The Theology of the Confederacy

Part Five

B. Transcendentalism.

Another New England philosophy which led to tension with the Christian South was Transcendentalism. This philosophy grew out of Unitarianism and, indeed, was a split from it. The schism was led by no less of a man than Ralph Waldo Emerson,

• This was an outgrowth of a schism which took place in American Unitarianism in 1832 when Ralph Waldo Emerson, then pastor of the Second Church in Boston, preached a sermon in which he proposed a radical change in the observance of the Lord's Supper. When the church refused to agree to this proposed change, Emerson resigned and retired "to his literary seclusion at Concord" where he brought forth books and pamphlets in which he set forth his objections to all fixed forms of belief and rejected all restrictions upon the freedom of intellectual action. Soon Emerson became the intellectual leader in a group of New England Unitarians who became known as Transcendentalists.

1. Transcendentalism Defined.

Transcendentalism was a break with reason and the ability to reasonably ascertain truth. Instead of gathering truth about God and the universe from the Bible, the Transcendentalist formed his ideas about these matters from the well of his own opinions. Historian C. Gregg Singer states,

• The Transcendentalists insisted that man had an innate intuition of God and that man is not limited to his senses in the quest for knowledge... For human knowledge there is no logical or rational basis, but only intuition. Because God is uniquely present in each man, man, therefore, has an innate intuition of him which is independent of the senses...

The logic of these ideas led to the conclusion that since the existence of God was dependent upon man's intuition, man actually became the Creator and God became the creature. Above all else, the Transcendentalists held to a high view of man. Singer describes the Transcendentalist perspective of man with these words,

• Man was good, noble, and therefore perfectible. His imperfection was not the result of any fall of Adam into sin, nor the consequence of original sin in the race; it was simply due to the fact that he had not yet gone through the stages of development which were necessary for the achievement of that perfection which was his assured and rightful destiny.

Such a high view of man always coincides with a very low view of God. A low view of God leads to a low view of His law, and necessitates that man develop another law to take its place. This is what occurred in the North. Godly morality was verily swept aside and the morality of equality took its place. Today, this equalitarian morality rules America.

2. Its Conflict With Christianity.

This anti-Christian view of man, who was possessed of innate goodness, led to a great social upheaval. To the Transcendentalist, such a noble being as man should never be subject to the bonds of slavery and servitude. Indeed, among the leading Transcendentalists of that day was the Rev. Theodore Parker. He was one of the main financiers of John Brown and his terrorist activities.

Calvinists in the Church began to rally against the growing influence of Transcendentalism. By 1837 the dispute had grown so furious that the Presbyterian Church split into factions historically known as Old School and New School. The Old School held tightly to the Westminster Confession of Faith, while those in the New School were willing to accept the heretical departures of the Transcendentalists. The great preponderance of Old School adherents were the Presbyterians of the South. This added greatly to the growing gulf between the two regions. Singer states,

• In the South, Old School Presbyterianism constituted a far greater majority of Presbyterianism than it did in the North, and it had much greater influence on southern thought than the Old School had in the North. As a result, there was in the South a far greater consciousness of the theological radicalism lurking behind the anti-slavery crusade, and also a much keener insight into the growing radicalism in northern thought in its many varied implications for constitutional government in this country, and its effect on the American way of life... After 1830 there was a growing philosophical and theological cleavage between the North and the South. While the North was becoming increasingly subject to radical influences, the South was becoming increasingly conservative in its outlook.

This theological cleavage between North and South is nowhere illustrated better than in the reaction of the two regions to the revolutionary antics of John Brown. Brown went through the country raising money and men to lead a "holy crusade" against slavery and to bestir a revolt of the slaves against their Southern masters. Both the sectional divergence and the theological heresy of many in the North can be seen in a passage from Dr. J. W. Jones, written two decades after the war,

• The "John Brown raid" would have been treated by the South as merely the mad attempt of a wild fanatic, but for the endorsement of so many leading men in the North. The Concord philosophers called him "Saint John, the lust," and Emerson elicited the applause of a vast crowd in Boston when he declared, "The new Saint... will make the gallows glorious like the cross."

Wendell Phillips made a speech in Henry Ward Beecher's church, Brooklyn, in which, among other bitter utterances, he said: "John Brown has twice as much right to hang Governor Wise [Virginia] as Governor Wise has to hang him... if the Virginia tyrants dare hang him, after his mockery of a trial, it will take two [George] Washingtons at least to make the name of the river anything but abominable to the ages that come after it.

Besides this, a member of the Massachusetts legislature rose to defend John Brown in the most blasphemous manner, "The heinous offense of Pontius Pilate, in crucifying our Saviour, whitened into virtue when compared with that of Governor Wise in his conduct towards John Brown."

These statements were not merely isolated incidents. Indeed, because of the effects of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism upon the minds of so many in the North, John Brown became a "martyr" and a cause to rally around in opposition to the South and her institutions.

3. Its Advancement in the War.

The Civil War did more to advance the twin evils of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism than it did to advance any other ideas. The fanaticism of the period should be viewed as an attack upon the orthodox Christian religion and the Southern way of life which sprang from that religion. To demonstrate this, the following words by theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony are pertinent,

• The Civil War was a triumph for the religion of humanity. Most churches, whatever their stand on slavery, opposed abolitionism and its social radicalism. As a result, in the North, these churches supported the war effort rather than demanding it. The Unitarian, Universalist, and Transcendentalist champions of abolition were thus the real victors of the war. They called for war, tried to promote it by financing John Brown, and, when the war began, called at once for emancipation as the war aim. These men were moved, as a Unitarian scholar has pointed out, by "the perfectionist desire to impose upon the West and South the intellectual and religious supremacy of New England. One significant result of the Civil War was to accomplish just this."

Without the agitation of the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists, America could have settled its slavery dilemma peaceably, as had been done in England. President Lincoln had proposed a plan in which the U.S. Government would purchase each slave for $400. But the proponents of these false religions saw the abolition of slavery by violent means as their best opportunity to tear down Calvinism in the country and to promote their own ideologies.

This is not the only case of such a plan of action by the opponents of Calvinism which is known to history. Over the past few decades, the same drama has been repeated in South Africa. As the opponents of that country have succeeded in tearing down the society in the name of democracy and social justice, it is the Calvinist society which has been the aim of their efforts. The Sunday Times of London printed an article on May 5, 1992 entitled, South Africa Goes on a Sin Binge: Vice soars as reforms challenge Calvinism. Words from the article tell the story, "As South Africa emerges from a moral strait-jacket, the Calvinist principles that once regulated everything from sleeping partners to leisure habits are falling apart. With censorship laws relaxed, the availability of pornography has mushroomed."

This is what the Unitarians hoped to accomplish in the Civil War. Yet, it was nearly a century after the war until the destruction of Calvinism and Christian morality in the South began to become evident. And the responsibility lies with us, the present generation of Southern Christians, to return the Southern people to their Christian heritage and to Christian standards of virtue.

4. Considered Sociologically.

Author David Hackett Fischer, in his book Albion's Seed, approaches this subject from an entirely different perspective. Nevertheless, he ably demonstrates that it was novel developments in Northern ideology which originally put North and South at odds with one another. Fischer states,

• From 1800 to 1852, the northern states dominated the many reform movements that developed in this era - education, temperance, penology, care for the insane and the blind, feminism, passivism, and especially abolitionism. Most leaders of these reform movements came from New England and Quaker stock... At the same time most reform movements - not merely abolitionism, but, isms of every kind - found few followers in the coastal south and even fewer in the southern highlands. The Richmond Inquirer roundly attacked what it called "our enemies, the isms." Modern ideologies in general were regarded as hostile to southern folkways.

Indeed the Southern Magazine had boasted that "the South was poor soil for the isms."

Most historians assert that sectionalism was second in importance only to slavery as the cause of the Civil War. In this discussion, however, it has been shown that both the sectional dispute and the slavery dispute were the results of theological and philosophical errors which had taken place in many New England churches and universities. War burst onto the American scene because of the fanatical efforts of Northern heretics to uproot Christian society and replace it with a humanistic, anti-Christian way of life in the rest of the country. In a real sense, the ideological portion of this war continues today.

5. The Southern Response.

Seventy-five years after the war the South was still fighting against the ravages of Transcendentalism. This situation led Historian Richard Weaver to observe,

• Emerson and his colleagues founded their revolt against New England orthodoxy upon the principle of the continuity of knowledge and the prerogative of the individual mind to judge and determine. They were successful, and the country concluded that the victory was won everywhere; but in the South the battle has not yet been fought. In the present century [1943], when publicity attending the theory of evolution forced the issue, there was widespread amazement that legislatures representing sovereign states were prepared to vote revealed knowledge precedence over natural, for such in a broad view of the matter is the significance of the so-called anti-evolution laws.

Weaver saw that even in the 1940s the legislatures of Southern states were willing to follow the Bible when so-called "science" came into conflict with it. Because God had revealed to mankind that He created the earth, our fathers and grandfathers were willing to write that into our law. But Washington defeated us again in the 1960s as their Supreme Court outlawed the teaching of the Bible and its instruction on creation in the government schools.

This has, over the last 30 years, led to an appalling secularization of the Southern children. Yet, despite this terrible secularization which the South has undergone, it remains that, even today in 1993, some Southern legislatures are still working to pass laws to insure that the creation story be taught in the public schools. This is a result of the efforts of so many Southern Christians, and it represents the Southern tradition of giving the truth which God has revealed in his Word pre-eminence over the spurious, momentary fads of "science" so-called.

Thus, we still fight on!

6. Our Current Opportunity.

Doctrinal error breeds social revolution is the maxim we need to understand. God has both created the world and ordained that it run according to the laws and principles laid out plainly in His Word - the Holy Bible. Obedience to that Word ultimately brings blessing and peace. Disobedience to that Word ultimately brings war and devastation.

Robert Dabney saw that the day would come when the philosophical principles of the North would work to ruin that land and those peoples. Weaver recounts,

• Dabney felt so assured of the correctness of his principles that he promised his readers the North would one day be overtaken by the consequences of her own misdeeds, and that the wild notions brought down to disrupt Southern society would return to plague their inventors. For its revenge the South would have to look forward to that "anarchy and woe" which the "disorganizing heresies" would eventually produce among its conquerors.

That day, which even to Weaver must have seemed quite a long way off, is fast upon us. In the North we now view searing riots, waves of crime, militant queers parading naked down the streets of their capital, and ethnic free-for-alls occurring as a result of their Unitarianism coming back to haunt them. Besides this, philosophical equalitarianism demands political and economic socialism, and this system of government-handouts along with enormous numbers of citizens living off the dole has bankrupted the Treasury of the United States. Washington's debt today stands at over four trillion dollars and is rapidly growing by more than a billion dollars every day. The corruption in Congress has multiplied to the point that the representatives have very little respect in the eyes of the American people.

To top it all off, no one in Washington has any answers as to how to make things better, or even to arrest the fiscal problems that are expanding and eating away at the country like a cancer.

This horrendous state of affairs cannot go on much longer. We will see in our lifetimes how accurate Dabney was!

Therefore, let us understand that it doesn't matter what is said about us as Southerners. It doesn't matter what ideas are put before our eyes, nor what words are spoken into our ears. It doesn't matter what laws are imposed upon us from Washington or New York. For if we will follow the Bible and the God of the Bible, our position will be impregnable. The words of Dabney about this matter, written shortly after the War, are so very vital,

But the principles of truth and righteousness are as eternal as their divine legislator. These must be upheld under all dynasties and forms. Here, in one word, is the safe pole-star for the "New South"; let them adopt the Scriptural politics, assured that they will ever be as true and just under any new regime as under the one which has passed away: "that righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." [Proverbs 14:34]

If we as a people will build our individual lives, families, businesses, and national institutions upon the solid rock of the Bible, then we will have the victory our forefathers toiled so arduously to obtain.

The Theology of the Confederacy

Part Six

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