review of _Gods and Generals_
I finally had the opportunity to watch _Gods and Generals_ last night. I watched it, my wife went to bed after 2 hours of the 4 hours, partly because she needed to get up to go to work this morning, but mostly because i think she gets tired of me cheering for Johnny Reb. I am an unashamed Southern sympathizer even though i was raised in southern California, it may very well be genetic however as my mom's people come from the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the one time i met my grandfather it was pretty obvious he was Southern. I watched the movie, absorbed by the characters, heart raced by the battle scenes, in tears at the horror and destruction of war. I yelled at the lines of foolish men throwing their lives into a pit as the walked into the hail of cannonfire and minibullets (come to think of it my wife might of disliked that part to), laughed as 1 of the 3 main characters hailed from Maine (my wife's adopted state), a college professor of history and philosophy, but warmed up to him as he quoted Julius Caesar's crossing the Rubicon at length just before a battle. So in general i acted like a crazy football fan at the finals, cheering the Gray and booing the Blue.
But as i reflect upon the movie, it is the Christianity of the Generals that comes through most strongly, and here i am as little impartial as i am to the participants. I share in the conservative faith of Jackson, i think Robert Dabney is one of the best theologians America has ever raised up. I was truely amazed that a movie would be done in modern secular anti-theistic America where the lead characters really pray, really believe, really love the Lord, (Wow, how did that get past the censors?) or be thought to make any money? Their faith is not dumbed down, the hard parts are presented as in where Jackson sits and cries for the death of a little girl by scarlet fever as his men remark-but he didnt cry for all the men we've lost. The minority view of the war is presented straight forward at several places: the Civil War as the Second American Revolution, the role of the Irish, slavery as a side issue not the important one, the contradictory role of the races in Jackson's praying with his black cook, or the protection of a white family's house by their brave women slave and her children and her talk to northerners about wanting to be free, for example. I had even hoped that somewhere on the extra disk would be several alternative endings where the South won.
And this is where my thinking is pushed by this most extraordinary movie, alternatives. They all revolve around the Faith and slavery, Biblical Christianity and ethnic relationships where a history of such epic proportions and such real horror intertwine with fundamental principles and good sound religious belief. This is the great value of the movie being as true as it possibly can to the historical conditions of the Civil War, for it was a religious as well as an economic, (industrial v. agarian), political (right to sucession), or what-have-you war. This is often minimized in our era of weak believism, mild feelings about religious things, a general feelings that religion isn't a great motivator, money and politics are. Well, secular America meet your great great grandparents, see their religious beliefs mirrored in the young suicide bombers in Israel, or the car bombers in Iraq. Religious beliefs are worth dying and even killing for, today as they where in 1861-4.
But it is in the mixture of truth and error that the movie hints at in the relationship of the races that is to me the takehome message that i need to dwell on, for those issues are not finished in today's America and the war was finished so long ago. Jackson (not in the movie but in real life) knelt with slaves in church, praying to the same Lord. Lee owned slaves, Dabney defended slavery in a book 20 years after the war. The South did fight to preserve the 'peculiar institution', slavery, abolitionists where Christians as well, although often Unitarians not Presbyterians. And this is where the present hits 1861 headon, and the power and the bright coloration of history so as to make it alive and real in the movie has great value. This is the extraordinary opportunity that the movie gives us, to revisit and re-evaluate our past, as if the issues are meaningful to us, important to us as they were to Jackson, or Lee, or whats-his-name you know the Maine guy. That is why i recommend even Yankees to watch the movie, to learn what moved our ancestors in a way that a book just can't do. So thanks all of you who contributed to this movie for an accurate picture of a piece of the War for Southern Rights.
It is the relationship of slavery to Christianity that the movie leaves most strongly in my mind.
To start with: I don't think the Bible condemns slavery but it does not allow a slavery of fellow believers, nor a hereditarial, race-based slavery as evolved in the South.
That the war was basically an industrial, secularizing society over an agarian, conservative one where the material basis of Southern society-large scale agricultural slave based society was unable to move to the next stage in development without a fight.
That many of the abolitionist were speaking from a defective religious base, often Unitarian or what would become liberal progressive Christianity in the next generation versus a much more conservative biblical based Christianity of the South, a faith i share and adopted not born or raised into.
That the South was right and the North was wrong.
And the big issue for me is why the South lost if they were on God's side? Was Jackson faith in an historical, biblical God either misplaced because God is really like the Northern Unitarians preach? Or worse yet, where they all deluded and backwards, and there is no god and the issue is simply sociological and historical? What is the utility of Jackson's faith if he dies from a Southern bullet and the South lost?
This issue is not going to go away. What good is it to believe in lost causes in 2003? The War of Southern Secession marks a watershed moment in American and Christian history, from there the liberal branch of the faith is in ascendancy, a marked division between the churches of the north and south occurs, to be partly healed only recently. And the issues out of slavery are far from settled in either the general society or in the church.
I think the South allowed the faith to be intertwined with economic theory. It let the reasons for slavery infilltrate the church because of human sinful racism, period. It was easy to justify enslaving the other, the outsider, the not-my-kind and using the Bible to justify it. And this same process is alive and well in every Christian because sin is still with us and actively corrupting our minds and emotions. The only cure is recognisation and repentance, just like the process in everyother sin in our individual and corporate lives. Repent and rely on God's goodness to reshape us to do the right thing.
It is this process that the war stopped, the Southern repentance for the sins of their fathers. The whole hearted acknowledgement that the very economy basis of society was based on a lie, not just any lie, but a lie justified and preached about as a theme of the Faith. In Christ there is no other, all Christians are my brothers, black, Spanish speaking, Chinese, men, woman, children, the faith is not exclusive as regards any ethnicity, language, culture. This is not just a good noble ideal but is real, actual and ought to have great consequences for the faith and how we work it out at our fingertips in the real world. And these are the alternative endings i would have written for the movie, war is avoided, the South repents and frees the slaves and racial justice, equality, and brotherhood comes from not the French revolution's rights of man but the Biblical rights of brethren under God. As was beliefs hardened, society closed ranks against the northern carpetbaggers and the ex-slaves got caught in the middle and this societal repentance never happened. And the country as we have it today is partly a result of this never-quite-finished war-between-the-states that was reflected in the war between ethnic groups but underneath it all is the war within ourselves.
and 
so true. Makes me 
and I want to 
) and when I was in university most of my American history classes focused on the post-bellum period. 
