Our "Civil Religion"

From The Myth of a Christian Nation, by Gregory A. Boyd:

"No version of the kingdom of the world is closer to the kingdom of God than others because it does its job relatively well. For God's kingdom looks like Jesus, and no amount of sword-wielding, however just it may be, can ever get a person, government, nation, or world closer to that. The kingdom of God is not an ideal version of the kingdom of the world; it's not something that any version of the kingdom of the world can aspire toward or be measured against. The kingdom of God is a completely distinct, alternative way of doing life."

"If you peal back the facade of the civil religion, you find that America is about as pagan as any country we could ever send missionaries to .... The fact that we have a quasi-Christian civil religion doesn't help; if anything, it hurts precisely because it creates the illusion in the minds of kingdom people that we are closer to the example of Jesus than we actually are."

Here they go again

Liberals claim to be outraged over supposedly “racist” and “inflammatory” statements made in a Ron Paul publication fifteen or twenty years ago, by a staff writer unknown to the congressman. We’re still waiting for the media to mention another presidential candidate’s church. To refresh your memory we repeat our comments first posted here, on the SCLoS Historian blog, on August 26 of last year:

Picture the headlines: PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ADMITS MEMBERSHIP IN RACIST CHURCH.

The church in question, it was discovered, openly promulgates a “White Value System,” and proclaims itself “a congregation which is Unashamedly White.” “We are a European people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization … We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a White worship service and ministries which address the White Community.”

Don’t get excited. This is all made up. But can’t you imagine the “breaking news,” the denunciations by civil rights leaders, the candidate stuttering to explain, and then withdrawing in disgrace?

Well, it’s not entirely made up. The statements quoted above are taken from the website of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, the 8,000-member congregation where Dr. Jeremiah Wright is senior pastor. And where Sen. Barack Obama is a member. All we’ve done is insert the words “White” in place of “Black,” and “European” in place of “African.”

No need to dwell on the liberal double-standard when it comes to the “R-word.” We all know how that works. What seems most striking though, is this church’s double-mindedness. Shouldn’t Christians seek to uphold their Creator’s value system, not one based on race (whatever that means)? Those in Rev. Wright’s flock may prefer the company of those who look like themselves, but the Savior’s church cannot be built on bigotry.

Lincoln's Unnecessary War

Liberal sensitivities were shocked one more time when presidential candidate Ron Paul suggested that the American “ Civil War” didn't have to happen. AOL went on to conduct a poll, asking people if they too believe that Lincoln was wrong to wage the most costly war in American history. As of this writing over 90,000 have responded, with the YES vote in 31 states prevailing. Granted, it's not a scientific survey, but we can only conclude that thinking people are beginning to question Lincoln and his war.

The real Lincoln is very different from the demigod generations of Americans have been taught to worship. Some admirers claim that Lincoln was a “benevolent dictator.” Judge Andrew Napolitano responded to this in his recent book, The Constitution in Exile. “The numerous civilians who were injured by Lincoln’s troops, the citizens whose homes were burned and destroyed, and the parents and wives who lost their loved ones in the … War would certainly not have called him a ‘benevolent dictator.’” Judge Napolitano concluded that “The bloodiest war in American history could have been avoided. But, with very little regard for honesty, Lincoln increased federal power and assaulted the Constitution.”

Thomas DiLorenzo, in his groundbreaking book The Real Lincoln, made it very clear what “saving the Union” meant: “[Lincoln] wanted to use military force to destroy once and for all the doctrines of federalism and states’ rights that had, since the founding of the republic, frustrated ambitious politicians like himself who wanted a highly centralized and greatly enlarged state.” Lincoln destroyed the voluntary Union of the states, replacing it with a consolidated, coercive government the Founding Fathers would not have recognized.

Prof. DiLorenzo likened Lincoln's “saving the Union” to a man who was abusing his wife, causing her to leave him. The man goes out and grabs her, beats her up, drags her back into the house, and says, “If you leave again I'll kill you!” Can that man be applauded for having “saved the marriage” ?

"Total war had made its lethal debut"

"By the end of the [Civil War] the process of radicalization made possible by identifying war aims with a humanitarian cause had turned the conflict into a merciless and bloody war of attrition in which the Confederacy did not figure as a real state with any legitimate humanitarian claim to existence. Southerners had become in the eyes of their opponents subhuman demons defending a reactionary order, a dark power dedicated to block the forward march of emancipatory progress. One need only read the newspaper accounts of the day to understand that this is no exaggeration. Confederate efforts to reach a settlement were thus rebuffed and 'total' war had made its lethal debut.
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"The history of the modern age is written largely in celebration of this disastrous shift in ethical authority. Those who oppose it are depicted as history’s villains when they lose. The million young Southern men who tolerated four years of merciless deprivation and war, convinced as they fell that they were defending their homes and families, now figure in our national story as bigoted racists who devoted their efforts to the utterly unjust defense of a repressive and anti-humanitarian status quo. Their very battle flag has become a symbol of evil."

Dr. T. H. Pickett, "War, Power, and Supremacy:
A Conservative Interpretation," Modern Age, Summer 2006, pages 200 and 204.

James Lord Pierpont (1822-1893) Confederate Hero

As Confederates marched off to defend their independence in 1861, they were stirred by such songs as “We Conquer or Die.”

The war drum is beating, prepare for the fight!
The stern, bigot Northman exults in his might.

The composer, James Pierpont, knew the enemy firsthand. Southerners would have been surprised to learn that he was a Bostonian, the son of a fanatical abolitionist! In 1863 Pierpont published another great Confederate war song, “Strike for the South.”

Strike for the South! It must never be said
that her banner was furled to the foe.
Let those stars ever shine in bright glory above,
and the pathway to victory show!

When the war came Pierpont was in Savannah, Georgia, where he worked as music director at the Unitarian church, and he joined the First Georgia Cavalry Regiment. He would share the bitterness of defeat with his adopted Southland, never returning to the North. After the war he taught in Quitman, Florida, and was organist at the Presbyterian church there. He died in Winter Haven, Florida in 1893, and at his request was buried in Savannah—far from his frigid Massachusetts birthplace.

Before the war young Pierpont had written a number of sentimental songs. In 1850 he composed a winter ballad for a Boston Sunday school entertainment. He published the sheet music in 1857. It was a bright, happy song of young people reveling in the snow-filled New England countryside. Not until the twentieth century did his tune become a Christmas favorite. Over the years its popularity grew. A Bing Crosby/Andrews Sisters recording in 1943 sold over a million discs.

This Christmas season when you hear children singing “Jingle Bells” remember the composer, James Pierpont. Here was a man who let go family and his native land that he might serve a truly noble cause—that he might “Strike for the South.”

Missouri Wildfires

The exodus of Californians fleeing recent wildfires has been characterized by TV media as, "the largest peacetime evacuation of Americans since the Civil War."

We're a little confused by their terminology, but the statement may at least be an acknowledgment that such things happened during Lincoln's War.

Non-combatants fled Charleston when that city was shelled by Federal terrorists, and Atlanta was forcibly depopulated after its capture by Billy ("War is Hell") Sherman. Women and children slept in parks and cemeteries when the boys in blue burned Columbia, and wherever the Union-savers appeared, multitudes were left homeless.

But the most horrendous of forced evacuations occurred in occupied Missouri, where Yankees were having a difficult time pacifying the population. On August 25, 1863 Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing issued his infamous Order No. 11. Everyone–more than 20,000 civilians–living in his 3,000 square mile district had fifteen days to get out. Refugees were robbed and murdered as they departed, and their homes were torched. The devastation was so compete, fires often spreading to fields and forests, that the four counties became known as "The Burnt District."

"The order settled the border war," Ewing proudly told the Washington Post. "It was approved by Major General [John] Schofield and by President Lincoln."

Y'all, this was one war the Nazis won.

"Maybe it was hell for some of them Yankees ..."

Former slave Henry D. Jenkins of Fairfield County, South Carolina, interviewed in 1936:

"When the Yankees come, what they do? They did things they ought not to have done and left undone the things they ought to have done. Yes, that ’bout tells it. One thing you might like to hear. Mistress [Sara Howell, wife of plantation owner Joseph Howell] got all the money, the silver, the gold and the jewels, and got the well digger to hide them in the bottom of the well. Them Yankees smart. When they got there, they asked for the very things at the bottom of the well. Mistress wouldn’t tell. They held a “court of enquiry” in the yard; called slaves up, one by one, good many. Must have been a Judas ’mongst us. Soon a Yankee was let down in the well, and all that money, silver, gold, jewelry, watches, rings, brooches, knives and forks, butter-dishes, waiters, goblets, and cups was took and carried ’ way by an army that seemed more concerned ’bout stealin’, than they was ’bout the Holy War for the liberation of the poor African slave people. They took off all the horses, sheep, cows, chickens, and geese; took the seine and the fishes they caught, corn in crib, meat in smoke-house, and everything. Marse General Sherman said war was hell. It sho’ was. Maybe it was hell for some of them Yankees when they come to die and give account of the deeds they done in Sumter and Richland Counties.”

From SC Slave Narratives, vol. 14, pt. 3, pp. 23, 26; quoted in Walter Brian Cisco, War Crimes Against Southern Civilians (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2007), pp. 185-6.