[Vision2020] My Response to Atwood, Wilson, and Wilkins

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

I've never been tripled teamed before, but I think I've covered most of the 
bases.  The gentlemen's column were posted yesterday.

         In December, 2003, over 1200 Moscow citizens signed a petition 
condemning Douglas Wilson’s views on slavery, homosexuals, and 
women.  Although some condemned Wilson as a racist, no one, as far as I 
know, called him a neo-Nazi.  This term did not enter the debate until the 
Statesman included it in the title of my column on August 12.

Roy Atwood, president of Wilson’s Moscow college, claims that area 
newspapers been on their side.  Here are some samples from the editorial 
page of the Lewiston Morning Tribune: “As pamphleteer, Wilson deserves 
repudiation for historical inaccuracy. . . . the board of [Wilson’s] Christ 
Church has forsaken an opportunity to set the example for generosity and 
goodwill in a community immediately in need of both” (11/18/03). . .  “Even 
hard-core conservatives distance themselves from Wilson” (7/26/05).

I always accepted Wilson’s repeated disavowals of racism, but his statement 
that the antebellum South was the most harmonious multiracial society in 
history would give great comfort to many racists.  This claim is found on 
page 24 of Southern Slavery As It Was, which Wilson co-authored with Steven 
Wilkins, who responded to my column, along with Atwood and Wilson, on 
August 22.  This booklet has been condemned by professional historians, 
including a conservative Presbyterian civil war expert at the University of 
Washington.

We also discovered that 20 percent of the slavery booklet had been borrowed 
from another source.  Wilson blamed this on transmission errors between 
Wilkins and him, but in his book on Robert E. Lee Wilkins lifted passages 
from at least two other books.

Wilkins claims that he resigned from the board of the neo-Confederate 
League of the South (LOS) five years ago.  When I checked the LOS website 
in 2003, Wilkins was listed as a board member, each having Confederate 
flags as hot buttons.  Later Wilkins was listed as “consultant” to the 
board (2004), then “affiliate scholar” (2005), and now no affiliation.

Wilkins was a regular speaker at LOS annual conferences, sometimes 
appearing with Michael Hill, who has called blacks "a compliant and deadly 
underclass," who rejects interracial marriage, and states that slavery is a 
“God ordained” institution.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has declared the LOS a hate group, 
and I have relied on its Intelligence Report (Summer, 2000, 2004) for my 
information.  My critics have charged me with falsehoods, but the SPLC and 
the film I reviewed in my column are my two sources. The film has been out 
for two months and neither Wilson nor Wilkins have said that they were 
misquoted.

The LOS has essentially taken over the more moderate Sons of Confederate 
Veterans (SCV), and many SCV members are saddened that their organization 
has been hijacked by political and religious extremists.  LOS board member 
Jack Kershaw said that “we will need a new type of Klan.”

Wilson says that he is not a neo-Confederate, but I offer the following:
·       Robert E. Lee’s portrait hangs in the classrooms of Wilson’s Logos 
School and it is his birthday rather than Washington’s and Lincoln’s that 
is celebrated.

·       The Confederate flag has displayed at social functions and has hung 
in Wilson’s office.

·   Wilson wrote an editorial supporting the right of states to leave the 
Union.

·Wilson has spoken at neo-Confederate Southern Heritage conferences and has 
written three articles for neo-Confederate journal Chronicles.

Wilkins claims to be a member in good standing of the conservative 
Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), but the Mississippi PCA presbytery 
declared that Wikins’ and Wilson’s views “are unbiblical. . . and are . . . 
of a pernicious and fatal tendency.” On June 22, 2002, the conservative 
Reformed Presbyterian Church of the United States declared that these two 
men’s teachings were heretical.

Wilson is a former student of mine and we were on cordial terms until I 
experienced his reaction to the slavery booklet.  I’ve been shocked by his 
nasty comments, but I have rather enjoyed being called a “pagan” and a 
“banshee.”  I’m not amused, however, when I am likened to a lawn chair 
flattened by Wilson’s divine tsunami.

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31
years. For more on the Wilson controversy see
www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse.


"The god you worship is the god you deserve."
~~ Joseph Campbell
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