Columnist Nick Gier (Daily News, April 18) has assembled something of a laundry list of complaints about Christ Church, complaints that go back years, or even decades. Although I would prefer not to write in such a staccato fashion as I do below, I think that is probably the best way to answer the objections that were raised. Please bear with me.
Nick says that my father wrote “Principles of War” in 1991, which is off by about 25 years. My father wrote it in the 1960s, when I was a boy.
Nick then juxtaposes an article we published by Greg Dickison — which defended the justice of the Mosaic code — with my comments at the town hall the other night, where I said that we were interested in persuasion, not coercion. Anyone truly interested in what I believe about capital offenses and biblical law can read an article entitled “Old Testament Law,” which can be found at dougwils.com. The search bar will turn it up for you.
He then brought up the time a number of us went to Tri-State during the Most Unnecessary Masking Panic. My daughter had called Tri-State to talk to someone there in managerial authority. My daughter told them that she always shopped for Christmas presents at Tri-State, but didn’t want to wear a mask. She was told to please come, the city council was being dumb, this thing is killing us, etc. So I organized some of our people, not to “storm” Tri-State, but rather to go and within a very short space of time bless them with thousands of dollars’ worth of sales. (We did this for another store which shall remain nameless, and they were most grateful.) But this time, a masked customer made quite a scene about it, with the result that Tri-State closed. All in all, it was quite a failure, but it was a failed attempt to bless a business that was being harmed by our city council.
On the “Topless and Proud” April Fool prank, I am afraid that I cannot take credit for it, as it was the work of an ingenious colleague. And although it was a prank, it did reveal the bankruptcy of much modern scholarship. A poster that promised a topless feminist lecturer talking about “breasts as embodied intuitions,” and people thought it was for real?
Nick’s point about the “Southern Slavery” booklet is a farrago of confusions. My co-author is not a neo-Confederate and neither am I. The point of the booklet was that slavery was the kind of institution that should have been subverted by following biblical instructions, instead of through a bloody war that killed 600,000 men. Nick cites two UI professors who responded with a “devastating” critique of the booklet, but I will call and raise him Eugene Genovese, one of America’s premier historians on that era. Genovese read and made suggestions on my follow-up book, “Black & Tan,” and even provided a blurb for it. He said, among other things: “His (Wilson’s) grasp is a great deal stronger than that of most professors of American history, whose distortions and trivializations disgrace our college classrooms.” And where Nick got the idea that I wrote the governor in order to get the UI professors fired, I am sure I will never know — I did no such thing.
And the citation problems discovered by Robert T. McKenzie were a real problem, unlike the other problems mentioned above. “Time on the Cross” was repeatedly and accurately cited by my co-author, Steve Wilkins, but some of the citations were mistakenly stripped during the editorial process. But McKenzie was exactly right, and this is why the booklet was immediately pulled. The material that I had contributed to “Southern Slavery” was then reworked, chapters were added, and “Black & Tan” was published. People who are interested in a fruitful exchange of ideas should interact with “Black & Tan,” which is rarely done, instead of going after “Southern Slavery,” which did have real citation problems. As I said the other night at the town hall, a mark of fanaticism is when people won’t let you agree with them.
I am glad that Nick acknowledged this much in his conclusion. At this town hall, Wilson “condemned the atrocities that happened, and he also rejected southern slavery as an ‘ungodly system.’ ” As we said in the original booklet, we are in no way prepared to defend the indefensible.
The town hall meeting was taped, and should be available soon.
Wilson is pastor of Christ Church in Moscow.
