It's about a rightwing extremist Christianist leader, Warren Mark Campbell, pastor of the Lordship Church in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho:
“Any of you kids recognize who this is?” Campbell tells the crowd of children.
He's holding up a picture of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. He calls Lee a “great Christian general.” He praises Stonewall Jackson’s Christian leadership. He laments that people are opposed to flying the Confederate battle flag.
"We're not going to give that up to a politically correct ideology," Campbell says.
Campbell calls himself a "strong advocate of the Confederacy."
He returns to few sermon topics as eagerly as the Civil War. But he doesn't call it the Civil War. He calls the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression," or, even more dramatically, "Lincoln’s war against Christianity.”
It's a common neo-Confederate belief. The war was a battle between good and evil, they say. The South was on the side of the good, while the North was evil. Campbell compares Lincoln to Hitler, focusing on atrocities carried out by Northern generals.
Even today, Campbell preaches, the damage Abraham Lincoln did to the Union remains. He says states are “coerced at the point of the gun to remain in the Union,” comparing states’ relationship with the federal government to the relationship of a lamb in the jaws of a wolf.
He says the nation has been propagandized for the last 150 years about the Emancipation Proclamation, noting that Lincoln only initially freed the slaves in the South, not the North.
“He thought by doing this the slaves would go against their masters and against their wives and the war would end immediately,” Campbell preached in an Independence Day message. “It didn’t happen that way. Because so many blacks fought on the side of the South, because they loved their masters.”
For a moment, set aside the historical distortion of the notion that large numbers of black Southerners fought on behalf of the South. [my emphasis, internal links omitted]
No comments:
Post a Comment