While looking up Pandas and People at Amazon, I found it very interesting that the books celebrating the “scientific” nature of Pands and People are Christian lists.
I’m sure that it is just coincidence.
But what I found very interetsing was the list by Marlton Green, “third grde teacher.” Included on the list was a book called “Southern Slavery As It Was.”
Wow! Chef Devergue’s review is entertaining:
“Suppose you are a son of the South, you consider yourself to be a good Christian, and (like most of us) would like to consider the deeds of your ancestors in the best light possible. In that case, you are probably at the mercy of conflicting impulses, since the sine qua non of the Confederate States of America was the preservation of slavery, and virtually all mainstream Christians today are in agreement that slavery as practiced in the United States was an evil institution. One cannot honor one’s heritage without compromising one’s heartfelt religious principals, and vice versa. What is one to do?
Well, the more prevelant route is that taken by most devotees of the Lost Cause mythos, which is that secession and the CSA was never about slavery, but rather “states’ rights,” whatever the hell that might mean. If one argues that rationale, all your opponent has to do is bring up either the Dred Scott decision or the Fugitive Slave Act, both of which utterly trample the notion of states’ rights into the dust. In short, the states’ rights argument raises as many paradoxical questions as it hopes to answer.
Another route is that taken by authors Wilson & Wilkins, who argue that 1) slavery was not contrary to godliness, and in fact it was the abolitionist movement which was contrary to the will of God; and 2) in any case, the slaves by and large were well-treated, well-fed and content with their existence. Oh yes, and it was the fault of the Northern slave trade that slavery continued in the South in any case, so if there is an original sin of slavery, it is to be found somewhere near Boston — gosh, we haven’t heard this argument before, have we?
The scholarship here, simply put, sucks. However, that puts these clowns in good company as the pseudohistorians that are Holocaust deniers or (ironically) Afro-Centrists like GGM James or JA Rogers. This work is heavily dependent on just a few sources, such as the writings of RL Dabney (not exactly a neutral source) or massively flawed statistical works like Engerman & Fogel’s “Time on the Cross.” The authors cherry-pick through the historical data, selecting only that data which fits into their pre-fabricated thesis. When they aren’t cherry-picking, they are engaged in wholesale distortion, such as the argument that the leadership of the North had fallen under the pernicious and bible-hating influence of New England Unitarianism, which the authors rank only slightly above devil-worship, apparently.
Hmmmmmmmm. I didn’t realize that Springfield, Illinois was a hotbed of Unitarianism — my mistake. Also, I know my own family’s history, and all of those ancestors from Ohio, Indiana & Illinois that joined the Republican party in the 1850’s — the last time I checked, almost all of them were Methodists, not Unitarians. Where do you think Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists got their start anyway, because of disagreements over the tarriff? Also, where do the Quakers, who really were the backbone of both the abolitionist and sufferage movements anyway, fit into the authors’ simplistic scenario.
Of course, one has to accept the notion that the authors’ narrow definition of “orthodox” evangelical Christianity is the One True Faith, otherwise their thesis tends to fall apart in a hurry. Regarding this, it might be in order to point out that these guys have ties to the Christian Reconstruction movement, a movement that frightens your more garden-variety right-wing Christians like Ralph Reed, for example. Their extemism is pretty much off the charts (among other things, this movement envisions the recreation of the South as a separate, lily-white Christian republic where public stonings might be acceptable), so if your Southern Pride tendencies are more conventional, you might want to keep this in mind.
All of this might seem pretty silly, ut consider the relative success of the Holocaust Denial movement. For a generation now, the Holocaust deniers have been patiently peddling their wares, and now one sees a growing number of Americans (the numbers still vary considerably, depending on which poll you read) who now have doubts about the specifics of the Holocaust. Because Americans by and large tend to be pretty uncritical of that which they see in print, this pseudohistory can have a lasting effect. It remains to be seen if Wilson & Wilkins will succeed in their pushing their agenda.”
