The Theology of the Confederacy

Part Two

II. The Relevant Doctrines of Southern Theology.

Being proponents of Southern Presbyterianism, Dabney, Thornwell, and many other important thinkers in the Confederacy held unswervingly to the Westminster Confession of Faith. This is a document which was framed by our forebears in London in 1634. Presbyterians believe it to be the clearest interpretation of the Bible ever set forth.

A. The Bible as the Key to Life.

Dabney's theology and Southern society were anchored on the belief that the Bible is not only the key to salvation, but also the key to life itself. Observing the tie between the Bible and the Southern people, Historian Richard Weaver wrote, "Reverence for the `word of God' is a highly important aspect of Southern religious orthodoxy."

Concerning the Bible, the Westminster Confession of Faith states,

• The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture... The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.

After the war, General D. H. Hill edited a pro-Southern magazine in Charlotte, North Carolina. He saw the South's devotion to the Bible as one of her defining qualities,

• Her conservatism, her love of the Constitution, her attachment to the old usages of society, her devotion to principles, her faith in the Bible - all these involved her in a long and bloody war with that Radicalism which seeks to overthrow all that is venerable, respectable, and of good repute.

Robert E. Lee was also a firm believer in the importance of the Bible. While still in the United States Army and stationed in Missouri in 1855, Colonel Lee wrote to his wife about the habits of his devotional life,

• I ... am content to read the Bible and prayers alone, and draw much comfort from their holy precepts and merciful promises. Though feeling unable to follow the one, and truly unworthy of the other, I must still pray to that glorious God without whom there is no help, and with whom there is no danger.

During the aforementioned memorial sermon at "Stonewall" Jackson's funeral, Dabney asserted that General Jackson's drive and perspective were both derived from his study of the Bible,

• But especially did he derive firmness and decision, from the peculiar strength of his conviction concerning the righteousness and necessity of this war. Had he not sought the light of the Holy Scriptures, in thorough examination and prayer, had his pure and honest conscience not justified the act, even in the eye of that Searcher of hearts, whose fear was his ever-present, ruling principle, never would he have drawn his sword in this great quarrel, at the prompting of any sectional pride, or ambition, or interest, or anger...

This is what is needed in today's South. We need men who thoroughly examine the Bible to determine the rightness of their actions. We need men who fear God and thus, have no fear of man. We need the men of the South to be more like General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

B. Creation: The Proper View of Man and the World.

Because the vulgar theory of evolution has gained such a hold over the minds of so many in today's South, the doctrine of creation needs to be asserted in no uncertain terms.

1. The Confederate Doctrine of Creation.

Our understanding of the world and the things that occur in it needs to begin with the knowledge of how the world came into being. Dabney taught that God had literally created the world out of nothing. He stated, "It will be clearly seen hence, that the nature of the creative act is but faintly defined by the mere force of the words [Genesis 2]. Yet Scripture does not lack passages, which explicitly teach, that God produced the whole Universe out of nothing by His almighty power."

Dr. Thornwell was also very adamant in his view that the world was created directly by God, and went to great lengths to attack and destroy every theory of evolution being advanced in his day. He began his treatise on creation with these words,

• The fact of creation is vital in Theology, as upon it depends the question of the relation betwixt the world and God, and even of the absoluteness and independence of the Divine Being... If matter exist [sic] independently of Him, His knowledge of its laws and properties has been acquired. He has had to learn them. His power, too, like that of man, is conditioned by the nature of the material upon which He has to work.

Thornwell went to great lengths to demonstrate that the theories of evolution were all based upon crass speculation of data which could not possibly be verified. After a discussion of the five main evolutionary theories, he summed them all up with these words,

• They assume the infinite, the unconditioned, the absolutely perfect, as a thing about which we are as competent to speculate as the facts of experience... Hence such absurdities are not arguments. They are only puzzles or logical riddles. They prove nothing but the impotency of reason, and the incompetency of philosophy to transcend with its logical forms the sphere of experience.

Both Dabney and Thornwell were convinced that the Bible alone was the place from whence we should draw our beliefs concerning the creation of the world. Dabney held that we are to hold to the doctrine of creation by faith, just as we hold to every other doctrine of the Christian religion. He makes reference to Hebrews 11:3 which states, "By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible."

Dabney was a theologian and didn't claim to be geologist. It was not within his field of expertise to have the answer to every speculation put forward by evolutionary expositors. Still, Dabney knew that evolutionists had surrepititiously used science many times before to assail the Bible and its teachings on creation. So, he urged ministers to withstand these onslaughts against the Bible with these words,

• These apparent difficulties of geology are just such as science has often paraded against the Bible; but God's word has stood firm, and every true advance of science has only redounded to its honour. Christians, therefore, can afford to bear these seeming assaults with exceeding coolness.

The denial of the supremacy of "science" has been a tenant of the Southern nation for centuries. It is crucial to our existence. The Southern historian, Richard Weaver, recognized this in 1943,

• I should list first of all the fact that the South, alone among the sections, has persisted in regarding science as a false messiah. This by itself indicates that the Southern tradition has a center of resistance to the most powerful force of corruption in our age. While the Western world has gone after false gods it has clung, often at the cost of scorn and insult, to its lares of the field.

Indeed, the antipathy towards "scientific" attacks upon Christian dogma was not confined to the intellectuals and religious leaders of the South alone. The rank and file of the Southern armed forces also participated in the religious fervor,

• Into the strange personnel of the Confederate Army... poured fighting bishops and prayer-holding generals, and through it swept waves of intense religious enthusiasm long lost to history. And when that army went down to defeat, the last barrier to the secular spirit of science, materialism, and democracy was vanquished.

The war served to focus the fighting men's attention on the true meaning of their culture, society, and way of life. It became evident to thousands of them that "science" had nothing to offer that was worth fighting for. The Christian religion and the Southern way of life which was an extension of that religion, however, were truly worth the supreme sacrifice. They still are.

2. The Status of Evolutionary Thought.

The theory of evolution which Dabney and Thornwell were fighting 135 years ago, has remained as a thorn in the side of the Christian Church unto this very day. Evolutionism has gained such a foothold in American life that since the 1960s it has been taught in all of the government schools of the land. Furthermore, it is no longer taught as theory, but forms the basis for much of the legal and social philosophy in the United States.

The status which this spurious heresy is accorded in the academic circles of America can be demonstrated by the following quotation from a well-known journal of "science,"

• Evolution is the central organizing theory of biology, and has fundamental importance in other sciences as well. It is no more controversial in scientific circles than gravity or electricity... There is no scientific dispute that evolution has occurred and continues to occur; this is why evolution is regarded as a scientific fact.

From the preceding words we see that science in our culture has regressed to the place it held in the 1400s when dogmatic assertions about the flatness of the earth were submitted. For the entire earth can be searched, and the entire history of the earth can be searched, and not one shred of evolutionary evidence will be discovered.

As Christians and Southerners we need to fight this ludicrous onslaught against Christian civilization with all available means. Indeed, this is already being done as Christian churches all across our nation and the greater United States have established a gigantic network of schools and colleges which teach that the world was created by God, and that all of the universe should reflect this fact. In this manner the great work of our Confederate theologians of ages past still lives and flourishes in our day and in our time.

3. The Absurdity of Evolution.

The absurdity of evolution should be evident. For it can be intelligently submitted that if a simple wristwatch was taken apart, its pieces placed into a box, the box shaken and shaken, there would be a greater chance of the parts shifting together to perfectly rebuild the wristwatch than ever that the world was formed by random and unintelligent forces. From the colossal expanse of the universe to the intricate details of the tiniest atom, the orderliness of every piece of matter in existence heaps ridicule upon the notion that the worlds are the products of chance and random. The two questions which evolution can never answer are, (1) From where did the original matter, which began the evolutionary chain, come?, and, (2) If species are evolving even today into higher species, then why do we not see any evidence of this anywhere in the world?

For instance, if rats are evolving into bats, then it would seem logical that there would be many times the number of species that existed in the intervals between the two (bat-rats) than there would be of either rats or bats. Yet there are none. Furthermore, the concern over endangered species is also illogical; if evolution is true, extinct species are not eternally extinct. They are extinct only until species lower than themselves evolve to form them again.

The absurdity of it all is far more than the human mind can comprehend, yet, here in the South and all across America, this foolishness forms much of the basis of our society, and is even called "scientific fact" by most of the leading academicians of our day.

4. The Philosophical Nature of Evolution.

The philosophy behind the "theory of evolution" is nothing new. Darwin and his followers have dressed it up in new garb, but underneath the current costume remains one of the same-old, worn-out, pagan philosophies of ancient history. When the prophet Elijah squared off against the prophets of Baal, he was essentially confronting a system of belief identical to modern-day Darwinism. Author James Jordan, of Texas, offers some very helpful insight for us,

• So, what was Baalism? In essence it was the ascription of power to Nature. The universe has within itself the force of life. The world as we know it is the result of the union of the ultimate male and female principles of the universe, which may be called Baal and Ashteroth... The sun god copulated with the original mud of the world, and animals and man resulted. How does such a myth differ from a more sophisticated expression of the same principle, such as can be found in any 20 century high school science textbook? Once, we are told, there was a vast primordial sea. Then one day, sparked by sunlight, an organic molecule appeared, which evolved to become our present world. A `male' principle, sunlight, inseminates a `female' principle, the primordial sea, and life is born.

The Baalism of Elijah's day was philosophically no different from the evolutionary humanism of our day. Such beliefs lead inexorably to the deification of Nature, and, ultimately, to the deification of the state as Nature's regent. Elijah destroyed the prophets of Baal by calling down fire from Heaven. Our opposition to their modern-day appearance should be just as vehement, if not as dramatic.

5. The Political Effects of Evolution.

Evolution has spawned two political systems which have been highly visible in the 20th Century: Communism and Naziism.

a. Communism.

Communism has sprung from the idea that all men have evolved into being, and that the differences among the various peoples, along with their natural aversion to admixture, is a result of them having evolved in different areas and locations around the earth.

This being the case, the communist perspective is that if the various peoples of the earth are mixed together, they will eventually learn to get along with one another. Thus, they view ethnic integration as a moral positive which ought to be pursued.

So far, however, no evidence of this newly developed trust and brotherhood between diverse peoples has been observed. Yet, the communist ideal of integration persists.

b. Naziism.

Naziism approaches the differences of the earth's peoples in another way. The nazi idea is that the lighter-skinned peoples evolved first and the darker-skinned peoples evolved at a later date: the lighter the skin, the earlier the development, hence the further along on the evolutionary scale.

Although experience doesn't give rebuke to this theory in the manner that it does to the communist idea, nonetheless, the Christian Southerner ought to reject it on the basis of Scripture. There is no biblical basis to claim that the lighter-skinned peoples of the earth evolved first and have therefore advanced further. Scientific investigation cannot account for the cause of the physical, intellectual, and aptitudinal differences between the various peoples, either. Science can only catalogue these distinctions.

This is important because so many in today's South who have taken up the Southern cause operate from a National-Socialist perspective. This is not our heritage and a plan of action based on nazi principles will not gain for us the blessings of God to whom all of our actions are to bring glory.

5. Man in God's Image.

An alternative to both communism and naziism is Christian nationalism. This is the Biblical perspective. The ideal here is that although all peoples exist as a result of God's creative act and are therefore made in His image, at a later time God subdivided mankind into ethnic units called nations for His own purposes and reasons. (Deuteronomy 32:8, "When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples...")

The history of the South in relation to nationalism begins with the Southerners of the 1840s and afterwards viewing themselves as a distinct people from the Europeans in the North. Weaver, the Southern historian, describes the words of Raphael Semmes, the Commander of the Confederate naval ship Alabama, "he believed strongly in the Puritan-Cavalier distinction; to him Yankees and Southerners were different genera who should never have entered a political partnership in the first place."

Semmes was not alone. Edward Albert Pollard was a Southern journalist who Richard Weaver called, "The most prolific of all who argued the Southern cause." In his book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War, Pollard wrote, "From 1787 to 1861 the South and the North had lived together as two political aliens, with slavery furnishing a convenient line of battle between the disputants."

Weaver sums up the Southern attitudes towards national distinctiveness when he writes,

• Confederate captains believed they were fighting to protect a distinct people who had lost the political safeguards of their welfare... The Confederates were the upholders of a particularism which had been present in 1787, and which had greatly increased by 1860. Lincoln, with his principle that the nation could not exist half slave and half free, was a universalist, denying all tendency towards separation and particularity."

The Civil War was the historical experience which forged the peoples of the Southern states into one people and one nation. Present-day sociologist David Hackett Fischer asserts,

• New England and the middle states became more similar to one another, and increasingly different from the coastal and southern highlands. The effect of these tendencies was to combine regions into sections. That pattern had not existed in the United States before 1820. The words "north" and "south" were rarely used in a sectional sense during the early years of the republic. But they developed very rapidly.

Besides the national differences with the Yankees, the Southerners also saw themselves as a distinct people in regards to the African slaves. This perspective had been written into the United States Constitution in 1789 and was unanimously upheld by the United States Supreme Court as late as 1860 in the Dred Scott decision. In that case, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney wrote the unanimous opinion,

• The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea of abatement [Africans] compose a portion of this people [Americans]... We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States...

Even though part of the Civil War was fought to abolish slavery, still the idea that the Southerners and their slaves should live as one people did not have very much support throughout the country. Lincoln had a plan for buying the slaves and expatriating them to the country of Liberia, which land America had bought for just that purpose. Historian Rousas J. Rushdoony appraised the situation thusly,

For most Americans, the abolition of slavery meant also the abolition of the Negro from American life. Liberia was founded in terms of this hope, which was not peripheral but basic to much American thinking. The American Colonization Society, 1817, was organized to resettle Negroes in Africa, a hope advocated by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and others.

After the war the Confederates, suffering under the cruelty of Reconstruction, yet desirous to keep their national identity, rose up and surreptitiously maneuvered to drive the federal troops off Southern land. This program was completed in 1877 when the last U.S. soldier of Reconstruction left South Carolina.

At this point the Southerners set up a system of legal segregation to preserve the ethnic and cultural identity of the nation. This system called separate but equal, but pejoratively referred to as Jim Crow, eventually won judicial approval at the Supreme Court level in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. This legal state of affairs continued to preserve the integrity and the identity of our nation until 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Plessy and ordered the desegregation of our schools in Brown v. Board of Topeka, Kansas.

We had been defeated in the Civil War, in which we lost the ability to control our external affairs. In 1954 the Civil Rights War began which was a struggle for control of our internal affairs. Southern men put up a valiant struggle as they protested against the Civil Rights agitators in the streets, meeting African force with Southern force. Our politicians and sheriffs placed every legal obstacle in the path of the enemy. But Washington sent troops to Little Rock to quell our uprising. We had no troops to defend ourselves and over the following decade the Civil Rights War was lost and we had forfeited our ability to control even our internal affairs.

Since that time the African-Americans have made immense political gains in the South. The Civil Rights Act has been passed and re-passed and now stands as a punitive measure against Southern individuals, businesses, and communities. The Voting Rights Act has also been passed and is used as a whip with which the African-Americans bring us to heel whenever election laws on any level do not "maximize minority electoral strength." The schools have been forcibly desegregated at great financial cost and a plethora of jobs are reserved for "blacks only." This shows the legal standing they occupy over us as surely as when the reverse was true as Southerners posted "whites only" signs on public swimming pools and bus benches.

The tactic which our people have employed with modest success against integration with the Africans is mobility. As African-Americans begin to move into our neighborhoods, Southerners begin to move out and find other accommodations. In Atlanta, for instance, our people have continued to move farther and farther from the city's center, many of them now commuting 50 miles or more to work each day each way.

In some places our people have attempted to politically partition their county, so that the Southern people do not have to pay for the social services of the African-Americans living in another part of the county. In 1988, Atlanta Constitution columnist Tom Teepen made these observations,

• Perhaps it is something as simple as a yearning for remembered small-town virtues, even here within the Atlanta megalopolis. Perhaps it is something rather nastier, an impulse tinged with racism... Whatever the case... the recent local elections surfaced a renewed and unwise yearning in North Fulton County for breaking parts of the metro area down into smaller pieces... Another complaint: North Fulton County resident grumble about paying taxes to support Grady Memorial Hospital and its services to the county's poor... Ideally, Atlanta should be expanding to remain a full beneficiary of the growth that it plays a central role in generating. And surburbanites in unincorporated territory, keen for some sense of identity would be petitioning the city. It is impossible not to suspect that that would in fact be so if Atlanta weren't more black than white and if the suburbs weren't overwhelmingly white.

After the war a Southern woman, Myrta Avery, wrote words in her diary which reflected the Southern perspective on the nationalist distinctions between the Southerners and their former slaves,

• For the decisive fact is that like eagles and sparrows they will not flock together. "They are different rather than unequal" and "to ignore a difference inherent in nature is a crime against nature and is punished according to nature." The only hope for the future lay in the willingness of each race to mark out its place, and of each to help the other maintain that place."

Those words are as true today as they were the day Mrs. Avery wrote them. They also reflect a Biblical perspective. In his commentary on Genesis, the conservative author Harold Stigers asserts that the nationalism which resulted from God's division of mankind into ethnic groupings works to restrain unrighteousness,

It may be said that, in general, nationalism is best for the world in its present state of sin and that to destroy those national boundaries is contrary to God's present will. It may also be said that God's wrath will fall on those people who by creating empires provide conditions that facilitate the increase of sin and so weaken men. God even causes empires to come to an end to hold down the increase of sin.

God divided the various peoples of the earth to keep them from uniting which would tend towards their ideas of self-sufficiency and rebellion against Him and His moral law. The New World Order and the United Nations are but the latest attempts to destroy God's world order of separated peoples and separated nations.

Nonetheless, we still need to view other peoples as significant persons, created in God's image, and not as something inferior to us, as inferior as their pagan cultures may be to our culture.

The question remains, how did the various nations of the earth form? This is a complex question, the answer to which cannot be given with a great deal of certainty. Perhaps Dr. Henry Morris has given the best theory available,

• As each family and tribal unit migrated away from Babel, not only did they each develop a distinctive culture, but they each developed distinctive physical and biological characteristics. Since they could communicate only with members of their own family unit, there was no possibility of marrying outside of the family. Hence, it was necessary to establish new families composed of very close relatives, for several generations at least. It is well established genetically that variations take place very quickly in a small inbreeding population, but only very slowly in a large interbreeding population... Thus, in a very few generations of such inbreeding, distinctive characteristics of skin color, height, hair texture, facial features, temperament, environmental adjustment, and others, could come to be associated with particular tribes and nations. Since the earth's population was still relatively young and since, before the Flood, there had been a minimum of environmental radiations to produce genetic mutations, there was as yet no genetic danger from inbreeding.

Whatever the process may have been in dividing mankind into ethnic and national distinctions, we know that the cause of those divisions was God working according to His will. Nothing in the Scriptures has ever countermanded the world order of separate peoples and separate, sovereign nations which God instituted early in the history of mankind. Therefore, the Southern people should resist the integrationist programs of communists, Martin Luther King Cultists, New World Order enthusiasts, and United Nations bureaucrats.

The Theology of the Confederacy

Part Three

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