[Vision2020] Historical Revisionism at Moscow's Trinity Festival

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

In advance of my trip to Provence, I've recorded three radio commentaries (92.5 FM, Tuesdays at 8:05).  Two will be on torture and this is the third to get a few words in before the Trinity Festival.

This is an update on last year's column with a focus on Peter Lillback, who is back, this time with a book in hand, to tell conference participants all about Washington's religious views.  I agree with him that Washington was not a deist, but that does not mean that he automatically becomes an orthodox Christian by default.  He was, just as Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, a Christian humanist and religious liberal.  You can read an updated "Religious Liberalism and the Founding Fathers" at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/foundfathers.htm.

I will post a more detailed response to Dale Courtney's rendering of Lillback's views a little later.

Historical Revisionism at Moscow's Trinity Festival
by Nick Gier

The Trinity Festival (Aug. 7-9) sponsored by Doug Wilson’s Christ Church continues the annual “history” conference that has been held in Moscow since 1994.  I set off “history” in quotation marks because the conference speakers have, over the years, made a mockery of the academic study of history.

Wilson’s 1994 conference led to the publication of the now infamous Southern Slavery As It Was, which has been roundly condemned by real historians, including Tracy McKenzie, a civil war expert at the University of Washington. 

A congregant at a sister Christ Church in Seattle, Professor McKenzie said that he "disagreed with just about everything in" the book.  He also determined that 20 percent of the text was copied from another book that he knew very well.

This year’s topic is "Secular Jihad in America: War on the Constitution," and Wilson, Steven Wilkins (Wilson’s co-author on the slavery booklet), and Peter A. Lillback, all conservative Calvinist pastors, will no doubt continue to distort American history for their own religious purposes.  

In 1994 Wilson and Wilkins told their audience that the antebellum South slavery was the most harmonious multiracial society in human history.  Wilkins is founding director of the League of the South, which has been declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

At last year's conference Lillback declared that George Washington, contrary to 74 years of scholarly consensus, was in fact an orthodox Christian.  Lillback was kind enough to share some of his main points with me, and I encouraged him to have professional historians review his manuscript before he published his book. Sadly, the good pastor chose to publish with Providence Forum, an organization of which he is president.  Preferring vanity publishing, Wilson also publishes most of his books at his own Canon Press in Moscow.

I have already done several commentaries on the religious liberalism of our founding thinkers, so I will not repeat the evidence that demonstrates that they were not orthodox Christians.

I have yet to receive my copy of Lillback's book, but I have learned about a few more claims that I would like to dispute. It is said as a vestryman in his church, Washington would have signed an oath of office affirming the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. 

Being a vestryman was a sign of political power and prestige.  It said very little about religious beliefs, let alone guaranteeing their orthodoxy. Thomas Jefferson was a vestryman at his Episcopal church, and even though he called himself a Christian, he rejected both the Trinity and the deity of Jesus. 

As a student at Harvard, John Adams faithfully attended daily prayers in the campus chapel. As an adult he regularly attended Sunday services and continued daily Bible readings. Nevertheless, by the age of 21 Adams had rejected Christ's divinity, and in letters to Jefferson he expressed his dislike for Calvinists and his distaste for the Trinity.

Lillback also claims that he has evidence that Washington received Communion on at least two occasions, but Nellie Lewis, his own granddaughter, did not witness it: "On Communion Sundays, he left the Church with me . . . and returned home, and we sent the carriage back after my grandmother." 

Washington's pastor James Abercrombie and two other Episcopalian ministers complained that they never saw him take the sacrament.  After his death Abercrombie was asked about Washington's religion, and he declared: "Sir, Washington was a deist." I would rather have said "Christian humanist," because I agree with Lillback that the only deist among the major founding thinkers was Thomas Paine.

It was James Madison 's opinion that Washington never "attended to the arguments for Christianity, and for the different systems of religion, [n]or in fact ... [had he] formed definite opinions on the subject." Curiously, Lillback cites this as favoring his thesis, when it clearly supports the view that Washington was more interested, as was Adams and Jefferson, in religious ethics rather than theological doctrine.

Washington would have agreed with Adams that "religion is founded on the love of God and . . . neighbor," and that "all the honest men . . . are Christians, in my sense of the word."