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Errand in the Wilderness; Bonnie Blue revival gets a fresh jolt of that old time Reconstructionist persuasion.


TheoDixie rising:

"The vision of the Puritan fathers is not dead, but in our generation has revived and is beginning to spread through our land again," - Steven Wilkins (Pastor, Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Monroe LA) [Intelligence Report, Spring 2004]

Excerpted material below from the Spring 2004 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Itelligence Report.

'Overthrowing Secularism'
Wilkins and Wilson have together probably done more than any others to construct the theology now animating much of the neo-Confederate movement. But there is more to their ideology than a defense of the South and slavery.

In his voluminous and often tedious writings, Wilson lays out an array of hard-right beliefs, many of them related to family and sexual matters. Overall, he told congregants last year, his goal is "the overthrow of unbelief and secularism."

The world as Wilson sees it is divided not by race but by religion — biblical Christians versus all others. As he says in one of his books, "[I]f neither parent believes in Jesus Christ, then the children are foul — unclean."

"Government schools" are godless propaganda factories teaching secularism, rationalism, and worse. Wilson's congregants are instructed to send their children to private Christian schools (like the one he started) or to home-school them.

Woman "was created to be dependent and responsive to a man," Wilson writes. Feminists seek "to rob women of their beauty in submission." Women should only be allowed to date or "court" with their father's permission — and then, if they are Christian, only with other Christians.

If a woman is raped, the rapist should pay the father a bride price and then, if the father approves, marry his victim.

Homosexuals, Wilson says, are "sodomites," "people with foul sexual habits." But the biblical punishment for homosexuality is not necessarily death, Wilson says in trying to distance himself from Reconstruction. Exile is another possibility.

Cursing one's parents is "deserving of punishment by death," Wilson adds. "Parental failure is not a defense." And Christian parents, by the way, "need not be afraid to lay it on" when spanking, he says.

Indeed, "godly discipline" would include spanking 2-year-old children for such "sins" as whining.

The high water mark; Wilson's charge.

Good Christians, he said, needed to look for "decisive points" in society, places that are both "strategic and feasible" targets to be "taken." New York City, for instance, is strategic but not feasible — too many godless liberals. Other places are feasible but not strategic — unimportant places in the theological wars that Wilson foresees.

"But," Douglas Wilson added in an upbeat note that day, "small towns with major universities (Moscow and Pullman, say) are both."

Continue reading: Taliban on the Palouse? A religious empire based in Idaho is part of the far-right theological movement fueling neo-Confederate groups - By Mark Potok

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"Anti-Christian bigots have assumed that they can act with abandon in their efforts to trash the sacred history of Christian America. We're here to say that this anti-Christian bigotry has no place in this great country," - Roberta Combs, Christian Coalition of America [source: Agape Press, Oct. 2003]

Reference links:
SPLCenter.org
Intelligence Project