Comments

The "last thing" they want to be is a Patrick Henry? Does that mean they would take being a secular Harvard/Princeton/Yale before being a Patrick Henry?

Sounds like institutional rivalry/jealousy.

What a silly question to ask, Kristen. The whole enterprise is a divisve "we are right--you are wrong" mentality. That is the entire raison d'etre of both schools. Why are you advocating that they partner up? Is CT turning into a theonomist publication now?

Funny how the President of NSA favors execution of adulterers. I thought Jesus settled that question long ago when he attended a stoning party and spoiled all the fun.

I wonder what the NSA folks think of CT.

Considering the abuse Patrick Henry has received in the main stream press over the years, any reactions to this NYTM article about NSA ought to be approached with considerable caution and charity before our Christian brothers and sisters start jumping to conclusions.

The context to the comments about Patrick Henry and Liberty U. published in that icon of objective and unbiased news, the New York Times, was not one of rivalry, but one of emphasis. PHC wants its students to enter government and change American politics. That's not New Saint Andrews's mission. The NYTM article's author asked the questions, but the article offered our answers without the context and thereby suggested rivalries that are not there.

New Saint Andrews College has different goals for its students than Patrick Henry and Liberty University, it's true, but we still respect them and consider them sister institutions. We certainly don't see them as rivals.

All of us at NSA have high regard for PHC and Liberty. I have had the pleasure of visiting PHC and interacting with its administration, faculty, staff and students several times. I have, in fact, served on both of their accreditation site teams. As a College we have prayed for them and wish them God's best.

The NYTM article wrongly suggested otherwise. We are different schools with some different emphases and goals for our students. But we are each united to one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and so are inseparably linked as sister institutions of Christian higher education.

I'd ask you all be more guarded and gracious in your responses to the article for the sake of Christ and his Kingdom. Let us not create strife between brothers and sisters where none exists.

Blessings,
Roy Atwood
President, New Saint Andrews College

I know nothing of New St. Andrews College, except what I've just seen on their website. As a militantly moderate (in my mind anyway) Methodist, I'm not initially impressed.

To me, the wit who called communism "secular Calvinism" was on to something. Both secular and sectarian Calvinsims seem unbelievably tedious and self-righteous.

I have the 30 Sept. NYT Magazine, but haven't read it yet. I just finished the NYT Book Review on the way to work this morning. I was going to read the October Scientific American on space exploration and consciousness during tomorrow's commute, but I'll catch the NYT Magazine piece instead.

I did internet explore Patrick Henry College a few years ago. The college looked rather silk-tie style neo-confederate to me. They even had creepy looking, antebellum style Cotillions, if you can believe that. At that time anyway, they seemed nonplussed on why the college didn't seen to attract much Black student interest.

I'd also like to know who linked Reformed theologian Cornelius Van Til to the idea that it is impossible for Christians to reason with non-Christians, and the nonsense written immediately after. Did somebody from NSA say that? Or was it ignorance or carelessness on the part of the New York Times writer? Yes, I know the founders of reconstructionism "credit" Van Til for their movement, but most scholars believe he envisioned nothing of the sort.

Speaking of neo-confederate, the Hatewatch blog of the Southern Poverty Law says that Doug Wilson wrote an eyebrow raising slavery apologetic called "Southern Slavery, As It Was," for starters.

I'm not sure I would want to live in Wilson's civilization, which doesn't sound all that civilized to me.

An internet search of the book brought up some very interesting hits, and one does wonder why this widely covered controversy wasn't brought up in the NYT piece.

I see a NSA magazine issue, Credenda, on the topic of Black Confederates. I don't think it's up to scholarly standards, but I'm an artist (who works in academia), not an academic.

However, I see this Wilson quote in NYT Magazine article, which I have in front of me now. This says it all, and it's all pretty pathetic. "They (Idaho conservatives) voted for Bush, I voted for Jefferson Davis."

Even with the omission of the slavery apologetic controversy, anyone can read between the lines of the NYT piece anyway. NSA apparently is...just another organization to keep the Lost Cause alive, the cause that should stay lost, and has never been lost enough.

I would suggest that CT should be careful, more careful than Hatewatch says of the NYT, anyway, in its coverage of New St. Andrews.

I have known Doug Wilson and even attended his church before it morphed into the ultra-Calvinist entity it is now. I personally can say he never impressed me as a person who is racist or homophobic. His publications and public statements are curious and hard to defend, though.

Doug has a knack for saying off the cuff (off the wall?) comments that really push other peoples buttons. This partly explains the animus he creates in many of those who disagree with him. One would think that after being in the public eye for so long he would learn to be a bit circumspect about what he says.

My impression of NSA and the associated neo-reform movement is that it very ingrown intellectually and they are contemptuous of the rigors of peer review with their scholarship. They tend toward legalism, and their appearance and manner seems affected. Their theology is very exclusionary and their impact has been to divde and demoralize the christians that reside in Moscow ID with them.

Serious error in exegesis here; "the last thing we'd want to be is PHC" is not equivalent to "we don't like PHC". It means, rather, that "we don't want to be PHC" or "we have a different philosophy."

More directly to the point, it doesn't mean that there is a rivalry, but rather that there is a difference of viewpoints. PHC engages the government first and the culture second; NSA aims to engage the culture first, and the government through the culture. People at each would most likely rejoice if the other succeeds at their goal, even though they might disagree with the method chosen.

I'm kinda surprised that Christianity Today didn't bother contacting either school prior to writing this. I'm trying to figure out how this isn't the journalistic equivalent of gossip. Something negative that one person says to one audience, picked up on by someone else, and repeated to another audience. It would be nice if Christian journalists sought to reverse this divisive trend in journalism instead of buying into it hook, line, and sinker.

Greg, the mixed blessing of the internet is that anyone can post pretty much anything. Unfortunately that means that your wacko's can post alongside levelheaded types. I hope you take everything you're 'internet searching' with a grain of salt.

I trust the Southern Poverty Law Center's information. If they say something is hateful, it's very probably hateful. What the danger level of that hate is...?

It was not the SPL Center who put out that dubious Credenda issue on "Black Confederates" and it's out of context, manipulative quotes, but New St. Andrews itself. This also inspires confidence in the "...I voted for Jefferson Davis" quote from the New York Times Magazine.

Having gone to a small university on the edge of the so called "Bible Belt," I did learn something on how the Lost Cause mind works. What an eyeopener that was.

Which is why I no longer pay much attention to the nice, agreeable and respectable things conservatives say, but the "off the cuff" remarks, like voting for Jefferson Davis, that show their most dangerous delusions. Of course, that makes me wonder about what dangerous delusions I might harbor, but don't recognize.

I am amused at the great lengths folks like SPLC’s Potok and you go to try to make folks out to be hatemongers, when such false accusations are the very definition of hatred biblically speaking. The repetition of SPLC’s false accusations by you or Potok does not make them true. And even if the claims were true about Doug Wilson, which they are not, they would not apply to New Saint Andrews or have relevance to the NYTM story. To play along with the McCarthiesque environment you’re creating, let me say for the record, Senator, that New Saint Andrews College and its faculty members are not now nor have they ever been members of a racist or “neo-confederate” organization. Heck we’re not even members of the Communist Party.

As a former professor and administrator at the University of Idaho, a visiting professor at Egerton University, Kenya, and a Senior Fulbright Professor at North-West University, South Africa, I find it no surprise that the folks at SPLC or similar accusers have never contacted me, as president of NSA, for my views or charged me personally with racism.

Moreover, from our very first class of students to the very first graduate (an African American) to our open admission to students from any nation, race or ethnicity, our multi-racial, multi-ethnic College community is a living testimony against these false, damnably false accusations. (BTW, we currently have students from Iraq, Ivory Coast, West Africa, Korea, and more). (continued)

Good grief, Potok can’t even spell the name of the college correctly (it’s not Saint Andrews, but New Saint Andrews). And you can’t even get other small details right: the College does not publish Credenda and never has.

Just as Potok has never visited the College, and in fact, refused our invitation to do so. All his so-called “sources” are secondary ones that include the same tiresome group of extremist pro-homosexual liberals in Moscow who have hated Doug Wilson for years because of his biblical opposition to homosexuality (and on that point, most of us are eager to stand arm in arm with Nigeria’s Bishop Akinola). Potok and his “sources” have been willing to extend any available slander to New Saint Andrews on a purely guilt by association basis for the same reason. But by that logic, his former philosophy professor and critic Nick Gier must be a racist, CT must be a racist magazine for publishing Wilson’s online debate with Christopher Hitchens, etc.

For those seriously interested in reading what I have publicly written about racism and bigotry, on behalf of the College—in my own words, not filtered second-hand--please see my “Open Letter” published on our website: (http://www.nsa.edu/news/Open%20letter.html). Also, check out Senior Fellow Doug Jones’s booklet, “The Biblical Offense of Racism” (http://www.canonpress.org/shop/item.asp?itemid=389&catid=) and Doug Wilson’s published response to these kinds of bigoted charges in his book, “Black and Tan” (http://www.canonpress.org/shop/item.asp?itemid=802&catid=). (continued)

You and SPLC may have wanted it the other way, but the NYT story was about NSA, not Doug Wilson. Even the NYT can clearly distinguish between the two, and they realized early on how our local hatemongers and national critics are trying to smear anything associated with Wilson. So they rightly ignored the nasty little smear campaign.

Yes, more careful journalistic research is always needed and New Saint Andrews can always improve what it does. But we have no need to repent of racism and “neo-Confederate” leanings because there aren’t any. The NYT did a credible (not perfect) job of reporting on NSA. You and the SPLC source are the ones who need to do better research before you write more about New Saint Andrews. Repent of bearing false witness. And consider offering an apology for your defamatory comments. It would do wonders for exorcising all that hatred in your soul.

Roy Atwood

Sorry, but this should have appeared between my previous two posts:

Just as Potok has never visited the College, and in fact, refused our invitation to do so. All his so-called “sources” are secondary ones that include the same tiresome group of extremist pro-homosexual liberals in Moscow who have hated Doug Wilson for years because of his biblical opposition to homosexuality (and on that point, most of us are eager to stand arm in arm with Nigeria’s Bishop Akinola). Potok and his “sources” have been willing to extend any available slander to New Saint Andrews on a purely guilt by association basis for the same reason. But by that logic, his former philosophy professor and critic Nick Gier must be a racist, CT must be a racist magazine for publishing Wilson’s online debate with Christopher Hitchens, etc.

For those seriously interested in reading what I have publicly written about racism and bigotry, on behalf of the College—in my own words, not filtered second-hand--please see my “Open Letter” published on our website: (http://www.nsa.edu/news/Open%20letter.html). Also, check out Senior Fellow Doug Jones’s booklet, “The Biblical Offense of Racism” (http://www.canonpress.org/shop/item.asp?itemid=389&catid=) and Doug Wilson’s published response to these kinds of bigoted charges in his book, “Black and Tan” (http://www.canonpress.org/shop/item.asp?itemid=802&catid=). (continued)

The issue of the college's Credenda magazine on Black Confederates says all that needs to be said on the college's standard of scholarship and it's tokenist approach to appearances instead of substance on matters of racism.

Credenda also lends support to what the SPL Center published. The offensive slavery apologetic booklet is for sale on Amazon, way overpriced for some reason.

(My extended family, neighborhood and workplace, if it matters, are all multicultural/interracial/gay/straight, so I'm maybe a little more sensitive on racism than many. I don't apologize for loving my neighbors, coworkers and family.)

The Black community in the US is huge and diverse. One Black person doesn't make an institution immune to charges of neo-confederate activism among it's powers that be. Wilson is obviously quite active and powerful within NSA, as witness the Credenda magazine and the NYT Magazine report. Credenda came up after just a simple google search. What else would a seriously skilled researcher find?

I'm sure there is no overt racism at NSA, people usually know their multicultural manners these days, and conservative people who don't go looking for racism will probably be happy not to have it rubbed in their faces these days.

Nevertheless, having a peculiar institution defending, neo-confederate founding father who is still quite active and influential in the institution, brings no kudos from me. NSA should, in a very public manner, distance itself from Wilson and denounce neo-confederate activism...and I still won't approve, as I don't approve of Calvinism in general...but I'd have some grudging respect.

Calvinism and neo-confederate activism...sounds like an interesting book topic, if someone has the time. I don't.

I think, just from quick internet research impressions, that they're very much intertwined, and the last bastion of pro-slavery Christian Reconstuctionist influence (I've read Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law...beyond disgusting. CT did a major expose some time ago.)

How is neo-confederate Calvinism, influencing, if it is, Calvinist institutions in general? AT NSA anyway, I think I have a reliable answer...too much.

"Pro-homosexual" is wrong. The proper phrase is "Pro-Gay." Refusing to call groups by their preferred names is a kind of hate mongering in itself.

"The College will neither participate in nor endorse any event in which racism is supported or racial slavery—past or present—is condoned."

You haven't condemned slavery, here, but "racial" slavery. That's not enough. In this country, you know the two are intertwined, so is this is meant to appear to condemn slavery, without actually doing so?

The Bible doesn't condemn slavery, Jesus did not condemn slavery, Paul did not condemn slavery, just slave sellers, the used car salesmen of the day; even the Ten Commandments condone slavery, as antebellum slavery apologists pointed out...but nevertheless, moral people today condemn slavery in every form...or at least my Methodist Book of Discipline says to do just that. Of course, Methodism, so potent in modernist days, is a dwindling movement in these post-modern times...so maybe the Book of Discipline can be dismissed?

"...tiresome group of extremist pro-homosexual liberals in Moscow who have hated Doug Wilson for years because of his biblical opposition to homosexuality."

There is no Biblical opposition to "homosexuality," a Victorian era science word and a rather obsolete concept in today's social sciences...and a word almost exclusively used today by extremist conspiracy theorists...(I know, I'll apologize if you will.)

On the other hand, antipathy is a kind of opposition, I guess, but outright opposition isn't supported by the text...or at least my text, which I'm guessing is the same as yours.

There is an antipathy towards same-sex sexual activity, to be sure, but there is an antipathy towards a great many things in the Bible, from my mother's dog Tilly to my thin sliced, smoked ham, Swiss, lettuce, tomato and sweet and spicy mustard sandwich...not to mention my cotton/poly, no iron shirt that still needs touching up anyway. "Antipathy" doesn't mean "prohibition," it means use your personal judgment as filtered through the Golden Rule.

Now usury...there is a very strong antipathy in the Bible to usury. Why aren't anti-homosexualists out campaigning just as hard against predatory lending practices...? I know there are get out of dept ministries in some churches, and I'm all for them, but that isn't translating into political pressure to end never get out of dept payday loans, sky high bank fees and dubious credit card interest shenanigans. Gay people are only a fraction of the population, one to ten percent are the numbers, but most everyone uses credit at some time in their post-modern life.

The beloved by anti-homosexualists, I'm liking that word, clobber verses are about abusing and enslaving other men and condemning temple prostitution.

There is an obvious antipathy in the Bible about sleeping with equals, period, except maybe between David and Sheba. However, gay men don't sleep with a man as with a woman...only "striaght" men do, such as perhaps in prison. Raping another man was a time honored, unfortunately choice of words there, way of enslaving other men...of being the alpha male, so to speak.

Idolatry was thought to be the cause of same sex sexual activity "choice," a common sense, but wrong, explanation for male temple prostitution. That didn't cause same sex sexuality, but was the sanctioned social niche for those who had same sex attractions. Fortunately today, moral people don't care if others are gay...at least in my world.

Few people these days worship idols. Nobody knows why some people are gay, I think, but it's clear that prenatal idol worship is not the cause. Does it really matter? No, not if you love your neighbor. The gay people in my life are exemplary people by every standard, except to the anti-homosexualists. (I like that work, maybe I'll keep it.)

Why are some people left handed? Who cares? I think the story is that the Latin word for Left handed is the root word for sinister...but nobody cares about left handedness anymore. It's hardly sinister. It is, at most, an inconvenience.

I'm not going to spend Eighty Five Dollars! for a copy of Wilson's booklet on slavery, though I would very much like to read it. Is it priced so high as to make it unlikely to be read, but still have bragging rights that it's in print?

I would hope that the criticism by those tedious Moscow liberals on his book, which I've now read, is wrong. Being proved wrong if fun...at least you've learned something and you have the excitement of learning new things.

Judging from your "pro-homosexual" conspiracy theory remark, however, I'll go with the judgment of those tedious Moscow pro-homosexual liberals for the time being.

Your appeals to race tokenism doesn't impress me. Neo-confederate activism is wrong, period. The Credenda issue is racist, even as it claims to be "honoring" Black people.

Wilson's bragging to the New York Times! that he voted for Jefferson Davis is a racist and racialy intimidating statement. The only excuse is that the NYT made the quote up...did they?...I thought not. Wilson even gives it its own context...comparing himself against those other Idaho conservatives.

Even if Wilson is the personification of multicultural polite society manners, the quip is racist, period. He personally must apologize for it, not you or anyone else, if he is to be respected in scholarly circles anyway.

A few black people in your college does not negate the obvious neo-confederate activism by one of it's very public founders, whatever his manners towards others.

My great grandfather, by the way, was in Sherman's army towards the end of the Civil War, guarding railroad crossings against sabotage. He marched down from Wisconsin to free the South from slaveholder tyranny, and I'm appalled that I still have to fight neo-confederates into the 21st century. Fortunately for my sickly self, words are the weapons of choice in the neo-confederate skirmish.

Greg

Nice diatribe. It seems no facts will dissuade you of your prejudices and no arguments that will diminish your hatred of those who disagree with your views. Demonizing people for views they do not even remotely held borders on pathology. But neither your bitterness nor your "internet research" nor your name calling can make me, my colleagues or institution racists or neo-confederates. Frankly you are embracing another form of bigotry every bit as ugly and destructive as the neo-Confederates and racists and other right wing nuts out there. Your hatred is merely hatred of the left wingnut variety and hardly give you any moral high ground. Give up the hate and stop imitating the hatred of the right wing kooks.

Roy

Sorry for the typos and grammatical errors in the last post.

Roy

Wilson said he voted for Jefferson Davis to the New York Times! The newspaper read around the world by everone who is everyone, even those who aren't, like myself. Either Wilson is a victim of the New York Times making the quip up, or Wilson is completely responsible for his actions.

New St. Andrews is also completely responsible for the Credenda magazine. You should be glad the NYT didn't dig that up and give it wide circulation. NSA is completely responsible for that.

"...I voted for Jefferson Davis" is unequivocally a racist quip, period. Deal with your colleague properly, unless you want New St. Andrews to be labeled as a neo-confederate college. apparently you're too busy issuing dismissals of critics rather than dealing properly with the bad publicity that your colleague unnecessarily brought down upon New St. Andrews all by himself. Deal with him, not me.

Your outrageous tokenist argument excusing it all is quite unbecoming. I haven't seen that sort of thing since the Seventies...I take that back, I remember a Jerry Falwell story on Bill Maher. So sad about him.

It wasn't a New St. Andrews Black student who made the Jefferson Davis quip...to the NEW YORK TIMES! READ EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE OF INFLUENCE! liberal or not, and by plenty of ordinary people such as myself. (I can barely afford the NYT, but it's still money well spent..of only for the Book Review. Full disclosure, my oldest friend, now passed on, I really miss him, wrote an op-ed on Puerto Rican enfranchisement for the NYT. A NYT editor/columnist and I use to carry on a long correspondence about the religious right, something I've studied since I (gratefully) moved from the Bible Belt in the late Seventies. Which is why I still read CT despite being busy. I'm designing a poster in my head as I write. However, we've both been very busy the last couple of years, and we both now know what the other knows, anyway. I think I've figured out my initial puzzlement on the religious right, thanks CT, though I suspect the editors wouldn't like the conclusions they help me find.)

I'm immune, I hope, to smarmy and condescending "you're the real hater" dismissals such as yours, having had it dumped on my family and me in the early Seventies, when we moved from the rural upper Great Plains to a little city on the edge of the Bible Belt.

Back then, it wasn't "homosexuals" who were the Christian conservative's biggest fear, but people who tried to live the Golden Rule. My parents seem to have been naturals at that, my father being from a family that had already crossed the Protestant/Catholic line without the world coming to an end.

Crossing the Bible Belt's color line was easy to them. They just didn't care, and were confident that God didn't care either, despite all the "inerrant" verses and "well meaning advise" flung around. They aren't saints (I'm certainly not), but they got the Golden Rule down right. I try to live by their example, though, unfortunately, perhaps not as blithely.

What verse is the one about that worrying about the speck in the other's eye and log in one's own eye advice? Which of us has the speck, and which has the log...or do we both have the log in our eye? Who has the speck, then?

On the other hand...an I immune? Since my blood pressure feels like it rose just now, maybe I'm not immune to your blast from the past dismissal after all. On the other, other hand, I could use a boost of energy about now, without buying some expensive Starbucks coffee, so thanks for that.

Seriously Greg--you're being silly.