[Vision2020] Wilson as Neo-Confederate

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

Inspired by Frank McGovern's opinion piece on Wilson & Co., I submitted the 
following letter to the Argonaut.

To the Editor:

I want to thank Frank McGovern for his hard hitting column on Douglas 
Wilson’s religio-political views. The Idaho Statesman (8/12) was wrong to 
characterize Wilson as a neo-Nazi, but McGovern was right to call him a 
neo-Confederate Christian.

I accept Wilson’s repeated disavowals of racism, but he cannot deny his 
associations with the neo-Confederate movement. Here are the facts:

• At the Moscow Christian school that he founded, it is Robert E. Lee's 
birthday, not Washington's or Lincoln's, that is celebrated.

• A Confederate flag was once displaced in Wilson’s office and at his 
school’s functions.

• Wilson wrote an editorial defending the right of states to leave the Union.

• Wilson has spoken at Southern Heritage conferences and has written four 
articles for a neo-Confederate journal.  Wilson's most recent article 
appeared together with an ad for a conference to bash Lincoln and celebrate 
the joys of secession.  The ad drew a faulty parallel between former states 
leaving a self-dissolving Soviet Union and rebel states leaving a solid Union.

With regard to Wilson’s friend Steven Wilkins, he was indeed a founding 
director of the neo-Confederate League of the South, but when we made it an 
issue, he became a consultant to the Board of Directors, and when we 
continued to make that an issue, he is became an Affliated Scholar. He now 
claims no connection, but he has not openly disavowed any of their principles.

Wilson and Wilkins claim that they are good conservative Presbyterians, but 
many of them have disowned them. Mississippi Presbyterian Church of America 
has declared that their doctrines “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.

Nick Gier, Head Banshee
Palouse Region, Planet Earth


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

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20050910/573bd671/attachment-0001.htm