Let’s get this out of the way: For some time the Southern Poverty Law Center has been a far-left politically correct watchdog group that labels essentially all things right as “extremist.” And they’re pretty thorough. They search high & look for extremists and they out them. They are to Orwell’s Thought Police what the Christ Church Commitment to Loyalty is to Orwell’s Big Brother. In other words, the SPLC is a little to the right of Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church, Moscow, because the SPLC only outs political nonconformists whereas Mr. Wilson outs them and terminates their employment “without prejudice.” Doug Wilson’s totalitarianism makes the SPLC look tolerant.
These facts are stipulated and these facts are irrelevant to today’s piece in the Huffington Post, because as noted ad nauseam the Bible does not instruct Christians to practice race-based chattel slavery and Scripture never identifies the antebellum south as “the first Christendom,” contra Doug Wilson. Therefore, criticism of him on this point is fair — he deserves it.
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Gubernatorial Candidate Has Ties To Pastor Who Wrote Black Families Were ‘Stronger’ Under Slavery
Greg Gianforte, who is running for governor of Montana, is unfamiliar with these writings, according to his campaign.
by Dana Liebelson Staff Reporter, The Huffington Post
Montana GOP gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte has ties to Douglas Wilson, a pastor who has controversial writings on women and African-Americans.
WASHINGTON — The Republican candidate for governor of Montana has ties to Douglas Wilson, an Idaho pastor who once wrote, “one could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery,” and maintains that women are “created to be responsive and dependent to a man.” Greg Gianforte, the wealthy technology entrepreneur who’s challenging incumbent Steve Bullock (D) for the Montana governor’s seat, served with Wilson on the board of the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, which the pastor co-founded. (Wilson is an ex officio member of the board, which means he doesn’t vote.) Both men spoke at the group’s conferences in 2014 and 2015. Gianforte praised Wilson at the 2014 conference. “We have been Classical Christian from day one — 20 years,” he said. “And I really appreciate Douglas Wilson’s comments about, avoiding, you know, vision drift.”
The Gianforte Family Foundation, a charitable organization that Gianforte and his wife established, gave more than $30,000 to ACCS between 2012 and 2014, according to filings. Gianforte remains the chairman and a permanent board member of Petra Academy, the Bozeman-based, ACCS-accredited school his son attended. (Craig Dunham, headmaster of Petra, said the school makes its own curricular choices. “We do not use Mr. Wilson’s book on slavery in our curriculum,” he added.)
Gianforte “is unfamiliar with Mr. Wilson’s writings outside of their mutual involvement with ACCS,” Aaron Flint, a spokesman for his campaign, told The Huffington Post.
Wilson’s writings on classical, Christian education inspired the formation of other schools, and he was involved in the effort to accredit them. But his views on slavery are so controversial that after learning about them in February, a Republican lawmaker in Tennessee withdrew a bill that would have helped ACCS. The Democrat who drew attention to Wilson’s views made claims that were “untrue and unfounded,” said ACCS President David Goodwin.
Wilson and a co-author rewrote slavery’s violent history in a 1996 pamphlet called “Southern Slavery, As It Was.” They cite narratives that they claim show Southern slavery was “a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care,” and note that “one could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery.”
In the same document, they claim “feminists, in rebellion against God, invert the order of the home established by God. They do so in a way that seeks to rob women of their beauty in submission.”
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HT: Amanda Wickstrom
Well, at least the press is starting to pay attention. This is good. Somewhere some editor has decided to start a paper trail, which means there’s a high likelihood that they have a reporter digging into Doug’s giant manure pile. Fantastic. I hope they burn him to the ground.
I offered to buy Doug Wilson a copy of Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told” so he could see in black and white how slave families were torn apart, over and over and over again, in the service of maximizing slaveowner wealth. It is a devastating argument against what is, at bottom, Wilson’s argument that African-Americans are too (fill in the blank) to run their own families and need benevolent slaveowners to own, oops *manage*, them. He never took me up on it. (Offer’s still open, Doug!)
Baptist, like the SPLC, doesn’t mince words. For example, he calls plantations “slave labor camps” and otherwise in his rhetoric makes it absolutely crystal clear what he thinks of Southern Slavery As It Was.
Thanks for this reference, Deana. My local library has several copies, one of which I’ll be reading in the weeks ahead.
@Deana:
In Black & Tan, Wilson frames a clever (by his standard) strawman, arguing that southern plantations were not the equivalent of Nazi death camps. And he is correct. They were not death camps and no one ever said they were death camps. They were “slave labor camps” specially designed to squeeze the last drop of sweat out of every single slave to their last breath. Death camps kill their occupants. Labor camps work them to the bone. Not a minor distinction but one that Wilson failed to make or does not understand. And here’s the punch line: Wilson claims Eugene D. Genovese endorsed the book.
Does Baptist mention SSAIW?
A better comparison would have been the Gulag.
Nope. I think SSAIW is probably beneath Baptist. 🙂
Adding that I wish the HuffPo article had worked in the plagiarism angle for Southern Slavery as It Was (not), but they had plenty of damning information without it.
“But his views on slavery are so controversial that after learning about them in February, a Republican lawmaker in Tennessee withdrew a bill that would have helped ACCS.”
This is sad. The ACCS needs to cut all ties to Doug Wilson before any more damage is done.