Linkathon!

Linn says:

“Welcome the Stranger”-not just because it was the first article, but because that seems to have defined my entire life. It started with getting to know my neighbors from other countries (learning to eat their foods, hearing their parents speak a different language in home, asking polite questions about their customs). I was fascinated and I am still friends with some of these folks 55 years later. Most of my teaching career has been with immigrants (Spanish-speaking majority, but also from all over the world). As a missionary, I worked with migrants to the large cities in Colombia who had fled fighting in rural areas. All that said, i find the “preserve our way of life” (i.e white way of life) view found in so many evangelical churches today to be both unscriptural and short-sighted. I don’t need to know what country you come from to treat you kindly and helpfully. Yes, I know the immigration system is broken (I’ve had friends deported and stuck in immigration hell by no fault of their own), but I don’t think churches will solve that one. But, we can love and welcome the people in our neighborhoods can help them to become part of the community. That is all most of them want.

EricL says:

Russell Moore’s letter is a powerful indictment of many in upper SBC leadership. Should I ever face such corruption and selfishness and anti-Christ behavior, may I have his integrity to take a stand too, even if it means alienating many others. Truth can be tough, but it does bring freedom.

Open24Hours says:

“As I shared with the officers, when these people started their guerilla attacks, I spent years in grief, feeling like an exile and like an orphan. I felt rejected by my own people and wondered why people would let this go on…”

Moore is the Southern Baptist I respect the most. He was my ethics teacher in seminary. But what Moore sadly does not see here, but which leapt out at me in an instant, is that he has just repeated the heart cries of the Moderates who were exiled from their beloved Convention by the Resurgency he supported.

CM says:

WTH,

Have you read much of the involvement of Native Americans in the Civil War? Particularly the Western Theater. Stand Watie was perhaps the most well-known of the Native American leaders in the Civil War. He was the only Native American to reach the rank of general. He fought for the Confederacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_Watie

WenatcheeTheHatchet says:

bob1, Douglas Wilson agrees Noll’s book is a good book, which is not necessarily a count against the book. I’ve read it and Noll’s book is a good one. As I’ve noted elsewhere, having Native American ancestry in the PNW meant I was told there were, in fact, no “good guys” in that war but we can be grateful the North won.

CM, I am not as familiar with the other Native American groups outside the PNW and there isn’t exactly a strong pan-Native movement even now, but I do remember reading the Cherokee were on the side of the Confederacy and that would have a lot to do with how pervasive slavery was among Native American tribes generally and the Cherokee in particular. However, when the Emancipation Proclamation got issues the Cherokee voluntarily abolished their slavery practices … so paleo-Confederate or neo-Confederate types who would claim the Emancipation Proclamation “didn’t do anything” don’t have a leg to stand on if they go back and look at how a prominent Native American tribe voluntarily ended its slavery practices in response to the EP.

Oregon and Washington territory was basically not involved in the American Civil War. There was an extremely robust region-spanning slave trade that I’m reading about (again), actually. There’s a tendency in American discourse and debate to “only” define slavery practices in terms of white and black with little reference to the pervasive nature of Native American slavery systems. The system in the PNW was unusually robust and unusually nasty in a lot of ways. There’s been some interesting scholarly back and forth on how and why the PNW tribes had such an entrenched slavery system because Western theorists didn’t expect nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes to have such a system. There’s blog posts at WtH on that stuff, though, so I want to avoid rabbit-trailing too much.

The older I get the more grateful I am that I was introduced to a perspective where NEITHER side in the American Civil War has to be taken as “good”. Mark Noll’s book surveys some of that theological territory and for those who haven’t read it he made a particularly strong point that evangelicalism in the North and South and of the progressive and conservative varieties were so dead set on ignoring Catholic and rabbinical arguments and cases regarding slavery in the antbellum South that American evangelicalism couldn’t resolve the theological crisis in part because of who they were deliberately ignoring as having anything to contribute to the doctrinal debates.