[Vision2020] Column Headline was not mine

[Nicholas Gier]

Dear Mr. Dickison:

As you well know, newspaper editors are solely responsible for the headlines that they choose to print.  The title of my submitted column was "The Cultural Wars Come to Moscow." I personally object to the title the editors if the "Idaho Statesman" chose to use.  I certainly would not have chosen it myself, because it is not an accurate characterization of Wilson's religion.

I have never called Wilson a racist or a neo-Nazi.  In my column I simply related information that I gleaned from the Southern Poverty Law Center concerning the League of the South's relations with two other Southern political groups.  I would feel comfortable calling Wilson a "neo-Confederate," because there is sufficient evidence to do so.

You may recall last year that I was quoted by Vera White stating that I did not think that Wilson was a racist in connection with a parallel statement that I did not think that Mel Gibson was an anti-Semite.

In the past Mr. Wilson has seen fit to call me a "slanderer," "libeler," and "banshee," and other crude names.  I believe that in comparison I've taken the moral high road in this debate.

I would also remind you that some time ago a version of this column appeared on Vision2020, but Wilson and his associates did not raise any objection at that time.  I further remind you that you are on record in "Credenda Agenda" stating that Old Testament law and custom--including the support of slavery--should be the law of the land.

I'm currently on the road at this time and do not have a copy of the Statesman column, but I have appended the column as it appeared in "New West" magazine with additional paragraphs from the essay on my website.  Readers can now judge for themselves about the accuracy of my statements.

I trust that this clears up any misunderstanding and/or anxiety on your part.

Nick Gier

The Culture Wars Come to Moscow, Idaho
By Nick Gier, 6-25-05, New West On-Line

"My Town," a new documentary on America's cultural wars, had its premier in Moscow, Idaho on June 23rd. The newly refurbished Kenworthy Theatre was filled to capacity with an enthusiastic crowd of 340 people.

Michael Hayes, an education professor from Washington State University, worked on the film for about 18 months, interviewing the principal players in the debate about Douglas Wilson's religious empire.

Wilson is pastor of Moscow's 800-member Christ Church, which has mission churches across the country. Wilson trains the ministers for these new churches in a two- year program called Greyfriars. He also holds the franchise for 154 classical Christian schools, his own Logos School in Moscow being the model. 

In 1996 Wilson founded New St. Andrews College (NSA), and it now enrolls 130 four-year students in a building in the heart of historic Moscow. He also runs Canon Press in the same building as Greyfriars and it grosses almost $1 million a year. Last year, two Moscow residents, Rosemary Huskey and Saundra Lund, challenged the tax exemptions on this building and the NSA site and they won their appeal.

The controversy about Wilson exploded in October, 2003, when some students at the University of Idaho discovered "Southern Slavery As It Was," a booklet published by Canon Press. Wilson co-authored the book with Steve Wilkins, a Monroe, Louisiana pastor and founding director of the League of the South, whose vision is new 15-state Confederacy ruled by Calvinist patriarchs.

Details about Wilson's ties to the Neo-Confederates have been given in a previous column (appended below), so I would like to focus on what new I learned from Hayes' film. 

In rejecting the charge of racism, Wilson claimed that it was Christianity, not genes, that make a culture superior. He said that if Christianity had moved south instead of west, Africans would now be the most advanced people in the world.

One might ask how Wilson defines cultural superiority. If it is economic power, then Euro-Americans will be overtaken by Chinese and Indians in 20-30 years. If it is moral superiority, how does Wilson explain that fact that Christian America now imprisons 2 million people, while the Japanese currently incarcerate 150,000, if you adjust for population. We will be militarily superior for a long time, but I remember Jesus saying that we should be as little children when we come to him.

History appears to disconfirm Wilson's view of Christianity‚s special advantage. Medieval Europe is Wilson‚s ideal world, but the rest of the civilized world at that time--China, India, and the Islamic countries--was far more advanced than these Europeans. In fact, if it had not been Mongols bringing Asian goods/inventions and the Muslims preserving Greek philosophy/science and introducing algebra, Europe would have remained stagnant. 

Wilson has the Mongols to thank for the pants he wears, and he should be grateful to the Hindus for the zero. The Mongols were the source of the gunpowder that Wilson's hero Robert E. Lee used against the Union Army. Furthermore, it would be very difficult for Wilson to count his book royalties with Roman numerals. We live in one great world culture in which all people contribute. Even the wisdom of the Bible is based on many Middle Eastern cultures.

At Wilson's history conference in February, 2004, he and Wilkins were joined by George Grant, who has called for the stoning of homosexuals, and who has written this:

"Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land--of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. It is to reinstitute the authority of God's Word as supreme over all judgments, over all legislation, over all declarations, constitutions, and confederations."

In the film, Wilson prophesied that the conquest of Christianity would hit secular culture like a tsunami hitting a folding chair on a beach. When Wilson encouraged Americans of all beliefs to replace the public schools with their own private schools, his tolerance for their short tenure does not appear to be much of a virtue. 

Wilson's tolerance was also pretty thin when a reporter once asked him how he would react to a future Muslim mayor. That is not possible, he said, because soon everyone would be a Christian. For Wilson, the law of the land will not be Shar'ia, but it will be the laws of Leviticus.

Hayes' assistant had an opportunity to interview all three men together at the February conference. Wilkins was asked if he really believed that only propertied males should vote, and he answered "Yes," while the other two nodded approvingly. Always the jokester, Wilson said that democracy was just like two coyotes and a sheep voting on what to eat for lunch. Wilson's "federal vision" for church and society is that husbands would vote for their wives, who would submit to them in all things.

The three men were asked about slavery, but none of them condemned the owning of one person by another. Wilson said that slavery is a sinful institution, but rebellion is just as sinful. Slaves who have Christian masters will at least be treated with love and respect. God presumably will remove sinful institutions according to his own counsel.

This is a tough question for Wilson, because he has always said that Christians should never be ashamed of what the Bible says. The other problem is moral relativism: Wilson seems to be saying that biblical slavery was moral but it‚s now immoral.

For pastors such as Wilson and Wilkins who believe in the absolute sovereignty of God, they should be the last ones to take divine judgment into their own hands. Only God chooses whether we are saved or damned, or whether all rebels are sinful.

Wilson and Wilkins, however, are following in the footsteps of Jerry Falwell who once declared that God does not answer the prayers of Jews. Again this is surely for God alone to decide, not mere sinful mortals. We humanists are always condemned for preempting divine prerogatives, so what is going on here?
Some conservative Christians make yet another division: an ethnic one that declares that one culture is superior to all others.  Michael Hill, founder of the League of the South, proposes that an independent neo-Confederacy of fifteen states would have the duty to protect the values of Anglo-Celtic culture from black Americans, who are "a compliant and deadly underclass."  A key word for the League is “hierarchy,” the God-given right for superiors (read “white males”) to rule over inferiors. 

        Since 1998, the League of the South has had close ties with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who in 2000 elected Kirk Lyons to its national executive board. An outspoken racist, Lyons was married by neo-Nazi Richard Butler in 1990, when Butler still had his compound in Hayden Lake. Lyons has led an amazingly unsuccessful legal campaign to have Southern whites defined as a “protected class.” 

        The League and the Sons of Confederate Veterans organize public protests with the Council of Conservative Citizens whose website decries "negroes, queers and other retrograde species of humanity." (Try replacing the “Cs” in their acronym with “Ks”!)  One League leader said that we “need a new type of Klan.”

Moscow pastor Doug Wilson and Steve Wilkins of Monroe, Louisiana wrote a booklet entitled Southern Slavery as It Was in which they describe the antebellum south as the most harmonious multiracial society in history. Two University of Idaho history professors took time from their busy schedules to refute this piece paragraph by paragraph. It was later discovered that 20 percent of the essay was lifted from Robert Fogel’s and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross.  


Wilson still stands by the booklet’s thesis, but he has withdrawn it from circulation.  The problem, however, is that there is remaining stock in neo-Confederate book stores and at Wilson’s 154 Christian schools across the nation. In December the principal of one of those schools in Carey, North Carolina was forced to remove the booklet because of local protests.

Both Wilson and Wilkins deny that they are racists or neo-Confederates, but Wilkins is a founding director of the League of the South.  The League’s website uses small Confederate flags as hot buttons for information about the board members. Even though a visitor said that he saw a Confederate flag displayed in Wilson’s office, he now claims that neo-Confederates should “burn the flag and wear the ashes.” I would love to see Wilkins and Wilson do this when they meet for a conference on the American Revolution in Moscow on August 8-10, 2005.

 If Wilson has no sympathies with neo-Confederates, why is he associating with Wilkins, displaying the Confederate flag at his Moscow school’s functions, celebrating Robert E. Lee's birthday at this school, speaking at the Southern Heritage Conference, and writing for Chronicles, a journal whose editors boast that they are all members of the League of the South? 

 
Christian nationalist George Grant, who believes in the death penalty for gays and lesbians, has joined Wilson and Wilkins at earlier Moscow conferences.  Grant and Wilkins are promoting a novel entitled Heiland, whose hero leads a violent overthrow of a "godless" federal government. Heiland has been compared to the Turner Diaries, which inspired the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building. The author of the book, Frank Sanders, is a charter member of the League of the South.

           Grant's evangelism has as specific political goal: "Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land--of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. It is to reinstitute the authority of God's Word as supreme over all judgments, over all legislation, over all declarations, constitutions, and confederations. True Christian political action seeks to rein the passions of men and curb the pattern of digression under God's rule"(The Changing of the Guard [Dominion Press, 1987], pp. 50-51).


 Another parallel between Christian and Islamic fundamentalism is a desire to make religious laws the laws of the land. In his regular column in Wilson’s Credenda Agenda (vol. 3: nos. 9, 11), Greg Dickison, member of Wilson’s Christ Church and a Moscow public defender, states that "if we could have it our way,” then there would be capital punishment for “kidnapping, sorcery, bestiality, adultery, homosexuality, and cursing one's parents.”  Dickison also quotes biblical passages (without qualification) that support slavery as "ordained and regulated by God," death for apostasy (Deut. 13.6-9), and cutting off a woman’s hand for touching a strange man's genitals (Deut. 25.11,12). Behold, the Moscow Taliban!


I have obtained my information about the neo-Confederate movement from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has declared the League of the South as a hate group.  Wilson and his associates belittle the SPLC’s achievements, one of which was supporting the suit that lead to the dismantling of Butler’s Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake.  We are now faced with yet another national embarrassment in Northern Idaho, and many Moscowans are already planning protests for the August conference.

I have fought religious fundamentalism all of my adult life, primarily because I believe that it is one of the most destructive forces in the world.  These views do not deserve our respect nor tolerance, but call for our strongest condemnation. Come join us in Moscow in August to demonstrate once again that “Idaho is too great for hate.”