By Ehud Would

I recently received a private communique from an OPC minister grappling with the Marxist bent of his son’s “Christian school”. Yes, you read that right. Christian schools are now but another mouthpiece for Marxist zeitgeist. Incredible as that is.

Since my response reiterates the content of the pastor’s letter, I have here omitted the original in favor of my reply.

 

“I’m sorry to hear [your son] has this stuff coming his way. But I’m glad you’re not just rolling over to the secular narrative.

Subsection A:1 posits an audacious falsehood — that only Blacks were subject to slavery in America.

Fact is, most slaves in America were White/British, not Black. What’s more, in colonial times more Whites came to these shores as slaves than as free men. These matters have been lately reprised by books like White Cargo by Jordan and Walsh and They Were White and They Were Slaves by Hoffman. But you can also find these things taken for granted in pre-civil rights cinema like the 1947 epic Unconquered, which opens with the British heroine being sentenced to slavery in the American colonies, and depicts a mass trade in White slaves. It’s actually a great film and available for free on Youtube.

A:2 stating that most slaves in America were held indefinitely is also proven false by the fact that the colonial laws stipulated White slave terms could not exceed a seven year tenure. Which followed biblical law on the subject of keeping slaves of your own folk (Exo. 21:2).

But it is true per Leviticus 25: 44-46, that slavery was treated as a lifelong proposition for Africans, albeit subject to manumission at their masters’ discretion.

And A:3 is false also. It was not the result of buying “stolen” Africans. Much has been written on the fact that slavery under the African chiefs was the native condition of their race from time immemorial. So much so that slaves have been described as the historic currency of Africa. Their chieftains were then, as many are still, most enthusiastic slave-traders. 

Most of the trade from the 15th through 19th centuries was run by the African kingdom of Dahomey. They typically sold their slaves to Arabs in the East and Jewish-owned merchant fleets in the West. The latter of whom, by their control of institutions like the bank of London, compelled deals with the governments of European states to flood markets of the New World with African labor (corporations and banks are still doing this with Mexican labor in America today). That’s where White Christians enter the chain of custody — at the very end. 

Regardless, the Africans cannot credibly be described as ‘stolen’ in any sense. They had always been slaves. 

Section B dealing with the Middle Passage is a mixed bag. It was no doubt hellish but even the highest tallied death rates on those ships (13-25%) are roughly on par with the death rates of Whites en route from Europe at the time. Passenger sea travel was very dangerous, no matter your race.

As an aside, even when we compare the life expectancy, health, and fecundity of Black slaves with “free” Whites in Boston and London at the time, the slaves had far better quality of life. 

And B:1(c) is also misleading. While it is true that America banned the slave trade in 1808, the Virginia House of Burgesses banned the trade in 1778, making the government of Virginia (the seat of Southern civilization) the first legal body on earth to ban it! Dabney covers this subject in depth in chapter 2 of A Defense of Virginia and the South.

The federal ban in 1808 was logistically downstream from the British ban in 1807 because of so much intertwined property and trade in the rum isle plantations.  

Section 3 is also truth mingled with lie. While Southern Christendom maintained property in domestic slaves by biblical law, the record shows they opposed the import of those slaves virtually from the beginning.  In essence, they were trying to make the best of a bad situation. If the banks were dumping African cannibals on the labor market here Americans would take measures to defend our women and children from them. Domestic slavery was the restraint used to prevent the rape and mass murder of a Christian folk.

Over against which history shows anywhere that Black Africans were not so restrained, they genocided the White populations near them.  

While differing on the means of their release (immediate federal release vs. gradual manumission), Christians North and South agreed on one thing — that the African populace would eventually have to be repatriated to Africa or resettled somewhere apart from our nation. The African repatriation societies were from the outset a who’s who of the Founding fathers and Reformed clergy.

It is a forgotten bit of trivia today but Abraham Lincoln’s second term was largely determined by a popular hope to see Africans all deported.  

Of course, liberal zeitgeist hates these sentiments, but these were the perspectives of our Colonial/Reformation era fathers.

I’m sure I’ve said much you’d rather not relay to [your son’s]  teacher, but I hope I’ve helped somewhat.

Postscript:
As to the price Americans paid to end slavery — yes, in one sense, we paid more than any nation to end it by far.

But in another sense, that cost was merely paid to transform the institution from a biblically oriented domestic slavery to a communistic federal slavery.

In my opinion it is both. We paid the most and got a worse outcome for that strife.”

 

Perhaps the most unusual thing about this is that it isn’t so unusual. Truth is, I receive these sort of “messages by night” with some regularity.

Why do they come to me? I don’t think it has to do with me, personally. I’m not that special. But against the backdrop of an advancing Marxist zeitgeist, Kinism is special.

The Kinist vantage alone holds consistent remedy to these questions. And that, for the simple reason that Kinism is the orthodox Christian worldview.

And when push comes to shove, many such elders who would not otherwise associate with Kinism, find themselves turning, albeit discreetly, to the Kinists for help against some dimension of Cultural Marxism.

I mean, otherwise, why not take counsel from the elders in their own congregation, session, or presbytery? Clearly, because they know they will find little in the way of answers or aid there. More likely, they’ll find themselves rebuked for gainsay of the zeitgeist. Or even indicted.

At present, any with a modicum of Christian worldview are subject to bouts of “values vertigo” because we so frequently find our own courtyards permeated by the alien ethos. If the majority reflexively recoil from discussion of the intersection of ethos and ethnos, some occasionally perceive that their ethnos is in the cross-hairs of zeitgeist precisely because of its historic association with the Christian ethos. And that epiphany has led to scales falling from many an eye.

So contend with those vigorously who won’t come in out of the rain, but keep a candle in the window so your battered brother can find his way home through the dark and stormy night.