For as long as I’ve been familiar with Doug Wilson, he has fought to defend himself against charges that he’s a racist. He simply mocks, as you would expect, any charge that he’s racially insensitive, but he appears to genuinely disturbed that those familiar with his work and ministry conclude that he’s a racist.
Of course, when you write the hermeneutically egregious, and largely plagiarized, “Southern Slavery As It Was,” in which you pollute Scripture by using it to defend the chattel slavery of the American South, it does raise questions. When you insist that, because you will NEVER be embarrassed by any verse in the Bible, you will doggedly defend the right of white, Anglo-Celt “Sothrens” to buy human beings, split up families, beat the men, rape the women, and trade away children with less severity than your grandchildren trade their Pokemon cards, it does raise questions — of which your being a racist is only one.
People who truly revere the Word of God will read your works and immediately wonder how it is that you, a pastor, ministry kingpin, and leader in the Classical Christian education movement, would defend a practice that bears as little resemblance to the slavery of the Old and New Testaments as a gaudy, lust-driven Hollywood marriage does to the Levirate marriage of the Old Testament. Thinking people who aren’t indebted to or controlled by Wilson, Inc., will know that the Bible explicitly condemns race-based slavery, kidnapping to obtain slaves, and the demolition of families, so they’ll wonder if, in your valiant defense of Scripture, you’ve simply embarrassed yourself in your refusal to not be embarrassed by it.
And if your co-author in that hideous endeavor, Southern Slavery As It Was, was a proud member of the racist League of the South, which works to secure a secessionist, separate State that recognizes the “Anglo-Celt” — read “white” — Christian homeland established by slaveholders, and which assures us that it would be willing, in establishing this Anglo-Celt homeland, to work with “minorities” who don’t get all victim-class whiny and such, you might find that people scratch their heads and wonder if maybe you might harbor some racist sentiments. You don’t condemn that sort of thing; if you’re Wilson, you just parse the hoary racist hairshirt by insisting that you’re a paleo-confederate, not, you know, a neo-confederate like the League of the South folks, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
You’re offered a chance to repudiate the asinine notion of an Anglo-Celt homeland only a century and a half away from building an economy on the battered backs of kidnapped children of the Creator you say you worship, and only a lifetime away from this racist “Christian” Jim Crow abomination that further humiliated them, but you don’t. You don’t.
You just remind people that you’re not a neo-Confederate, just a paleo, as if you were somehow distancing yourself from what other slavery apologists do and say. Ahhh, you say — it’s all about the history; there IS a difference. But your grasp of history is lamentable, to say the least. You call the Bible-revering abolitionists who risked their lives to proclaim the Gospel that would eliminate slavery and, perhaps, bring the South to repentance “godless, Bible-hating” Northern aggressors. You ignore clear Biblical teaching that condemns the slavery of the Antebellum South and scurry down hermeneutical rabbit trails that lead you to deny what’s clear and in keeping with the Gospel while you pluck from obscurity and an utterly different context to defend what your Bible and mine explicitly condemns: The “right” of “Christian patriarchs” to buy kidnapped persons, enslave them solely because of their race, and commit acts so egregious that your claim that the slave-holding South was a bastion of Christian virtue shames — or ought to — any thinking person with a beating heart.
Beating hearts, at least, that are not indebted to you for their livelihoods. Of course, you surround yourself with beholden toadies who dare not object, even as they’re unable to formulate a cogent defense of the indefensible things you say. That any try, in the privacy of their own hearts, is only because the reign of the Holy Spirit has not yet completely left their minds. The hearts seem strangely, sinfully, given over to you.
But you know that.
You lambast racism in strong terms — and then you bait, mock, humiliate and manipulate those who are aggrieved not only by your polluted and perverse handling of the Word of God, but who have, in their own lives, suffered from racism’s toxic effects. Witty one that you are, you wave your serrated edge to score cheap points against your accusers and adversaries — and remember, you believe a sinful world to “run” on these sorts of things, regardless of how close to home or how accurate those accusations are. Perhaps it’s because some accusations and attacks hit home for you. It could be. But your careless handling of your serrated cutlass will, in the end, result in your own evisceration. A prudent man knows that the rhetorical sword ought not be energized solely by the rapier wit of its handler.
You and your hideous co-author caught hell for Southern Slavery As It Was, and not just for its plagiarism and shoddy scholarship. So you took it down from the shelf, tucked it away, and you cranked out the slickly-printed but equally odious Black and Tan. You tidied up your “editing problems” and restated some of your worst arguments, but you insisted, as you did before, that Southern Black slaves were “better off” in what you shamefully argued was the most “harmonious” multi-racial society the world has ever seen. But better cover graphics and editing aren’t enough. You told the Church of the Lord Jesus that its Black brothers and sisters — my Black brothers and sisters — were better off, all things considered, when people like you, and people like me, bought and sold them like cattle.
I don’t believe I’ve ever called you a racist. I don’t know that you are. But I have argued that whether you are a racist or not, you are, indeed, something far worse, and I will repeat it again: You are a blight on the Church of our Lord, a troublemaking merry factionalist with nary a humble or discerning bone in your body, and are unworthy of the title of Pastor. There are other things as egregious as racism; the fruit from the tree of your ministerial entrepreneurship is rotten, and you are the life-sap that poisons it.
As you’ve said, words and ideas have consequences. You are even now reaping the consequences of the divisive, ignorant, contemptible and contemptuous things you’ve said. Manliness is important to you; would that Godliness were as well. Nonetheless, stop whining — or rejoicing — that “they” call you a racist. You seek to offend, and you rarely fail yourself. You are not the misunderstood product of the fruitless babbling of a pomosexual, modernist, godless culture, Doug. You are the product of your own fruitless babbling.
All the evidence points to your utter lack of wisdom and sincerity in dealing with race. Just once, would you take some manly responsibility and focus your energies not on why people say these awful and untrue things about you, but on why you persist in behaving boorishly and recklessly and then have the gall to wear your dishonor as a badge of pride?
I pray for your repentance. But your crocodile tears and foot-stamping over being called a racist are somewhat less than manly and considerably less than prudent. You are not a prudent man. You could be, of course. It’s less lucrative, it’s less likely to rally the troops, and it’s less in accord with your nature, but it would keep you from looking a bit less like an ass when you defend the owning of Black people and then whine about being called a racist.
Man up. You are what you say. That people draw conclusions from your words might, perhaps, someday, cause you to weigh the effect of those words. Until then, you made your bed, complete with your white sheets. It’s time to lie in it. May you do so without further embarrassing yourself and, moreover, without further embarrassing the Church from whom your harshest rebukes come.