Doug Wilson: The Ugly

 By Wes Bredenhof

In the first part, we looked at what could be regarded as commendable. In the last instalment, we looked at some of the doctrinal concerns with Wilson. In this final instalment, it’s time to face some of what’s scandalous and ugly.

This is going to be the longest and most controversial of the three posts. There’ll be those who think I’m mud-slinging. They’ll say I’m taking Wilson’s words out of context. I’ll do my best to present facts, as well as giving assessments of those facts. The reason I’m doing this is because, when considering Wilson’s influence, we do also have to consider the outcomes of his life. Is he blameless? Is there a pattern of unwise behaviour that might warn us away?

Southern Slavery

There is an infamous quote from a book written by Doug Wilson and Steve Wilkins, Southern Slavery As It Was. This quote has been circulated around for years:

Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its predominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. The credit for this must go to the predominance of Christianity. The gospel enabled men who were distinct in nearly every way, to live and work together, to be friends and often intimates. This happened to such an extent that moderns indoctrinated on ‘civil rights’ propaganda would be thunderstruck to know the half of it. Slave life was to [the slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes and good medical care. In spite of the evils contained in the system, we cannot overlook the benefits of slavery for both blacks and whites . . . Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.

In a 2020 blog post, Wilson appeared to retract some of these statements. He wrote:

…while there were many instances within American slave-holding in which many blacks and whites did have genuine and godly affection for one another, we cannot say it was characteristic of the institution as a whole… we can surmise that American slavery was a wicked institution on the whole because God brought a cataclysmic judgment against the entire nation because of it.

In that same blog post, he says that the book Black & Tan contains his more recent thinking on the issue. And he doesn’t retract anything from that book. In Black & Tan, Wilson wrote:

The issue is whether a Christian man could have lawfully owned a slave in 1850 America without being necessarily guilty of a moral outrage. Was slave ownership malum in se, an evil in itself? The answer to that question, for anyone who believes the Bible, is that it was possible for a godly man to own slaves, provided he treated them exactly as the Scripture required. (p.69)

Was southern slavery a wicked institution? Well, if so, how was it possible for a godly man to partake in that institution without any moral culpability?

I’m a Canadian living in Australia. I really don’t understand how difficult it should be to just categorically condemn American slavery as evil and move on. Why all the waffling? But in the United States there’s this phenomenon known as Neo-confederacy. It’s a movement which believes the south was on the right side of the Civil War. Neo-confederates pine for the old south and its values. Wilson has been known to run among them and that’s why it seems he gets caught up in controversy over slavery.
 

Continue here.