April 30, 2011 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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Welcome to the Political Cesspool, known worldwide as the South's foremost populous radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
All right.
Welcome, my friends, to the second and third hour of the Political Cesspool, the award-winning Political Cesspool.
I'm Winston Smith, and I'm going to be your host for these next couple of hours.
James is attending to some family responsibilities, and he asked me to take over tonight.
So there'll be no racism, schmazism for the next two hours.
All right, folks.
I am very pleased to welcome to the political cesspool Pastor John Weaver.
He's been on the program a few times before, and he never fails to deliver.
We are always happy to have him on because he is always so timely.
Pastor Weaver has been in the ministry.
He was called to the ministry in 1965.
He is a much sought-after speaker.
He travels across the country preaching about the sovereignty of God and civil government, about history and southern history, constitutionalism, civil government, and practical Christian obedience.
He preaches in churches in Way Cross, Georgia, and Live Oak, Florida.
He's the circuit riding preacher, I guess you would say.
But he's a native of Georgia, and he and his wife have four children and six grandchildren.
Pastor Weaver, welcome to the Political Cesspool tonight.
Well, thank you.
It's a joy to be with you again.
I look forward to the opportunity to share tonight.
Very good.
Folks, I want you to know also that you can lay hold of Pastor Weaver's sermon material at www.dominionministry.com.
Dominion Ministry is all one word.
That's www.dominionministry.com.
It is an incredible resource of history and Christian truth.
I urge you to go there and partake of Pastor Weaver's offerings here.
Pastor Weaver, we're ending our celebration of Confederate History Month at the Political Cesspool.
Indeed, today is Confederate Memorial Day, is it not?
That is correct.
And I was at a Confederate Memorial service this afternoon and just got back in a little bit ago.
And we had a great time.
Oh, excellent.
I wish I'd been there with you.
Now, our topic for tonight is going to be the revival in the Confederate armies during Lincoln's War of Northern Aggression.
And I have in front of me now a wonderful book called Christ in the Camp by J. William Jones.
And it's about religion in the Army of Northern Virginia.
And here's what the preface says.
Any history of that army which omits an account of the wonderful influence of religion upon it, which fails to tell how the courage, discipline, and morale of the whole was influenced by the humble piety and evangelical zeal of many of its officers and men, would be incomplete and unsatisfactory.
The Army of Northern Virginia has a religious history as distinct and as easily traced as its military exploits.
So here we have a fact that religion was rampant in the Confederate armies.
But it wasn't always.
Could you tell us what the spiritual estate of America was prior to Lincoln's war?
Sure, I'd be happy to.
And by the way, it was also Pastor Moses Hoag who said it similarly when he said that trying to describe the Southern armies and the Southern generals and southern soldiers without Christianity is like trying to describe Switzerland without the Alps.
So Pastor Hoag also understood this as well.
And let me just begin by saying, before I even deal with the question that you just asked, that there are many individuals that have understood that that war was not just simply a tariff war or a war over states' rights and things like that, although those issues were involved, but they also saw it as the theological war.
There have been many scholars that have looked into the tariffs, the tariffs of abomination.
They've looked in the economics.
They've looked into states' rights, limited government, and things like that.
But let me give you just two quick quotes.
The first one is from C. Greg Singer in his book, A Theological Interpretation of American History.
And he said, after 1830, there was a growing philosophical and theological cleavage between the North and the South.
While the North was becoming increasingly subject to radical influences, the South was becoming increasingly conservative in its outlook.
Now, let me just kind of paraphrase what he just said.
The North was becoming more and more liberal, in fact, more and more Unitarian, rationalistic, while the South was holding on to the Bible and biblical Christianity.
And then there was one Presbyterian pastor who was an author and a theologian, James Henley Thornwell.
He died in 1862.
But he said this concerning the war before he died.
He said, the parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders.
They're atheist, socialist, communist, Red Republicans, and Jacumans on the one side.
He was talking about the North, and the Friends of Order and Regulated Freedom on the other.
In one word, the world is the battleground, Christianity and atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity is at stake.
So here are men that understood that there were indeed theological reasons for that war.
And certainly because of this, prior to that war, there were great divisions in our nation theologically, religiously.
What many people do not understand is when our nation first started, we basically had one people and we had one Bible in it.
And of course, there were variations as far as one might be a Presbyterian, one might be a Baptist, one might be a Methodist, something similar to that.
But yet, there was not a real division at that particular time between the North and the South.
And what we fail to realize is that originally, like, for instance, the Baptists, it was a national denomination, let me put it like that.
There was no Northern Baptist and no Southern Baptist.
They were just Baptists.
And likewise with the Presbyterians, there were no Northern or Southern Presbyterians.
They were just simply Presbyterians.
It was that way with any denomination.
However, when the abolitionists began to push the religion of abolitionism, there began to be serious divides in every one of the major denominations.
In fact, there were serious splits in all of the denominations.
You will find that the Presbyterians were the first to split.
In fact, they split, first of all, in 1837, and then they split again in 1857.
And abolitionism was certainly part and parcel of that.
And then you would also find that the Baptists, of course, went ahead and split again in 1845.
And then, of course, the Methodists split as well.
And the interesting thing is, in every one of these splits, it was abolitionism being pushed by the North that was an integral part of it.
Pastor, can you hold that down to a break now?
Can you hold that thought?
Don't go away.
The political cesspool, guys.
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And here's the host of The Political Cesspool, James Edwards.
Welcome back to The Political Cesspool.
This is not James Edwards.
This is Winston Smith, one of the co-hosts of the Political Festival.
It's my pleasure, indeed my privilege, to be talking with Pastor John Weaver of DominionMinistry.com.
That's www.dominionministry.com.
And you can also listen to Pastor Weaver's excellent sermons by going to www.sermonaudio.com.
That's www.sermonaudio.com.
And just do a search for John Weaver.
Or you can also do a search for the revival in the Confederate armies.
And that'll take you to what he's talking about tonight.
But he has so many excellent sermons on the history of the Confederacy and Confederate chaplains, everything you should know, but didn't know what you needed to ask.
All right.
Pastor Weaver, you were talking about the sorry spiritual condition of America leading up to Lincoln's war.
Please continue.
Yes.
Well, the state of the union, religiously speaking, was very, very sad because I'd already mentioned the Presbyterian church had split in 1837 and 1837, Methodist in 1844 and Baptist in 1845.
And the amazing thing, some of those men saw exactly what was happening.
And there is a very important book.
It was written by C. Gowen.
And the title of the book is Broken Church, Broken Nation.
And in that book, he documents how all of these men foresaw that when the churches were divided and cut asunder, then it would only be a matter of time before the nation was.
For instance, Charles Hodge, who was a Presbyterian theologian, who observed that abolitionism, and here's what he said, abolitionism must operate to produce the distinction of states and the division of all ecclesiastical societies.
We shall become two nations in feeling, which must render us two nations in fact.
So here Charles Hodge is saying, yes, what is happening?
Our churches are broken, and our nation is going to be broken as well.
William S. Plummer, who was, I suppose, one of the greatest of the Presbyterian pastors and theologians, says this Concerning abolitionism and the church voting on it at that particular time, he said, should the assembly legislate to decide that slaveholding is a sin, the southern churches would all feel themselves instructed by the Apostle Paul to withdraw from such, 1 Timothy 6:5.
Thus, our church would be ripped asunder, then nothing left except rent the star-spangled banner in twain.
Soon the Potomac will be dyed with blood.
Can it be that the righteous of all the earth has so dreadful a controversy with the Presbyterian Church of the United States as to give her up to the folly and madness of being the first to watch the gate that the flood of instruction rolled in?
So here are these men, some of them 30 years and 40 years before the war, understood exactly what is going to happen.
And so when that war came, it was not just simply a cultural division that existed.
It was not just an economic division and a political division.
It was a religious division as well.
And very obviously, we were in very dire straits at that particular time.
Well, culture is always the result of religion in one way or another, or it's always the result of a lack of religion.
And there are always political consequences to theological shifts.
Is that correct?
Yes, sir.
You see, you cannot have a shift in your culture without having a shift in theology.
Your theology always changes before your cultural changes.
All you have to do is look around.
My goodness, I can tell you how our culture has changed in the last 50 years.
And the reason our culture has changed is because our theology has changed.
And so when the theology was changing in the North, particularly, their culture changed as well.
And certainly anytime that happens, the South, it's the same thing.
Let's deal more pointedly with the spiritual revivals, the revivals in the Confederate armies.
Why was religion such an important part of the Confederate armies?
Well, you know, there could be an awful lot of answers to that.
You've got to remember that most of the South was made up of Scots-Irish people.
And, of course, they were always known to be believers.
They were always known to be hard fighters and warriors as well.
The South not only had more chaplains and more preachers, but there were a great many preachers that ended up as fighters and regular soldiers as well.
In fact, for instance, General William Nelson Pendleton, he was the Episcopalian bastard, and yet he was the chief of artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Dr. Robert L. Dabney, who was a Presbyterian, he was chief of staff for Stonewall Jackson.
Then you had M.P. Lowry from Mississippi.
He was a renowned Baptist preacher.
And then Lieutenant Colonel D.C. Kelly, who served on the staff of Nathan Bedrand Farm, he was a famous preacher.
That doesn't count Dadney Carr Harrison, Beverly Lacey Bucker, Moses Pope, Bishop Monk, Morgan Bomper, Dr. Quintard, all of these.
There were just so many of them.
In fact, the interesting thing is that there wasn't one regiment that was referred to just simply as the Preacher's Regiment because it was made up of mostly preachers.
So there were a lot of chaplains.
There were a lot of preachers that were not only preaching, but they were also among the men fighting as well.
I think also you can say that one reason religion was such an important part of the Confederate armies is because religion was always an important part of the southern home and of the south.
Yes, the south was an agrarian, an agrarian land.
And when you have those ties to the field and to the cycles and rhythms of nature, you are automatically tuned in to God because God controls nature.
Is that a correct statement?
Yes.
And moreover, you've got to think about this.
The South is known as being the Bible Belt.
It was the North that gave that monarch to the South.
And it was not given necessarily as a compliment.
It was given as a criticism because the North had gone into rationalism and transcendentalism.
And they were looking upon us as being narrow-minded and ignorant, superstitious, and stupid.
And so we were referred to then as the Bible Belt because we held tenaciously to the Word of God while they in the North had given up on the Word of God.
Now, you just understand, I'm speaking generally.
I'm not saying that there were no Christians in the North.
Certainly there were some.
But I'm talking about as a whole, the Unitarianism, the rationalist, transcendental movement has basically taken over the North.
And so, but the South clung doggedly to the Word of God as the only standard of faith and practice.
That is correct.
That is correct.
And in fact, I'm defending the Word of God over and over and over.
What was the result of so much religion in the Confederate armies?
How did that affect the men and how did it affect the conduct of the war?
Well, of course, when the war began, there were indeed unconverted men in the South that were soldiers as well.
And there were problems with gambling, with cursing, profanity, whatever you would like to say.
And the men were just as lost in the South as they were in the North as well.
However, we did have some Christian officers and Christian gentlemen, certainly like Stonewall Jackson, General Hugh Stewart, and so many others.
Pastor Weaver, we could stem the profanity and to stem the card and the gambling and things like that.
However, hold on, Pastor, we got to go to a break.
We have to go to break, Pastor.
On the show and express your opinion in the political cesspool, call us toll-free at 1-866-986-6397.
Welcome back.
Welcome back, my friends, to the third segment in this hour with Pastor John Weaver of dominionministry.com.
Again, that's www.dominionministry.com.
You can also listen to Pastor Weaver's sermons by going to sermonaudio.com.
That's all in Word, sermonaudio.com, and just doing a search for John Weaver.
And you can also do a search for the topic at hand tonight, and that is revival in the Confederate armies.
Pastor, you were finishing up a thought before we left on why religion was such a...
Yeah.
Go ahead. Go ahead.
I was just saying that there were a lot of unconverted men in the Southern armies as well.
But although there were all of these chaplains, all of these preachers, and they began to preach and share the scriptures.
And, of course, God sent a great awakening and a great revival.
In fact, there were two great awakenings during that particular time.
W.W. Bennett in his book, The Great Revival in the Southern Armies, and J. William Jones there in his book, Christ in the Camp.
From the chaplain's records, they have put together a figure of 150,000 men that were converted.
Now, there were indeed other men there that were already Christians, but we're talking about 150,000 men.
Barksdale's Mississippians, revival broke out in his camp, and there were men, chaplains reporting as many as 2,000 soldiers a week being converted.
And these chaplains all worked together, although they did not necessarily agree in every detail, but the Presbyterians and the Baptists all worked together as well.
And they would, if someone was converted and he wanted to be baptized simply by immersion rather than by a Presbyterian preacher, the Presbyterian preacher would take him to the Baptist over there.
And it was just absolutely amazing the cooperation they had.
There was a great amount of cooperation between the various denomination chaplains.
Yes, yes.
In fact, I read an article where it was Dr. Moses Hoag, who's a Presbyterian, who went to preach, and he was traveling there, and he only had that one particular night.
And the Baptist preacher there, who was preaching, of course, had several other nights.
So he insisted then that Dr. Hoag preach.
And the interesting thing is, there was a Presbyterian sermon with an introduction by a Baptist with a Methodist church there.
And they all worked together.
It was just that simple.
And because they all simply believe in Christ and believe in the Bible.
But here, these men were just wonderfully, wonderfully converted.
And to show you how genuine this was, it was 410 men that were converted that J. William Jones followed up on after the war.
And out of the 410, he only found three who were not continuing in the faith and living for Christ.
Now, I've got news for you.
That is a tremendous percentage of success.
So these men were not, they were not making quote-unquote decisions in a battlefield and hoping I'm just not going to die.
No, no.
They were real and they were genuine.
In fact, it was so genuine that many of those soldiers then, in turn, began to pray for those churches from whom they had come, some of them, or in their neighborhood, and they would send word back to the churches that they were asking God to send revival among those people.
So it was a real, real awakening.
Now, this was wartime, and religion had to have had an effect on the boots on the ground.
How did this religion, this great revival in the Confederate armies, translate into the soldiers' work?
Well, certainly it made them better workers.
It made them better fighters, even.
It made them better warriors.
It gave them more courage.
It gave them more strength.
gave them total and complete dependence upon the Lord.
In fact, one Yankee critic said concerning the southern preachers, he said this, that the most unmitigated set of villains they have in the South are the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian preachers all talking secession, drinking mean liquor, and advocating the cause of Jeff Davis and the devil.
It's quite a compliment.
You stop and think of the great disparity between the North and the South.
All the banking was in the North.
All the industry was in the North.
The Confederate troops were outnumbered in most battles three to one, sometimes five to one.
They were outgunned in the sense that the North had better equipment.
And yet the South won battle after battle after battle.
And the amazing thing is that the South held out for four long years.
You've got to remember when this thing started, Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for three months.
It was going to be a Sunday school picnic to come down and whip the Southerners and to make us kowtow to him.
So it's a very important thing.
We have actual proof of that in the First Battle of Manassas, don't we?
That's exactly right.
In fact, at First Manassas, when those troops came, a lot of the quote-unquote lords and ladies came from Washington, D.C., and they brought their picnic baskets and their buggies, and they spread their picnic baskets out as they were going to watch the North just simply whip the South.
But it turned out just absolutely the opposite.
And those Northern troops turned and ran back to Washington, throwing down their weapons.
And the picnic baskets were left.
Buggies were overturned.
Ladies were stranded.
I mean, it was real, a real rout and real confusion.
But they thought it was going to be a picnic.
I'd like to read the dedication from Christ in the camp.
This was by J. William Jones.
And he is a clergyman.
He's a fellow clergyman with you.
And this is what he wrote in dedicating Christ in the camp.
To my comrades and to workers among the chaplains, missionaries, and co-operators of the Army of Northern Virginia and of other Confederate armies who labored faithfully in that great harvest deal of souls.
This book is affectionately dedicated by the author in the confident hope that as we cherish hallowed memories of those days of toil but of precious blessings, so we will over there enjoy sweet communion with each other as we shall talk over the wonderful manner in which Christ was in our camp to save the penitent, to strengthen the true Christian, and to make even battlefield and hospital bright and glorious by his presence.
Pastor, I have to ask you, how does it feel being from that pedigree?
And I say that with full confidence that you are of the same strain.
How does it feel reading words like that from one of your fellow ministers?
Well, it makes you thankful, and at the same time, it makes you humble.
But it just shows you what the grace of God can do.
If you would continue to reading in Christ in the camp and also W.W. Bennett's book, they will tell of the common everyday soldier, of one man who was sent up particularly on the front line as a sniper.
He was there, he was being shot at.
When he ran out of ammunition, he just laid his rifle down, took out his pocket testament, and lay there and read the Bible as bullet whizzed fine.
Never got up, never tried to move, just lay in the same spot and read the Bible.
There's another incident in that book in Christ in the camp where one man is preaching and all the soldiers are there sitting up on stumps and logs.
And he said, you know, he said, I just, the artillery shells are coming in.
I believe that we should move over to the left a little bit.
And so he stopped his sermon.
He got all the men to move over to the left.
He started back preaching.
And just as he did, a cannonball came and burst exactly where they had been sitting.
But they kept right on preaching.
Unbelievable.
Once you get a southern minister going, it's hard to stop him.
That's a fact.
Once again, folks, we're talking with Pastor John Weaver of Dominion Ministry.com, www.dominionministry.com.
And you can also hear his sermons at sermonaudio.com.
The topic tonight is revival in the Confederate Army.
And we've talked about the state, the spiritual state of America leading up to Lincoln's War.
We've talked about why religion was such an important part of the Confederate Army.
And we talked about the effects of religion upon the soldiers doing the actual fighting.
Welcome back to get on the political cesspool.
Call us on James's Dime, toll-free, at 1-866-986-6397.
And here's the host of The Political Cesspool, James Edwards.
Cesspool with you, and we've been talking for the past hour with Pastor John Weaver for the past hour.
A little tongue twister there.
And we've been talking about religion in the Confederate armies.
It's a glorious subject.
And once again, I would like to encourage you to go to www.dominionministry.com, www.dominionministry.com.
That's where you can lay hold of Pastor Weaver's sermon materials, CDs, DVDs, MP3s, literature, I think.
You can also hear his sermons by going to sermonaudio.com, sermonaudio.com.
Pastor Weaver, it's been an excellent hour, but we still have, what, maybe 10 minutes left to go.
So let's jump right into it.
What effect should this knowledge have on we southerners today?
Know that we know what kind of men our gallant forebears were.
What sort of effect should this have on us today?
Well, the answer is, I believe it should not only humble us, but at the same time, it should make us want to emulate them.
We have no idea what all we have lost.
We've lost our history.
Yes, we've lost our heritage.
And the problem is, most people are totally ignorant of their history.
They're ignorant of the Bible.
And consequently, they're ignorant of their forebears as well.
But these people were not compromisers.
These people had character, they had convictions, they had courage, and they were not willing to surrender any of it for any government.
They were not willing to give up their inalienable rights.
They were not willing to sacrifice one principle.
No, they were willing to fight for that which was right.
For instance, Francis S. Bartow of Savannah, when there was a piece of legislature that might spare Savannah during the war, but it would involve a compromise.
Francis Bartow said this, let desolation come, if it must upon Savannah.
Let every ship line or port and rot.
Let commerce go to ruin for a season.
That he, Francis Bartow, would never give a vote that compromised the dignity, the fair fame, and the honor of Georgia.
And of course, there was a flaws everywhere when he said that.
So here's the man.
He says, look, I don't care about the economics.
I don't care about this.
What I care about is principle.
And so we find that our forefathers, they always chose virtue over vice and morality over money and conviction over compromise.
They chose principle over prosperity.
And when you stop and think where we are today, we have lost so much character.
We have basically turned into a characterless people and can't depend upon anyone or what they say.
Back in those days, they believed indeed a man's word was his bond.
They believed in honor.
They believed in courage and righteousness.
And I'm just simply saying, if we want what those people had, we're going to have to go back and stand where they stood, and that's upon the word of God.
Pastor Weaver, I have a theory, and it goes like this.
We see our land being taken from us on a wholesale basis.
We see all that is good in our culture.
And I'm talking about Southern culture here, but we see our Southern culture being trampled on today.
And worse than that, we see young people not really caring that it's happening.
Maybe it's because they're ignorant of their history.
Maybe it's because they feel defeated.
Maybe they are just distracted.
But my theory is this.
We are losing our land.
We are losing our culture because we have failed to honor the people who gave their all back in 1861 through 1865.
And God's fifth commandment says, honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
We are losing our identity.
We're losing our land because we do not honor those people.
Am I right?
Well, I would certainly say yes.
That's got to be part and parcel of it.
But you look at our young people that are so ignorant of history.
How in the world can you want to restore that which you're totally oblivious of and ignorant of?
Let me point out something else.
And this is in line of what you're saying.
You look at all the Confederate monuments.
You look at the attack upon the Confederate battle flag.
And by the way, that flag had absolutely nothing to do with slavery.
No slave ever came into this country under that battle flag.
That battle flag was not even, it did not even come into existence until after July of 1861 after First Manassas.
So it's not a flag of slavery.
It had nothing to do with anything like that.
But have you ever stopped to think why is it that everybody's got to hate the battle flag?
They have to hate Confederate monuments.
They have to hate Confederate history.
They have to hate everything Confederate.
Here's why.
Because if we ever stop and think, well, what does that battle flag really stand for?
What do those monuments really represent?
And we start thinking and we start studying and we find out that, you know, we used to be a free people.
We used to have liberty.
We used to have a life that was without tyranny and oppression and persecution.
And now all of a sudden, we want some of that back since we understand what those monuments and what that flag and those temples really and truly mean.
And so consequently, they want to keep everyone in absolute ignorance.
And yes, you're right.
But how can you honor someone when you don't even know them or you know nothing about them?
And when God says, honor thy father and thy mother, he went also and said, thou shalt rise up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man.
And so very obviously it includes honor to those men who fought and suffered and died as well.
God would also remind us that what he said a long time ago, he said, my people perish for lack of a vision.
And part of having a vision for the future is having a correct and solid understanding of the past.
And we don't have that partly because of laziness and in a good measure because of just plain old evil people like Rabbi Shmuly Botik, who not long ago penned an article called The Sin of Confederate Hero Worship, in which he lamented the Monument Avenue there in Richmond.
And he pretty much demanded that white southerners disown their Confederate forebears.
And so here we have this guy telling us to blatantly violate God's fifth commandment.
And there are people, Pastor Weaver, who will listen to him.
After all, the guys had a television show on the Learning Channel, and they will take him seriously.
And, Pastor, I'm not a minister.
I'm not a preacher.
But, you know, one of the first lessons of the Bible is that when some creature tells you to break God's commandment, you should not listen to that person or that creature.
Am I right?
That's correct.
That's correct.
So we have this problem here.
We know how to go about correcting it.
What resources would you recommend?
Well, certainly your sermon.
Buy everything that Lloyd Sprinkle publishes.
Oh, yeah, by the way.
Yes, Sprinkle Publications in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Yeah, because he's got the greatest theological works as well as the greatest historical works.
And if you really want good and get good and angry, read The South Was Right by the Kennedy Brothers.
Also read Thomas J. DeLorenzo's book, The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked.
And if you really, really want to get angry and upset, you need to read the book of War Crimes Against Southern Civilians by Brian Sisko.
I would also recommend that they get a hold of Sprinkle Publications and lay hold of the volumes called Dabney's Discussions.
There were four volumes originally, and I think Pastor Sprinkle has published two more.
And they are the thoughts of one of the premier theological and political thinkers of the South.
Have you read those?
Yes, I have those, and they're in my library, and I like Mr. Dabney very greatly.
So do I.
He was a man that understood.
And once you read what he says about public education, about the feminist movement and all of this, it's unbelievable everything that man saw way back then.
He talked about public education and the ills it would bring about.
He talked about what he called women's rights, women's life.
Well, Pastor Weaver, thank you very much for your time.
We have to go now.
Believe it or not.
All right.
It's joy to be with you.
Take care.
Thank you, Pastor.
God bless you.
Right after these messages.
Behold the rise in summer, and it's been the ruin of many a poor boy.