Interesting Article About The Neo Confederates

[debrand]

I have to apologize to the European members on this board who probably see my obsession in exposing the Neo Confederates but until recently, I didn't know how widespread some of this thinking is among southern fundamentalists.

religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4858/neo-confederates_and_the_revival_of_%22theological_war%22_for_the_%22christian_nation%22/

The writer of the article is quoting another couple of writers' work, Sebesta and Hague.

In turn, this reasoning leads to claims that the "stars and bars" battle flag and other Confederate icons are Christian symbols and the assertion that opposition to them equates to a rejection of Christianity.

Sebesta and Hague also discuss Rushdoony, who Doug Philips and a few other Calvinist follow.

T]he theological war thesis originated in texts by theologians who between them contended that the Confederacy comprised an orthodox Christian nation, at times intertwining this religious viewpoint with, amongst other things, defences of slavery, denunciations of public education and mass schooling, and proposals to maintain a hierarchical and unequal society. .

Apparently, some groups want a new Confederacy.

Fast forward to the 1990s, and Sebesta Hague find the "theological war" gaining traction among neo-Confederates, like the League of the South, which was formed in 1994. One of its founding directors, Wilkins, is a member of the PCA who maintains that, according to Sebesta and Hague, "the cause of the Civil War was theological incompatibility between North and South, the former having 'rejected Biblical Calvinism.'" Wilkins has written that "there was radical hatred of Scripture and the old theology [and] Northern radicals were trying to throw off this Biblical culture and turn the country in a different direction," and that "the War Between the States was a war between two different world views: The old way of Biblical Constitutionalism and the 'new' way of Humanistic Centralism."

I don't think that all fundamentalists are racists or southern apologists but there does seem to be an underground movement among some of the more radical fundies to white wash slavery.

[GenerationCedarchip]

it is interesting stuff. I think I find it especially interesting/scary because it's one of those points where fundie-land meets the mainstream. There are plenty of non-fundies out there who get sucked into some of the neo-confederate revisionist history and some of them then move on to fundier ideas.

The group that puzzles me are the college age folks from the north and the west who seem to have picked up on these romanticized ideas of the south. I always wonder why that is. Maybe the Old South seems exotic to them in a way that it doesn't to me as someone who grew up having to look at the remains of the town slave block.