the apes around them" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3351); the people displayed the "savage's common vices" of "lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3351); therefore, "Now cannot common sense see the moral advantage to such a people, of subjection to the will of a race elevated above them, in morals and intelligence, to an almost measureless degree?" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3351). When you talk like that about people, are you expressing affection or hatred? What is that somebody was just saying, about how the slavery system was supposed to have produced mutual affection in the people touched by it? More like seething hatred, looks like.

That's it, that's the great 'Bible argument' that reduces abolitionists to tongue-tied confusion, it's nothing but hateful animadversion against African-Americans, combined with boastful self-promotion on behalf of white slave-owners. From time to time we are reminded that all men are sinners, but evidently somehow this taint 'sticks' to the "morally inferior" African-Americans more so than to the "nobler race," the 'Anglo-Celtics' (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3362); though it does seem in the end that the Yankees, with "their hypocritical puritanism," (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3408), belong down there at bottom with the African-Americans, if not lower. So this man thinks his kind of folks are the best there are, others, not so good. What an amazing, and counter-intuitive, discovery, what a find is he, a man strong and true, willing and able to demonize the outsider and flatter the home-folks!

This man, Robert Lewis Dabney, is bitter and defeated; everything connected with the North lashes him to blind, spitting fury. So we find the moral dividing line placed by him, and by Wilson following him, at this irrational point: slave-trading is bad, because Yankees do it, but slave-owning is good, because Southerners do it. Dabney's economic analysis is strangely Marxist: the North is an imperialist power exploiting its colony, the South, which is perceived as an El Dorado of plundered treasure, not an economically backward part of the country. For those readers who feel they have any need to know, here is a typical sample of this individual's schtick:

Who is he talking about? Not 'Anglo-Celtics,' that's for sure. Polish people maybe. The much-advertised 'Bible argument,' by the way, is that sinfulness is hereditary, and therefore "Ham's posterity, like their father, would be peculiarly degraded in morals" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1209) (Noah having become a cut-out for God, and Canaan sliding back a generation to Ham). It is to be expected that ". . .depraved parents will naturally rear depraved children, unless God interfere by a grace to which they have no claim; so that not only punishment, but the sinfulness, becomes hereditary." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1211). Owing to "the peculiar moral degradation" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1221) of black folk, slavery is supposedly God's best and highest for them, because the kindly slave-master can correct their tendency toward degraded morals, no doubt by whipping as is deemed appropriate. We learn these facts, not from the Bible, which neglects to mention them, but from "actual history." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1209). And this is the much ballyhooed compelling 'argument' the abolitionists could not answer!

The reader will have noticed that this new feint runs counter to the 'sentimental' defense of slavery before noted, which loved to dwell on scenes of reunion between slaves and slave-owners: "Massa and Missis have long gone before me, Soon we will meet on that bright and golden shore, There we'll be happy and free from all sorrow, There's where we'll meet and we'll never part no more." (Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, James Bland). Now we learn the slaves are hell-hounds who are not bound for glory, and indeed it is this reoriented destination which justifies their enslavement. If the sentimentalists are right, Dabney is slandering God's people; if Dabney is right, the sentimentalists are raving. To the extent the slavers believed his obsequious flattery, they added the sin of pride to that of oppression, "He, whom his white oppressor refused to worship with, eat with, sail with, or dwell with on earth, shall dwell, and worship, and reign where his master may never be; and when— as may often happen— the white skin is shut out, and the black man, now and forever free, passes in at the celestial gate, it shall furnish but another illustration of the truth, that salvation is 'not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.'" (Thomas Guthrie, The Gospel in Ezekiel, Kindle location 2178).

Cultural Inferiority

For most of his book, 'Black and Tan,' Douglas Wilson seems as though he is 'channeling' Robert Lewis Dabney; he departs from him in almost no particular. One significant difference, however, touches upon the foundation of the argument, no small matter; if the foundation fails, the structure collapses. Robert Lewis Dabney's defense of slavery is ultimately based upon racism; the reason why slavery is a good thing and not a bad thing is, to Dabney, because they are born bad: blacks inherit a peculiar moral depravity. Douglas Wilson knows you cannot get away with saying things like that nowadays. And so he substitutes an alternative foundation upon which to establish slavery: namely, cultural inferiority:

"All men exhibit the image of God equally, but all cultures are not equal. As we look at all the tribes of men, we see some that have landed a man on the moon, and some that have not yet worked out the concept of the wheel." (Douglas Wilson, 'Black and Tan,' Kindle location 444).

So for Robert Lewis Dabney's theme of racial inferiority, we are substituting cultural inferiority. Dabney's conclusion remains intact: namely, that some people are entitled to enslave other people, and indeed it is the very same people as before (white Anglo-Saxon Southerners, and African-Americans). Now, those readers instructed in logic must surely know, it is a delicate operation indeed to excise the premises upon which a conclusion rests, leaving the conclusion poised delicately in mid-air, while you substitute an entirely different set of premises. Indeed some of you may have been taught not to do that; if you deposit the premises in the dumpster, and even Wilson admits we must do this with racism, then you must deposit the conclusion into the same dumpster along with them; the two go together. In any case one must ask, is the new and improved set of premises: that God prefers the mighty and strong over the weak, that He chooses the glittering civilizations of Egypt and Babylon over a rough, low-tech tribe of wandering Aramaeans, even compatible with the Bible? The answer is a resounding no:

God is with the slave, not the slave-owner:

"Another evil which drives away the divine Spirit is pride. The way to be very great is to be very little. To be very noteworthy in your own esteem is to be unnoticed of God. If you must needs dwell upon the high places of the earth, you shall find the mountain summits cold and barren: the Lord dells with the lowly, but He knows the proud afar off." (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to my Students, p. 201).

Douglas Wilson's category of 'cultural inferiority' mixes together the most disparate things, which do not necessarily track together. Japan is an example of a technologically advanced civilization which is a spiritual desert. Japan, according to what you read in the newspapers, gets little bang for the buck out of its R & D expenditures. Some speculate the reason is an educational system that stresses rote learning and social conformity over creativity. Be that as it may, suppose for the sake of argument that the Japanese get a handle on their problems, and their research efforts take off by leaps and bounds, and in no time at all they have surpassed our best technology. The Japanese, flitting around with those jet-pack back-packs that were such a feature of the 'future' years and years ago, then succeed in enslaving many of the technologically backwards Americans, and transport them to Japan where they are put to service as beasts of burden. Would anyone say, this is right and proper, because America, in this hypothetical example, is less technologically advanced than Japan? Of course not, because this is us, and that's them. No pro-slavery author in the history of the world has wanted to see 'us' enslaved by 'them.'

Douglas Wilson admires the Prohibition-era newspaper writer, H. L. Mencken, an insult-meister who perfected a style of one-liner put-downs. It was no part of Mencken's program to analyze and understand his adversaries' viewpoint and rebut point-by-point, nor would his state of sobriety have permitted such a project. He simply wanted to insult them, to make them look ridiculous. Is Wilson really going to defend Dabney's idea that one ethnic group suffers from a peculiar hereditary wickedness over against another ethnic group, that blacks deserve slavery because of their inherited moral depravity? No, but that doesn't mean he'll shut up; to him, an insult is an answer.

There is an element of self-fulfilling prophecy to Dabney's pro-slavery argument, because ancient authors noticed slavery's demoralizing effect on those subjected to that institution. Dabney, no believer in the power of the gospel to change lives, explained that the slaves were lazy and shiftless, and that thus they were obliged to remain under the tutelage of masters. Not the gospel, but "the birch," had the power to correct this situation: "But slavery made the lazy do their part with the industrious, by the wholesome fear of the birch." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3905).

But who in the antebellum South was lazy, and who was industrious? Who did all the work, and who did none? Rather, the indolent 'Anglo-Celtic' parasites in the big house should have been grateful the slaves were not so lazy and shiftless as they! Who, in this brave new world, were to be the Africans' instructors in the virtue of hard work? The plantation-owner's children, a class of persons notorious to all observers, both those sympathetic to slavery and those unsympathetic, for having no concept whatever of hard work, much less any inclination to engage in such a thing? These useless, lazy drones were fortunate to be surrounded by hard-working slaves, who would from time to time shove a tray of food in front of their faces, otherwise they would have starved to death. How can a virtue be taught by persons completely bereft of it themselves? This instructional plan: that persons who do no work ought to teach those who do all the work, about what? The work ethic!— does not pass the straight face test.

One would naturally suspect that slaves worked no harder than they had to, because this system of organizing labor does not distribute the burden so as to maximize effort. Visitors to the state collective farms in the old Soviet Union used to shake their heads at the neglected common fields, but then marvel at the lovingly tended garden plots. Were the Russian people who tended the state fields ethnically diverse from the Russian people who carefully watered and weeded their own little plots, the one group having an inherited tendency to moral depravity, the other to hard work and discipline? No, they were the very same individuals; in the one case they were given an incentive to toil out in the heat of the day, in the other they were not.

Douglas Wilson's instructor in all things slave-related, Robert Lewis Dabney, explains that slavery is a remedy for indolence which will correct this and other vices. Will it be needed forever?:

"But, it may be asked: Will not the diffusion of the pure and blessed principles of the Gospel ultimately extinguish all forms of slavery? We answer: Yes, we devoutly trust it will, not by making masters too righteous to hold slaves, but by so correcting the ignorance, thriftlessness, indolence, and vice of laboring people, that the institution of slavery will be no longer needed. Just so, we hope that the spread of Christianity will someday abolish penitentiaries and jails." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 2459).

Someday, somewhere over the rainbow. Dabney asserts that "slavery is the useful and righteous remedy" for "the ignorance and vice in the laboring classes." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 2468). Is it 'slavery' or 'Christianity' which is promoted here as a cure for shiftlessness? The intent seems to be both, or perhaps he really cannot tell them apart. But is slavery in any sense a remedy for poor work habits, if it seems rather to generate poor work habits, in all ethnic and cultural groups who have hitherto been subjected to it? It wouldn't surprise me if American slaves did display some of these behavior patterns, because the writers of classical antiquity observed a similar complex in their European slaves. Slavery is not the corrective for "indolence," because it produces indolence. This purported corrective action on the part of slavery justified the institution, according to Dabney and his followers: ". . .so it may be perfectly righteous to hold a class in bondage, which is incapable of freedom. . ." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 2459).

When did the Africans first show any signs of this characteristic vice which Dabney officiously diagnoses? While they lived in their own land, in tidy and busy little villages with well-tended fields, as John Wesley relates, condensing travellers' accounts, in his pamphlet 'Thoughts Upon Slavery'? There, a rational system of land tenure left the farmer content he was laboring to put food into the mouths of people he had reason to care about. Or did they first display signs of this malady when placed in a situation where they were no more stake-holders in the plantation, no more entitled to sign up for the profit-sharing plan, than were the beasts of burden in their stalls? In being torn from their homes, the slaves entered into a vicious cycle. The slave-driver whipped them to make them work, like a drunken or drug-addled boyfriend who beats a child to make him stop crying, which only makes the terrified child cry the more. Either he will kill the child, or the police will intervene. It will never happen that whipping unwilling and unpaid laborers who have no rational incentive to work will teach them the virtue of industry. Things are topsy-turvy when the only people doing any work on the plantation are accused of 'indolence,' by the very same people whose only observable connection to work is that of spectators.

Observers both ancient and modern have long noticed the spur that equality and opportunity give to achievement, both on the individual and on the communal level: "The Athenians accordingly increased in power; and it is evident, not by one instance only but in every way, that equality is an excellent thing, since the Athenians while they were ruled by despots were not better in war than any of those who dwelt about them, whereas after they had got rid of despots they became far the first. This proves that when they were kept down they were willfully slack, because they were working for a master, whereas when they had been set free each one was eager to achieve something for himself." (Herodotus, The Histories, Book V, Chapter 78, p. 38). What Dabney does is to step on someone, then blame him because he is unable to stand up, offering his weakness as proof he needs a conservator. Stop stepping on him, and he will get up. Realizing that slavery has no real life tendency to improve the character of those subjected to it, when would slavery be done away with in accordance with Dabney's ideals? The twelfth of never. The day after penitentiaries are abolished. Don't forget, he is a racist after all. Slavery is not likely to correct anyone's laziness, as he sees it, just to keep them from getting away with it.

The reader can only stare in disbelief at Douglas Wilson's claim that Southern slavery represented an altruistic effort on the part of slave-owners to civilize African barbarians. What better way to make people fit for civic life than to teach them to read and write? But not only did the slave-owners not do that, they prevented the meddlesome Yankees who would have done it! The assumption that God values civilization above all things is not itself Biblical. The Egyptians and Babylonians nurtured glittering civilizations; to this day people stand in line to marvel at the wonderful things the Egyptians made, taken from King Tut's tomb. Yet God did not show Himself to those cultured and refined (and slave-owning) folks, but to herdsmen who went out into the wilderness, away from the city, to seek Him.

Roman slavery was brutal enough, but the Romans never lost sight of the fact that the slave was a human being. Every year they held a festival called the 'Saturnalia,' a drunken riot unfortunately, during which slaves and their masters traded places, in memory of a fabled Italian king who had somehow got confused with the planetary body of the same name, whose reign was remembered as a time of justice and equity, when mankind's modest needs were met by a diet of acorns. After slavery was revived in Christendom, having gone dormant, some people marched into court and arrogantly announced that Africans were not even human:

". . .yet it has been alleged by the said Seller (even after the Negro had been a second time set at liberty by the authority of the right honorable the Lord Mayor) that he, the said Negro, is as much private property as a horse or a dog." (Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, Part I, p. 13)

In fact the dispute was not so much whether the slave was like a horse or a dog in being property, but whether he even was a human being at all, and wasn't rather properly classed with beasts of burden by nature. So the nauseating racism upon which Southern slavery was founded was a new wrinkle. The people who wanted to argue against slavery had first of all to prove that the slave was a human being; Dabney concedes, nominally, this much. Robert Lewis Dabney is all about racism, but Douglas Wilson somehow dreams of a Dabney cleansed of this fault. This would be a Dabney whose conclusions remain, founded upon a rock, though a new rock must somehow be inserted without being noticed, and the old one quietly withdrawn, because the old one, racism, has fallen out of favor.

Still, Wilson believes only so much of Dabney as suits him; Dabney explains that Virginia fielded no African-American soldiers, "But we exposed no negro to the dangers of the battle." (R. L. Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1102). But Wilson prefers his undocumented, ahistorical fantasies on this point; because neo-Confederates indignantly deny they are racists like their forbears, therefore entire battalions of African-American Confederate troops must be wished up, from smoke. Strictly speaking, it is true that Virginia exposed no African-American to the dangers of the battle, though in a last desperation move, they did recruit Black soldiers: "In the few weeks of life left to the Confederacy no other state followed Virginia's lead. The two companies of black soldiers hastily organized in Richmond never saw action." (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 837). Why weren't there more? Well, because, as even Robert E. Lee realized, you have to promise them freedom if they are to fight: "The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers. . .Those who are employed should be freed." (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 836). A chain gang will find it difficult to move at quick time over broken ground. Now this was a problem, because the theory under which the South fought the Civil War was that blacks were better off under slavery than freedom, whereas, as the newspapers explained, the idea of freeing slaves was "'a repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South. . . that servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of the slave.'" (McPherson, p. 834). As Georgian Howell Cobb explained it, "'The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.'" (McPherson, p. 835).

Indeed. Dabney's theory of slavery is that freedom for the slaves would be a curse rather than a blessing, and Wilson follows his hero's thinking, although he imagines he has cleansed the theory from the taint of racism by substituting cultural inferiority for Dabney's inherited racial inferiority. In theory, this condition of cultural inferiority is correctible, although it will take about 300 years for improvement to be noted. As will be seen, Wilson is no believer in the power of the Holy Spirit instantaneously to change human hearts; in his scheme of things, the gospel, a cultural construct rather than real or personal, ultimately permeates through these backward societies, but slowly, very slowly.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America made it illegal to legislate against slavery. Had secession been successful, as these authors fervently hope, would slavery thus have endured down to the present day? The authors' original pamphlet, 'Southern Slavery As It Was,' hints that at some point, economic death awaited slavery: "Because of this, economic death of slavery in our nation would have been hastened had there been more widespread obedience to the Word of God on the part of everyone — abolitionists, slaves, and slave owners." (Southern Slavery As It Was, pp. 5-6). One often does hear about this, even from people who are not Marxists: that impersonal, mindless economic forces would ultimately have done away with slavery, or indeed, did do away with slavery, that whole abolitionist kerfuffle being a mere side-show. Thus, even though our authors claim that agitating against slavery as the abolitionists did is immoral and constitutes rebellion against God, they might actually also expect that slavery would have died ultimately, buried beneath a roomful of Univacs spitting out rolls of economic statistics. If so, this brief foray into Marxism saves them from having to accept the consequences of their own argument, that is, if slavery is benign and only opposed by those in rebellion against God, it would nonetheless not still exist if the South had won the war, thanks to rescue by an impersonal deus-ex-machina: those blind economic forces, you know, just grinding inexorably on.

The American debate over slavery was asynchronous; as R. L. Dabney explains, the flurry of abolitionist pamphlets with which the North buried the South was not met by any answering flurry of pro-slavery pamphlets. After the South's crushing defeat, Dabney realized that this prior disdain of meeting Bible arguments with any attempt at counter-argument was a huge mistake on the South's part; first they had lost the propaganda war, without firing a shot, then they lost the shooting war. That is his interpretation, not mine. So after the war, Dabney sets out to declaim what would have been the South's Bible defense, if it had given one, to an empty room. It's a horror; it is altogether racist. Douglas Wilson disclaims Dabney's racism, but since there's nothing else there, no 'argument' beyond the purported hereditary sinfulness of African-Americans, it is impossible to conceive a morally innocent Dabney acolyte.

While all men have inherited a sin nature from Adam, this isn't the heritage of one of the tribes of mankind versus another, but a shared characteristic of the human race. This communal template is the starting point for many of this author's errors; he does not believe in a God who deals with individuals, but only in bulk at the wholesale level, contra Peter who urged his hearers to free themselves from their group: “And with many other words he testified and exhorted them, saying, 'Be saved from this perverse generation.'” (Acts 2:40). You can't defend this racist bilge: "But here the reader should be reminded of what has been already shown; that if this industrial evil existed among us, that evil was not slavery, but the presence among us of four millions of recent pagans characterized by all the listlessness, laziness, and unthrift of savages." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3842), and he won't even try. (No great believers in the power of the gospel to change lives, are these 'Reformed' folks? 'Recent pagans' indeed! If they were 'recent[ly]' pagans, then they are not so now; will he never stop slandering Christian folk? Evidently it takes a couple of generations, or maybe even centuries, for a Christian conversion to 'take,' the reductio ad absurdum of 'Federal Vision.') He should be ashamed to repeat that African-Americans are laboring under the burden of any hereditary moral depravity, and yet he and his atheist friends want it understood the South won the debate on slavery! They won the debate by saying things you can't repeat?

Douglas Wilson makes all the right noises about Dabney's racism; he deplores it, he rejects it, he condemns it, etc. However he accepts Dabney's pro-slavery argument, and encourages the reader to join him. But to filter out the racism from Dabney's pro-slavery argument is to rip out its guts. Dabney believes African-Americans suffer from an inherited moral depravity which is best ameliorated (it can't be removed, evidently, certainly not by the gospel) by placing them under the tutelage of a stern but kindly white slave-master, who enjoys a more wholesome racial heritage. (Dabney realizes not all slave-masters are paternalistic; his response to the sadists in the guild is to shrug his shoulders. Woe to the slave purchased by John Wayne Gacy, he has no meaningful legal protection.) Therefore, slavery is not oppressive, but benign. This paradigm of hereditary sinfulness is presented as empirical observation. If Wilson does not believe in it, what will he substitute for it? To remove it is to eviscerate Dabney's argument. We are left with Dabney's pro-slavery argument, disemboweled, but still towering victoriously over the losing abolition side, which has suffered no loss by the subtraction of racism. This whole things sounds like a dog whistle to me; perhaps only the one-toothed crowd can sound, or hear, the nearly-inaudible note.

Pro-Slavery

The correct designation for Douglas Wilson is 'pro-slavery;' he is a 'pro-slavery' author. This does not mean that he is willing to see any and all persons enslaved at any and all times to any and all other persons; what pro-slavery writer in the history of the world ever has? From the start of the world to this present point, pro-slavery writers have always wanted to see the same thing: namely, that people like them should feel free to enslave people who are not like them. Even Robert Lewis Dabney, a pro-slavery author if ever there was one, does not believe in universal slavery; he believed that one group of people, white Southerners, were entitled to enslave another group of people, black African-Americans. Had he heard of a case, on some foreign shore, where black pirates had captured and enslaved white sailors, he would have been every bit as indignant as the most fervent abolitionist; indeed, he himself was an abolitionist, in almost all cases except white-on-black slavery.

Our author follows Dabney slavishly, even in his irrational twists and turns; Dabney draws the dividing line on slavery between the slave trade, which he correctly diagnoses as evil, and slave-owning, which he considers benign. How can this be? As a simple matter of supply and demand, did not slave-owning call slave-trading into existence? But it was the hated Yankees who conducted the slave trade, Virginia had very little of a merchant marine at the time; and so, doing ethics by zip code, slave trading has to be bad, and slave owning good. Wilson follows Dabney at every irrational step. One drawback to illegal drug use, by people capable of ethical thought, is that if you purchase illegal drugs, you thereby become responsible for murders among drug cartels; demand elicits supply, and all that goes along with it. Are people who buy slaves not responsible for slave trading? According to Dabney, the slave purchasers of Virginia only bought those people because they felt sorry for them, not because they desired their service!

There is one case where Douglas Wilson can sound almost like a normal, moral, human being, and that is the case of Christian-on-Christian slavery. So he stresses this case, hoping his readers will develop tunnel vision and fail to notice this pairing is only one of several possible. What about Christian-on-pagan slavery, for instance? What about Christian-on-recent- pagan slavery, which is Dabney's way of conceptualizing the matter? Sometimes he seems to expect Christian-on-Christian slavery to fade away, as indeed it is prone to do, because Christians are abolitionists. One must wonder why it would be natural for slavery to disappear, if it is simply wicked for any Christian to say 'slavery ought to disappear.' Perhaps they can pantomime it? Evidently it is "wicked" to say 'slavery ought to disappear,' but watching it disappear is not wicked.

But the initial starting point of Southern Black slavery involved Christians enslaving pagans. Robert Lewis Dabney is not mistaken to point that out, though one must wonder why none of these nominally 'Christian' worthies believed in the power of the gospel to change that situation. With regard to that situation, Douglas Wilson is solidly pro-slavery. And who are pagans? Do Dabney's 'recent pagans' count? Pagans are, in the end, whoever he says are pagans. This reinvention of the law starts with Rushdoony's imaginative way of reconceptualizing Moses' law relating to slavery (which does not mention paganism per se), then takes off into the cult-land stratosphere on its own trajectory. So one has to understand this off-the-beaten-path cult doctrine to predict where Doug Wilson would come down in a particular case. Like Robert Lewis Dabney, he does not think slavery is for everybody. But what is unmistakable is that he really does disagree with his critics; the abolitionists do not agree with Doug Wilson, because he is pro-slavery. They are against what he is for. Abolitionists, I suspect, do not generally agree with Rousas Rushdoony's thesis that pagans do not deserve freedom.

There is no reason not to describe this author as pro-slavery; it is a perfectly accurate designation. He claims that slavery is Biblical, and he will allow no other criterion than the Bible for imposing ethical demands upon Christians. He is wrong, of course, about the Bible, but he is, thus, pro-slavery. Pro-slavery authors always privilege their own group above others, and the fact that he sees nothing wrong with white Southerners enslaving Africans puts him into the same category with his mentor R. L. Dabney, not into a different one.

And it's not like this is unusual. Browsing the unfortunately extensive stacks of pro-slavery literature, do we discover that the pro-slavery party wants to enslave people like themselves, or others? The pagan philosopher Aristotle thought that some men were natural-born slaves. Who were they: people like him? Why, no, but the 'barbarians,' the wild men from Thessaly for example, not the cultured Greeks, who were natural-born masters. Has there ever been a pro-slavery author who argued that, a.) slavery is a good thing, and b.) people like himself ought to be the slaves, and some other group the masters? So when Douglas Wilson comes along, proposing that people who are uncivilized, lacking technology skills and transportation mechanisms like the Apollo moon rocket, who are moreover pagans, ought to have been enslaved by people like him, nominal Christians with enough purchasing power to obtain technological goodies, then this is simply par for the course; it is no departure, pro-slavery people always restrict this great gift of slavery. . .to other folk. Inasmuch as the world population of pagans living in less-developed countries numbers today in the billions, one cannot be sure that, with him, slavery is a closed book.

Because race is an indelible character and 'cultural inferiority,' however defined, is presumably a remediable one, Wilson is able to tack a 'Hollywood ending' onto Dabney's bleak vision of a lost, cursed race. He laments that emancipation ended Southern Black slavery prematurely, before this institution's imagined civilizing mission could be accomplished, because he claims that this premature ending left our nation's African-American population in a semi-civilized condition, mired in what his son calls "residual paganism." ('Black and Tan,' Kindle location 41). He blames urban crime and other social ills on this circumstance. One might think becoming a Christian is a quick transition, taking no longer than the time needed to walk up the aisle in response to an altar call, but in their eyes, evidently it takes generations, perhaps even centuries, for pagans to become Christianized, and slavery is the ideal way to do it. Admittedly, their way, there is at least some end in sight for Southern slavery, as there was not with Dabney, who saw emancipation as a Yankee crime. In spite of this marginal improvement over Dabney, for whom he otherwise serves as a ventriloquist's dummy, this is a horrible book and certainly no contribution to our nation's dialogue on race.

Realizing that Doug Wilson ascribes present social ills besetting African-Americans to the premature ending of slavery, before that benign institution could work its wonders in civilizing the black race, what is his time frame? When would this period of tutelage, which he insists was beneficial and necessary, have come to an end? He doesn't give an exact time scale in 'Black and Tan,' but he is a bit more forthcoming in a panel discussion held under Reformed auspices (the visitor to the web site hosting this podcast might be perplexed, but realize, these folk are Reformed. Quite naturally, guzzling beer is de rigeur in these circles, and they end their drinking bouts with a rousing rendition of the Doxology). It's three hundred years. Adding this sum to the year in which importation of slaves into America was formally banned, 1807, gives us the upcoming year 2107. See:

"Doug Wilson: So I wanted to go back to what Toby said about the power of the gospel, and when we talk about race issues, almost always it breaks down into cultural issues and what whites have done in history, what whites think they have done, what blacks have done, what we accuse one another of doing, you know.

Moderator: Mmm-hmmm.

Doug Wilson: What does this culture do, what does that culture do, and so on? But if we're Christians, we ought to be thinking in the first instance: What did Jesus do? What did the gospel do? What will the gospel do?

Moderator: Mmmm.

Doug Wilson: Right? So if you say, if you look at one culture the way Europe was 750 years ago, and you look at what the gospel did to Europe, and then you go to someplace like Africa. And you say something like, but that could never happen here.

Moderator: Mmm-hmmm.

Doug Wilson: Right? The cathedrals and the symphony orchestras and you know, the glorious. . .all of that couldn't happen here. You're saying, so you mean to say that Jesus couldn't do that here?

Moderator: Yeah.

Doug Wilson: Right? Because that's fundamentally what you're saying. . .

Doug Wilson: When we've accepted that assumption, that the gospel has no cultural impact, that the gospel doesn't transform peoples and nations and tribes, then when you look at Europe, if Jesus didn't do it, then the white people did do it.

Moderator: Mmmm. . .

Doug Wilson: Right? Right?

[. . .]

Doug Wilson: Basically you have to say, this is a gift. Every cultural improvement is a gift of the gospel.

Moderator: Amen.

Doug Wilson: Right? So If there's genuine progress, if it's really progress, then it's really from God. If it's not really from God, then it's not really progress. It's not really something we want.

Moderator: Mmm-hmmm.

Doug Wilson: If it's something we want, we should want to share it. If we're all descended from Adam, it's shareable. Because the gospel is something we're commanded to preach to every creature. If they're moving around and breathing, and talking and walking, and the gospel comes to them, and then after three hundred years of that, you go into a tribe of cannibals in South America. You go into some really backward place. And if you say, Jesus could never do a mighty work here, culturally, well then, how did He manage to do it in Northern Europe?"

Moderator: Right. . . Exactly. Look, I believe that and I want that."

(CrossPolitic Live at NSA, A Discussion on Church and Race, with Douglas Wilson and Voddie Bauckham, 23:35-26:38).

Could be worse, could be 400 years. The primitive and backwards children of Israel, descended from a wandering Aramaean, were in bondage to the glittering civilization of Egypt for that long. Although Ethiopia adopted the gospel long before Douglas Wilson's precious Scots, notice that he has no conception that, in any one's eyes, they could have contributed anything to human culture. Dear Reader, if your Reformed friend wants to share this 'gospel' with you, run as you would from a house on fire.

The concept of 'civilization' was not invented here, it's not an in-house church construct, it's not a Biblical category. Roman Republican authors like Cicero came up with it as an ideology of conquest. Some of the places they conquered, like Egypt and Greece, were civilized long before Rome was anything but a rural village, but other places, like France and England, were quite primitive at the time. The inhabitants of these places used to plaintively complain, why are you stealing from us, when you're so rich, and we're so poor? But Cicero and others explained, that the Romans brought civilization. This is the practice of building cities, establishing written law codes and courts of justice, and other good things. The barbarians knew nothing about any of this. And the Romans had a point; the gentle Celts were head-hunters.

But the gospel is something different, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with "white people." Dear Reader, please do not let a 'Reformed' person explain the gospel to you; there is eternity at stake. The gospel is not a promise that, if an ethnic group adopts cultural Christianity, then, three hundred years later, they will be building cathedrals and writing symphonies. This false gospel will populate Hell as readily as will any other false gospel.

It never ceases to amaze me how gullible mainstream media types can be. When they encounter Douglas Wilson, they allow him to define himself, and he happily defines himself as a conservative evangelical. Really? If the churches called evangelical have anything in common, I would submit, it's a common heritage of participation in the temperance movement. This protective camouflage enables Doug Wilson to pretend that he is suffering for us; it's the millions of evangelicals in this country, not his small cult, which is the real target of his critics. In the experience of pollsters, 'evangelical' is a notoriously difficult category to get a grip on; when a given candidate is reported to have received a large percentage of the evangelical vote, that may simply mean that those who voted for him are thereafter more likely to check the 'evangelical' box than they would have been had they voted for the competing candidate. Why are some churches called 'evangelical,' others not? If it means disposed to preach the gospel, shouldn't all churches be evangelical?

In the United States, the prospect of prohibition caused a big rift in the Christian household. Some churches, like Roman Catholics and Anglicans, were very much opposed. Others, like Methodists and Baptists, were very much for. Prohibition turned out to be a failed social experiment; while it succeeded in reducing levels of alcohol consumption, it did so at a very high cost in terms of social comity, so it was abandoned. But why do Methodists continue to feel they have more in common with Calvinistic Baptists than with their parental Anglicans? Looked at from one perspective, they have no more in common with 'Reformed' Baptists than with the Dutch Reformed; yet they see themselves as kindred. Is it because they are 'fundamentalists'? No Calvinist is really a fundamentalist, they don't take the Bible literally; the words printed plainly on the page conceal a secret. What I mean is, for example, the Bible says the Pharisees rejected the will of God: "But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the will of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him." (Luke 7:30). But the Calvinists say, oh no, His secret will was that they should be doomed from the womb. Whatever that is, literalism it's not. So what is it, what is the common bond of identity? A history of shared struggles, even including ultimately failed struggles, I would submit.

When you look at the cult world, you'll see groups organized around the quirks and crochets of particular individuals, often distinctly ill-informed individuals, like Charles Taze Russell, and, for that matter, Douglas Wilson. You think you know where Charles Taze Russell is coming from, and then he throws Great Pyramid numerology at you. Where did that come from? From the brain of one ill-informed, confused individual. The Moscow, Idaho group is anti-temperance; they will tell you themselves they wish to promote a Falstaffian joy of life. That is why their choir practices can double as beer bashes. Their interview sessions feature booze on the table. Was the segment filmed at 10:00 a.m.? Doesn't matter. Now for some people, frequent ingestion of alcohol is probably a health necessity, because otherwise they'll get the shakes. But how else can this constant pushing of booze be justified? To this day, evangelical churches do not promote alcohol use, even as they tolerate it; rarely if ever do they serve alcohol at church functions. You can get that from the world. This church, pardon me , 'kirk,' is not evangelical.

Claims of domestic violence and other forms of abuse continue to accumulate around the Moscow, Idaho cult. Given their combustible combination of misogyny and rampant alcohol use, I suspect this is inevitable.

Wilson is a big fan of G.K. Chesterton, who reportedly held similar views: "According to Chesterton, tea-drinking is 'pagan,' while beer-drinking is 'Christian,' and coffee is 'the puritan's opium.' (George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier). The case of alcohol consumption is a good example of a problem with this group which goes far toward explaining why they are often called a cult. Challenged on their anything-goes policy on alcohol consumption, they respond by quoting Psalm 104:15, "And wine that makes glad the heart of man." This verse offers a positive evaluation of alcohol, and certainly makes up part of the Bible's teaching on this topic. But what about all the harsh condemnations of drunkenness which are also found in the Bible? They can't be wished away. These verses must be harmonized and integrated with the others. You can not simply cherry-pick a verse you like, and ignore all other teaching on a given topic. But they do just that; it's their signature. And it's what cults do.

Another point that's problematical for Doug Wilson is the relation of the sexes, which started off as complementarianism and has evolved to frank misogyny. For starters, they want to repeal the 19th amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote. According to these folks, women are to stay home and make the sandwiches, confining themselves to the domestic sphere, unless they happen to be related to Mr. Wilson or one of his colleagues:

They blame many of the ills of our present day on women voting. There probably always has been a gender gap; certainly on the issues near and dear to the hearts of this crowd, women tend to end up on the 'wrong' side:

"I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me — fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. You know my mind upon this subject." (Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 22 September 1774).

Cult leaders often end with denying the Trinity, an essential Christian doctrine, and so we find here:

"And so there should be no more difficulty in saying that the Son is eternally obedient than there is in saying that He is eternally begotten. His existence is obedience — eternal obedience, obedience that could not be otherwise. The Father's existence is authority." (from Blog and Mablog, "Triune Botherations", June 28, 2016).

Where they are going with this I shudder to think. This concept of the eternal submission of the Son, they invented to bolster their ideas about female submission to male authority. The Bible says, of God, that He does as He pleases: "But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased." (Psalm 115:3).

"Whatsoever the LORD pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and all deep places." (Psalm 135:6).

So: the Bible says that God does as He pleases, and the same Bible says that Jesus is God. There are theologies which assign to the Son a shorter list of divine attributes than are held by the Father; the Jehovah's Witnesses come to mind. If God does as He pleases, but Jesus' existence is endless submission, is Jesus even God, as Christians believe?

However one would categorize 'doing as one pleases,' without fear of external hindrance, as omnipotence, or aseity, it would seem to be an essential attribute of deity. Yet Mr. Wilson says Jesus does not have it. A Muslim will tell you, humanity submits. God is the one to whom submission is made. Where does eternal submission leave Jesus? Over on our side of the line, not God-side.

When this push for eternal submission of the Son began, the promoters insisted that they were talking about the economic trinity; the ontological trinity they intended to leave as inherited from Nicaea. But if the above-quoted statement accurately represents ESS, then that promise has been defaulted upon; their view is heresy. The verbal sludge above quoted, as written, would assign a personal distinctive to the essence of a Divine Person, such that that Divine Person could not share the same essence with another. For us, essence and existence are two separate considerations; after all, 100 real dollars is not the same as 100 imaginary dollars. Yet not so for God. Whatever the doctrine of the trinity allows you to say about God, "is not God" is not an allowable predicate. So to say 'the second person of the trinity is stupid, or is weak,' is not acceptable because these qualities are so foreign to the essential nature of deity that you are effectively denying it. Is 'eternally submissive' so altogether different from 'is stupid' or 'is weak,' or is it not rather getting uncomfortably close? Is that character really something that does or could belong to God?

The Bible does not say that the Son's existence is obedience or submission, rather than He learned obedience in the incarnation:

"Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared; Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered. . ." (Hebrews 5:7-8)

If, as Douglas Wilson claims, the Son's existence is obedience, you would think He'd be a past master in the subject, having had an eternity of experience as living heavenly door-mat to bring to bear, not that the subject matter remained essentially unlearned until a babe was born in Bethlehem, whatever occasional sendings might have occurred prior: "He sent His word and healed them," (Psalm 107:20), etc.

If we go back to the beginning, to first principles, the word 'El,' sometimes used of God, "And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God [El]." (Genesis 14:18), seems to come out of a matrix of meaning 'strength, power, might.' In other words, God is He who excels in strength, power, might. Who has ever heard of an eternally subservient God? Submission is for man, power, might, and rule for God. And if they say, what difference does it make, there is only one will in God, that is certainly true, but what then becomes of their analogy with the case of husband and wife, where there are two wills? That was the whole reason these do-it-yourselfers started tinkering with the Trinity in the first place. According to their reasoning, the Father is the husband and the Son is the wife. Hmm. In which of the 50 states is it legal for a man to marry his own son? What a weird analogy.

The 'patriarchs' of Moscow, Idaho are so entrenched in their misogyny that they do not want the husband to say to his wife, 'Would you please make me a sandwich.' No, he must say, 'Make me a sandwich.' (Women were put on earth to make sandwiches; so said Paul, who never saw a sandwich.) Courtesy is effeminate, you see. Yet they make the second person of the trinity to be the wife, God the Father to be the husband. There is no suggestion of this anywhere in scripture. They despise women, whom they consign to perpetual servitude and obedience. Then they make Jesus, the mighty god, a woman. In their vocabulary: "...femininity is submission, obedience, gratitude, and responsiveness." (Douglas Wilson, For Glory and a Covering, pp. 41-44).

What's the next stop for this daffy little cult, Dan Brown's sacred marriage? If you can understand where they are going with this, dear reader, perhaps there is something wrong with you.

Is this novel approach consistent with Bible teaching? What does the Bible say about the Son's obedience to His Father? How does it relate to the incarnation, or is there an unbridgeable gap, a disparity of intrinsic nature, that has always been and will always be, between the Father and Son on this point of authority?:

Mr. Wilson is famous for the "serrated edge," meaning he sees no reason to be polite to people with whom he disagrees. When you criticize his views in a public setting like Twitter, be prepared for the troops of flying monkeys who will come swarming your way. Their strategy in general is to explain that you are a Marxist and therefore your "world-view" is incompatible with Christianity. This is called 'presuppositionalism,' and it's not like it matters you are not a Marxist; your vehement denials mean only that you are an unconscious Marxist. Everyone who disagrees with them, as it happens, is a Marxist.

The latest thing at Moscow, Idaho is smashing idols. If you took the trouble to notice, when a statue of Baphomet made out of pool noodles was recently disassembled by Baphomet's non-believers (he seems not to have any actual believers, but the atheists think he's a funny gag), in the Iowa State House, his remains were covered with marketing materials from Canon Press.  Surely, if we know anything about the Bible at all, it is that it commands all believers everywhere to smash idols wherever found. Right?: