Reconstruction and the Religious War

I want to tell you right off the bat, that I am far less interested in the blow-by-blow accounts of things that happened during the War for Southern Independence and the subsequent Reconstruction, as I am in seeing how those ideas and epistemologies can be used for our benefit today … to help return us to the principles of the Bible with regard to government, and to rein in the federal government especially from its increasing usurpation of the rights of States and individuals in a society which is supposed to be governed by the rule of law according to the Constitution.

 

As I speak today, I use the FACTS of history to that end. If the facts offend your sensibilities, that is unfortunate; please forgive me in advance, but the facts are still the facts; and history ought not be recorded merely to satisfy the whim of the writer or the government. We must not accept lies and propaganda in lieu of historical facts.

 

Let us begin with a couple of statements which will get your attention. I want you to remember these statements as we proceed today, because we will give evidence for their support throughout this presentation.

 

Statement #1:

Reconstruction is based upon the politics of hate.

 

Statement #2

Reconstruction has grown well beyond the old Confederate States.

 

Statement #3

Reconstruction has not ended, but rather it continues.

 

***_________________________***

 

Statement #1:

Reconstruction is based upon the politics of hate, and the hatred began long before the War Between the States. Our Lord Jesus Christ said:

 

John 15:18-21:

¹⁸If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. ¹⁹If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. ²⁰Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also. ²¹But all these things will they do unto you for my name’s sake, because they know not him that sent me.

Southern Theologian, the Rev. Dr. James Henley Thornwell said it well:

"The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and slaveholders, they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground, Christianity and Atheism the Combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake."

 

The South was hated because of its values, indeed, its Christian faith. Many in the North felt that the Southern culture had to be dismantled in order to make way for their idealistic and secular godless utopia. For the most part, they cared nothing for the Negro slave in the North or the South (Yes, Virginia, there were slaves in the North, too … Both generals Grant and Sherman had a few).

 

Incidentally, (http://www.scvcamp469-nbf.com/howwhyabestartedwar.htm) according to Mr. Frank Conner, “The Southern legislators could do their math; thus they knew full well that the only truly-safe way to protect the institution of slavery would be for the Southern states to remain in the Union and simply refuse to ratify any proposed constitutional-amendment to emancipate the slaves.  For slavery was specifically protected by the Constitution, and that protection could be removed only by an amendment ratified by three-quarters of the states. In 1860 there were 15 slave states and 18 free states.  Had the number of slave states remained constant, 27 more free states would have had to be admitted into the Union -- for a total of 60 states -- before an abolition amendment could be ratified. That was not likely to occur anytime soon.”

 

Not all, but the more radical Northern political elements, which had gained control of the Presidency with Lincoln, and both houses of Congress in 1860, hated the South for its prosperity, and they wanted to usurp its wealth through even higher sectional tariffs, and its state sovereignty, by radically increasing the power and far-reaching authority of the Federal government. Thus, the financially and politically oppressed Southern States had to leave … and they did. The Lincoln administration had to bring them back in or face financial ruin.

 

Understand this: When you are looking for the motivations of worldlings, look for the cash. Mammon motivates the worldling … period! The Lincoln administration and its handlers, cared nothing for the Blacks, and little about slavery. Lincoln himself favored deportation of Blacks back to Africa. They hated the monocultural (not multicultural) Christian South, and they would make her pay one way or the other! … and they did.

 

During the war, the hatred continued: For example, the vigor and zeal with which wartime atrocities were undertaken by the army of Sherman defy adequate description.

 

Dr. Thomas Dilorenzo wrote: “Perhaps the most hideous precedent established by Lincoln’s war, however, was the intentional targeting of defenseless civilians. Human beings did not always engage in such barbaric acts as we have all watched in horror in recent days. Targeting civilians has been a common practice ever since World War II, but its roots lie in Lincoln’s war.” (Recommend “The Real Lincoln”) … He continues, “The fact is, the Lincoln government intentionally targeted civilians from the very beginning of the war … As early as the first major battle of the war, the Battle of First Manassas in July of 1861, federal soldiers were plundering and burning private homes in the Northern Virginia countryside. Such behavior quickly became so pervasive that on June 20, 1862 – one year into the war – General George McClellan, the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, wrote Lincoln a letter imploring him to see to it that the war was conducted according to "the highest principles known to Christian civilization" and to avoid targeting the civilian population to the extent that that was possible. Lincoln replaced McClellan a few months later and ignored his letter.”

 

Most Americans are familiar with General William Tecumseh Sherman’s "march to the sea" in which his army pillaged, plundered, raped, and murdered civilians as it marched through Georgia in the face of scant military opposition. But such atrocities had been occurring for the duration of the war; Sherman’s March was nothing new. … In 1862 Sherman wrote his wife that his purpose in the war would be "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people" of the South. His loving and gentle wife wrote back that her wish was for "a war of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing."” (Endquote)

 

It was sheer hatred. It was hatred that the Christian cannot understand, abide, nor tolerate. How is it that these war criminals have somehow become heroes?

 

Lee Kennett, a Sherman-friendly biographer wrote: “Had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified...in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violations of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.”

 

Sherman himself admitted after the war that he was taught at West Point that he could be hanged for the things he did. But in war the victors always write the history and are never punished for war crimes, no matter how heinous.

 

The Second Point is this:

Statement #2

Reconstruction has grown well beyond the old Confederate States.

 

(Michael Peroutka) “That Lincoln destroyed Jeffersonianism in favor of an all-powerful Central Government is self evident. He set the stage for the oppressive Federal Leviathan we know today, and the presently sick state of an American Empire which has destroyed the Old Constitutional Republic. The statism and globalist orientation of Woodrow Wilson and FDR–to name two–was presupposed by what Lincoln did in the War Between the States. Di Lorenzo and Charles Adams, the author of In the Course of Human Events, both recognized and affirmed the truism that Constitutional America lost the War Between the States. … As Di Lorenzo puts it, Lincoln was the Great Centralizer and Consolidator of Federal power. Now we see the wholesale transfer of Federally usurped powers to the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Import-Export Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, NATO, and the like. We have become the classic expression of the Welfare-Warfare State. I would withdraw us from the entire mess. And I think Di Lorenzo and Adams would agree with me that Article I, Section 8 and the 10th Amendment explicitly spell out what the Federal Government of the United States is authorized to do. And outside of that, every single thing it involves itself in is specifically un-Constitutional. If we understood that, these budgetary and deficit-spending quandaries would resolve themselves. And getting the Central State out of areas that are the prerogative of the individual, the family, the Church, the Synagogue, and other voluntary associations, is the prescription for returning sanity to American government and the people whose God-given rights it should be securing.” (Michael Peroutka; http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/02/1680700.php)

Joe Sobran … “The Civil War wasn't just a victory of North over South; it was a victory for centralized government over the states and federalism. It destroyed the ability of the states to protect themselves against the destruction of their reserved powers.

Since the Constitution doesn't forbid the states to secede, the North found it necessary to violate the Constitution in order to suppress Southern independence. Lincoln was forced to usurp legislative powers by raising troops and money and by suspending the writ of habeas corpus; when Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled such acts unconstitutional, Lincoln wrote an order for Taney's arrest! He never followed through on that, but he did illegally arrest 31 antiwar members of the Maryland legislature and install a puppet government. He went on to crush freedom of speech and press throughout the North. Such was Lincoln's idea of "preserving the Constitution" and "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Joseph Sobran

 

Lincoln himself commented that, “in preserving the union, he had sacrificed the Republic.” Although the northern states had to come later to the realization, they, too, had lost their State sovereignty, and like the Southern States, after Mr. Lincoln’s War, they had become part of the American Empire with its increasingly more powerful and pervasive centralized government.

 

Mr. Nat G. Rudolph writes: “America lost the "civil war" because she lost her soul. … As to saving the Union, is that not like preserving a marriage by beating the wife into submission? The result is the humanist monster-state, and activist judges who reinvent what the constitution means. … Both sides lost!” (http://www.dixienet.org/spatriot/vol3no2/member10.html)

 

Well, you say, why is this so important? So what, State sovereignty is gone … North, South, East, and West … so what? Who cares about the usurpation of the powers of our local and state governments?

 

I have many friends who either reside in the North or who have come to the South from the North. I find it very interesting sometimes that THEY are the ones who are often at the forefront of the pro-life movements, the “Right to Bear Arms” movements, the home-school movement and the curtailment of Federal powers to those that are Constitutional for it to exercise.

 

They don’t realize it but they have an “Old South” mentality. In many cases, they are more Southern than most Southerners, although they do talk a little different!

 

Moreover, I contend strongly that if more Northern conservatives could begin to peer through the veil of tyranny; if they could just see the Confederate Cause a little more objectively; if they could somehow, by God’s grace, ignore all the Reconstructionist propaganda that the Feds have been trying to foist off on us for these 140 years now … if they could do this, real positive change might just take place in this country.

 

This brings me to my third important statement:

Statement #3

Reconstruction has not ended, but rather it continues unabated.

 

Let’s see, Does the concept of “Reconstruction” apply nationwide now, and, if so, how?

• Uncle Sam says, You’re not supposed to pray in school … In Wisconsin or Tennessee.
• Washington’s Farewell Address removed from History texts … in Maine and Arkansas.
• No Ten Commandments in the Courtroom … in Pennsylvania or Alabama.
• And they hate your symbols, Confederate and Christian, and they want them destroyed.
• Illegal immigrants continue to flood across our borders, and are not only to be given amnesty for their crime, but may obtain privileges which the government will not even grant to ordinary citizens; and all the while, your good manufacturing jobs have been shipped offshore! Have we gone completely mad? One would think so, but I assure you that there are sinister reasons for all these sorts of seemingly unreasonable machinations.
• Killin’ unborn babies is legal … in Minneapolis and Memphis, from Birmingham to Boston, from Austin to Anchorage, from Nome to New Orleans, from sea to shining sea! It wasn’t always that way. There was a time when the States and local governments controlled the public schools, the access to abortion, and the legal decisions that affect our daily lives.
• Soon, the federal bureaucrats will decide what medical care you can receive, whether or not you may own a gun (most likely NOT), and whether or not you legally can marry your same sex partner.
• They are dumbing our people down and undermining our very livelihoods. NAFTA and GATT have worked to our detriment, even as a sovereign federal entity, but that’s yet another story.

 

Listen friends, they want your guns, they want your hard earned dollars for lots of wasteful programs, they want your children’s minds (the ones that are allowed to live), they want your religion. Oh, yes, make no mistake about it (and we’ll talk much more about this subject tomorrow evening), they will regulate churches using the weapons of tax exempt status, etc. … It’s coming. It has already come to Canada and other places as well. If we speak about homosexuality from our pulpits in Biblical terms, they’ll accuse us of “hate crimes” and we pastors may wind up in jail! Pastor, are you ready for that? It is the direction that we are headed.

 

Reconstruction, you see, has much to do with the mind and the heart … it’s not limited to the outward circumstances of our lives.

(Anonymous) “Since Reconstruction, egalitarian collectivists have been preaching a situational ethic: that what was decided at Appomattox was that the Jeffersonian heritage (limited Government, States Rights and individual responsibility)--watchwords to the South, but accepted by the American mainstream, North and South--no longer applied. The Reconstructionists, in the late 1860s, and the politically correct zealots of modern America proclaim a utilitarian might makes right ethic that was and is supposed to end debate on the nature and morality of a political society.

At any time in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, that Conservatives had been willing to take up each others' causes, we could have broken the back of the Judicial Activism that has led to Federal and secular humanist control of everything in sight, simply by limiting the jurisdiction of the Federal Courts. But we were so sensitive to the propaganda of those who hate us all, that Northern Conservatives were afraid to stand by their Southern brethren in racial controversies; the business interests were afraid to stand against the legalized slaughter of the innocent; many anti-abortionists, not only afraid to stand with the South, but with the defenders of the right to keep and bear arms, or those who want to preserve traditional sex-roles or the rights of children to pray in school. It is as though we have all been mesmerized by the rhetoric of contention and hatred, leveled at each of us but with common design … We have the same choice as the Fathers. We can hang together, or we will surely hang apart. To recur to the present moment, we in the North can support our Southern allies against the assault on their heritage--and ask their support in return--or we can stand aloof and watch everything that we and they most value in this life, slowly picked apart. Our enemies are not kindly intentioned. They are persistent!” (http://pages.prodigy.net/krtq73aa/civil.htm)

 

This is the continuing legacy of RECONSTRUCTION.

 

So hear me today … Here’s the point

 

If you are a Christian, and you’re from the South, then act like it!!! YOU have been cowardly and this cowardice has encouraged and emboldened our Reconstructionist enemy. Your great-great-grandfathers WALKED home after four years of horrible war and privation, and suffered at the hands of carpetbaggers and scalawags and the Freedmans Bureau, and they held their heads up high. They were beaten militarily, but that was it … they were ultimately not broken in spirit when they declared that “The South shall rise again!”

 

Did I make you mad? Good, you need to do some reading and get really upset about a few things. But what I said is true. We do not have the soul of our forefathers. Many of us in the South are afraid to support that which we know is right. WHY?

 

• We are not knowledgeable enough about our history and heritage to defend it.
• We have been propagandized and brainwashed since our youth to believe that the Confederacy and its Cause were somehow evil.
• We are afraid that someone will point at us and call us a name, like “racist” or “bigot” or “hillbilly” “hick” or some such thing; and as soon as they do so, we’ll go running for cover with our tail tucked between our legs.

 

Well, you’re here at this conference and you’re doing something about shoring up the knowledge that you need. May God give you grace to soak it up, and further, may He give you courage to stand.

 

1.Corinthians 16:13-14

¹³Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. ¹⁴Let all your things be done with charity.

 

Well, if you’re from the North, or should I say, from the West as well or even elsewhere; I want you to know and understand that we welcome you here. (It saddened me to hear from a very good friend of mine from the North that he sometimes felt awkward around Southerners, as he felt like they didn’t accept him because he wasn’t from around here).

 

I am very interested in gaining allies among folks from other parts of the country, because I know and understand that many of you are very like-minded Christian people. I want Southerners to accept you as adopted brethren, and I want you to take an objective look at the Confederate Cause and see it clearly, with vision unencumbered by the kind of propaganda that has so hampered and intimidated folks here over the last few decades especially.

 

Let us help each other to be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might that we may withstand the Devil and all his minions. Together, we can overturn and reverse this reprehensible legacy of RECONSTRUCTIONISM which has usurped our rights as Sovereign States and as Citizens of what was conceived in 1776 as a Constitutional Republic.

 

Major R.E. Wilson, CSA wrote: "If I ever disown, repudiate, or apologize for the Cause for which Lee fought and Jackson died, let the lightnings of Heaven rend me, and the scorn of all good men and true women be my portion. Sun, Moon, Stars, all fall on me when I cease to love the Confederacy. 'Tis the cause, not the fate of the Cause, that is glorious!"

 

May God Save the Cause …

Well now we come to the religious aspect of the struggle that we face today. It is, of course, a struggle which began a long time ago. It did not begin for mankind with the War Between the States, but rather it began in the Garden of Eden. It was there that Eve was confronted by the Devil in the form of a talking serpent. He told Eve to go ahead and eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He told her that it would give her wisdom, that she would be like God, knowing good and evil; and that the only reason that God had forbidden them to eat from this tree was because of His supposed jealousy, because when they ate from THAT tree, they would be like God Himself.

 

The lie of Satan, our adversary, is the same today. Be wise in your own conceits, He says. You know what is right and wrong in and of yourself; You do not need any “God” to tell you. Forget the Bible, that old book of myths and legends and fairy-tales; just do that which “feels right” to you and you’ll get along just fine.

 

THE RELIGIOUS WAR, then, is nothing new. We have been fighting it since Adam bit into the forbidden fruit. It has manifested itself in different ways over the years and sometimes more acutely than at other times. During the 19^th Century, the forces of the Devil took aim upon the Northeastern USA with some great deal of success.

 

It is notable that this is the fertile time of deception in that place, for prior to that time, we would have to say that Christian Orthodoxy was the order of the day. After all, much of that area was settled by Puritans and others who were deeply committed to traditional Protestant values and faith.

 

But something happened. Cults began to arise. I will list some of these for you, but I will not spend too much time on this topic, because we must move on from there quickly.

 

• Jehovah’s Witnesses: Charles Taze Russell: 1870: Pennsylvania: Deny deity of Christ
• Mormon: Joseph Smith: 1820: Palmyra, NY: Deny deity of Christ (Elohim’s spirit child)
• Christian Science: Mary Baker Eddy: 1879: Boston: Deny deity of Christ
• Unitarianism: Roots in 1500s: 1805 (N. America): Henry Ware: Massachusetts (Harvard): Close kin to Universalism (explain): Julia Ward Howe and “Battle Hymn of the Republic”
• Transcendentalism: Emerson, Thoreau: 1830s – 40s: Concord, MA: Souls part of big “Oversoul”

 

These all denied the deity of Christ Jesus and all gained footholds in the USA in the 19^th century in the Northeast. It is from these heterodox and heretical religious influences that anti-Southern sentiments spawned and strengthened. These influences became more prominent in the Northern Protestant churches and whole mainline denominations began to split:

 

The Presbyterians split in 1838, Methodists in 1844, and the Baptists in 1845

ARP --- 1820

 

“Distancing the PCA from other Presbyterians in the United States, this organization envisaged itself as a successor to the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America (PCCSA), a denomination that had also formed in response to perceived heresy. Positioning itself to be the legitimate inheritor of the PCCSA legacy and that of its leading theologian James Henley Thornwell, whose writing the PCA reprinted, the PCA drew a direct connection between their denomination and the PCCSA stating an intent to “follow the pattern of the Assembly of 1861”” [Edward H. Sebesta and Euan Hague] (http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/theologyCRAS2Final.htm)

 

Well, you might say, that’s all in the past, but that past has influenced the present situation in the world and in America particularly. What is happening, and what must we do about it?

 

“Why do the left-liberals rage against the ‘traitorous’ South and its traditional culture and symbols? The stock answer has been because all that the South stands for – orthodox Christianity, honour, hierarchy, loyalty to place and kin, patriarchy, and respect for the rule of law – represents an obstacle to the left-liberals’ lust for power. This is a correct assessment, but it is only one side of the coin…. The treason of the Left involves such unconstitutional and immoral enormities as globalism – the selling-out of American national sovereignty to international agencies and interests; radical egalitarianism; feminism; sodomite rights; abortion; Third-World immigration; gun control; hate crime legislation (always meant to be used against whites); judicial tyranny; burdensome taxation; multiculturalism and diversity (code words for anti-white, anti-Christian bigotry); the universal rights of man; and other manifestations of a new brand of politically-correct totalitarianism.” [Edward H. Sebesta and Euan Hague] (http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/theologyCRAS2Final.htm)

 

Well, I have said that we are in a war, and that it is a religious war. Therefore we fight with religious weapons. Remember the words of Abraham Kuyper from yesterday:

 

"When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith."      --Abraham Kuyper

 

My friends, it is time for battle! I fear that the church today is even less well prepared for such battle than it was in the mid 19^th century. There is much work to be done, and the ranks are becoming thinner.

 

There are a few elementary doctrines that we need to grasp as a church and as a people and as a country.

 

The first one is that God is sovereign. He is in charge, and whatever rights and privileges that men have on the earth are given and ordained by God Himself. Government is not the creation of the people such that the majorities may oppress the minorities. Rather, government is the ordinance of God, and people are to be governed by the rule of His law. Moreover, in the Declaration of Independence, government depends upon the consent of the governed.

 

Thus, secondly, government must submit to God, and it must serve the people by their own consent.

 

How far we have come!!! How we have moved so far from the ideals held by the framers of the Constitution. The Sovereign States seceded in 1860-1861, because they adhered to these kinds of principles; loyalty to the Christian God and His Word, and loyalty to the Constitution which derived from His Word.

 

After the War, Robert L. Dabney wrote the following with astonishment:

 

"It is to me simply incredible, that a people so shrewd and practical as those of the United States, should expect us to have discarded, through the logic of the sword merely, the convictions of a lifetime; or that they could be deceived by us, should we be base enough to asset it of ourselves. They know that the people of the South were conquered, and not convinced; and that the authority of the United States was accepted by us from necessity, and not from preference. [snip] The people of the South went to war, because they sincerely believed (what their political fathers had taught them, with one voice, for two generations) that the doctrine of State-sovereignty for which they fought, was absolutely essential as the bulwark of the liberties of the people." (Dabney)

 

We must regain these sorts of convictions. It is not now enough for people who happen to reside or hail from the Southeastern portion of this country to accede to these Constitutional, moral, ethical, legal, and above all, Christian values … no … it is not enough. I have a far greater vision than merely that. I believe that this whole country can be turned around; that “Confederate” ought now to denote that state of mind which Dr. Dabney expressed so eloquently, and not merely a geographic orientation. I want to see Northerners, Southerners, Easterners, and Westerners getting on board with these ideas. Can this be done? Absolutely … as long as God is God it can; for even the heart of the King is in the hand of the Lord, and like rivers of water, He turneth it whithersoever He will.

 

I want liberty for all Americans. I want those principles of Christian government espoused by the Founding Fathers and defended by the Confederacy to be strengthened, for since the infamous Lincoln administration, our rights stemming from those principles have been eroding rapidly.

 

Dr. Alan Keyes (a black man) has put it well:

No future for America is lost until in your loss of conviction you throw it away. But if you are willing to stand for what is right, if you are willing to stand no matter what it looks like, no matter how bleak the predictions, behind those who look not to polls; look not to money; look not to power, but look only to the Lord our God to guide their steps, then I believe that you will stand where America needs you to stand. And that this republic, for all the danger we are in, will win through to that day, when we cannot only look back upon a heritage of liberty that has shone to inspire the world, but forward to a heritage of freedom renewed because we have not only spoken, but acted the truth that this is one nation that lives or dies not by the strength of man, but by the will of God. … [Alan Keyes]

 

We must fight where the battle rages …

 

There are many preachers out there who just wish to stay away from the controversial issues of our day for fear of giving any offense to anyone. They won’t preach about homosexuality, or covenant marriage, or abortion, or even Calvinism or English Bible Translations, because someone might be offended, but it is incumbent upon the church and the ordained men therein to provide instruction and guidance in these areas according to the dictates of the Holy Bible.

 

Dr. Kelly Hollowell writes:

“Issues such as presidential elections, Christian symbols, human cloning, abortion, gay marriage, pornography, public education, prayer in school and the Ten Commandments in government buildings are not trivial controversies, but controversies with far-reaching consequences to our way of life.

It is tragic when well-meaning people decide that Christians and their leaders have no role to play in the public square, because when we surrender on issues that are the …  standards of God we cannot maintain the life and freedoms intended by God in America. Worse, there is a deliberate and methodical movement under way to eradicate the Christian influence and presence from every vestige of life in our nation.

That means the battle to instruct, educate and contend for the faith belongs to the church and its leaders. Leaving the battle for others to fight with nothing but criticism from the complacent means we lose.”  Kelly Hollowell, J.D., Ph.D.

 

Allow me to continue this thought with a quote from Mr. Larry Beane:

 

“Like that of our Confederate ancestors, OUR generation is caught in a whirlwind of rapid change and a sense that the old ways are swiftly becoming caught in the rapid-moving stream of modernity. We too are in a war to preserve the status quo from change. Like our ancestors, we also reject the notion that all change is good, that all "progress" is an improvement, and that long-standing social, political, and economic contracts need to be abolished simply because self- declared social elites claim this to be the case.

 

But unlike our ancestors, we are not in a literal war waged with shot and shell, fought with infantry, artillery, and cavalry, executed with ‘right wheels' and ‘ready, aim, fire.' Unlike our ancestors, we are not starving and dying on a horrific battle ground in a melee of gunpowder, explosions, and the shrieks of dying men. We are not being shot at. We are not being killed. But we are in a war nonetheless.

 

We are in a war of CULTURE. Our enemies are advocates of “change.” They do not merely seek to surgically remove the elements of our culture that can and should be reformed for the better. No, our enemies seek a sudden and irrevocable revolution in the way we think, communicate, govern ourselves, and exist in the context of family and society. (Confederate Memorial Day Address by Larry Beane, Cumming, GA, 22April2000)

 

It is a War of Culture; a war of conflicting religious orientations. On one side today we have the faithful flock of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. On the other side we have both the avowed enemies of Christianity as well as those who masquerade as Christians, using Christian-sounding terminology, and attending religious services in places that they call churches. On one side we have those who know the Bible, the Word of God as their authority, and on the other we have the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, and a host of others who deny the deity and the saving sacrifice of our King and our Master Christ Jesus.

 

Yes, we must contest these heresies at every turn, we must fight where the battle rages, and less in some more distant area of doctrine. This is our duty. Fight where the attack of the enemy is the hottest! This is your clear duty, and you cannot shirk from it!

 

When activist law making judges strip Judge Roy Moore of his bench, and persecute him solely because of his insistence on the display of the Ten Commandments, we must fight. We must decry this in Scriptural terms, calling upon this country to return to the old paths. The Ten Commandments summarize that body of God’s Law from which our entire system of jurisprudence was originally derived, and yet the government now forbids its display in the courtroom. What a travesty!

 

When 200-3000 unborn babies per day may be killed in this country at the capricious whims of their own mothers, we have a duty. Especially you Christian ministers out there, you have a duty, and you’d better not shy away from it. James writes (3:1) “Be not many masters for such shall receive the greater condemnation.” If your knowledge, commitment, or courage with respect to these kinds of issues is lacking, then you’d better get out of the pulpit and find yourself a different vocation. God has promised severe consequences should you flinch and avoid His declarations about these things.

 

When the sanctity of marriage is violated by the acquiescence of our increasingly ungodly politicians to allow the “civil unions” of same sex couples, we must speak out. Moreover, when institutional clergymen (and clergy-women?!?!?) not only keep quiet, but spearhead these kinds of movements away from God’s Word, it is not enough for us to rest safe in the assurance that their judgment comes!

 

Peter wrote in 2.Peter 2:1-3 (KJV of course):

¹But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. ²And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. 

³And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.

 

We could go on and on with example after example; we could talk about our Christian Confederate flags and symbols, or School prayer, or discouraging clergy from praying publicly in Jesus’ name, or immorality and irreverence for God in the media, or the textual corruption in modern “translations” of the Bible, or the acceptance by many clergy of the supposed merit of pagan religions like Islam to save people and bring them into the grace of God; but I think you get the point. It will not always be easy to stand against heresies and gross errors. It will often times cost you something to stand firm for the infallible truth of God and His Word … but you must do it.

 

In writing about how these aberrant religious beliefs affect our political, social, and governmental environments, Dr. C. Gregg Singer made the point as follows:

 

“Political philosophies are not created in a vacuum, but are in turn the product of systems of thought which find their inspiration and nurture in Theology … A Christian world and life view furnished the basis for this early political thought … The history of this political orthodoxy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been quite a different story. It has gradually lost its hold on the American mind to such an extent that there is very little evidence of its former power in our national life today. …The disappearance of this Puritan vision … is to be found in the great changes which have taken place in American theology since the latter part of the eighteenth century. … Calvinism and evangelical theology have lost their hold on the American mind … They have yielded to various schools of Theology, nearly all liberal in their outlook. … It must be admitted that … these liberal forces in their ecumenical pronouncements and protests have not used their influence in vain. For the liberal press and their allies in Congress and other public offices have … echoed all too often the same arguments found in the ecumenical journals and statements of councils of churches. … The answer is found in the biblical view of government. The Scriptures clearly teach that human government is of Divine ordination. … Christian Theism insist(s) that government was ordained of God for man and that its just powers come from Him and not from man. … Thus, government has clearly defined powers, and operates in a clearly defined sphere” (Theol. Interpretation pp. 325-340 exc.)

 

I don’t care where you were born or where you come from today, if you hold to this kind of idea concerning a limited government according to the ordination of God as elaborated upon in His Word, then, my friend, YOU ARE A CONFEDERATE, and as such, you might as well start liking our flags and learning to sing “Dixie!” Moreover, I say “Thank God” for everyone who is a servant of the Lord, obedient to the Word, and willing to stand up for its precepts and values.

 

Ephesians 6:10-20:

¹⁰Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. ¹¹Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. ¹²For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.    ¹³Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.  ¹⁴Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; ¹⁵And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; ¹⁶Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. ¹⁷And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: ¹⁸Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; ¹⁹And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, ²⁰For which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

 

• God bless you all, and God save the Cause!!!

Note: These two works on this page are provided here in their entirety.

 

-- Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson