Steve Wilkins holds degrees from the
University of Alabama and the
Reformed Theological Seminary of
Jackson, Mississippi. He was ordained as a minister in the
Presbyterian Church in America in 1976, and has served as the pastor of Church of the Redeemer in
West Monroe, Louisiana since 1989. Wilkins is an advocate of
Federal Vision theology. He has been called an advocate of
Christian Reconstruction. In 2007, the Louisiana Presbytery was indicted by the PCA's Standing Judicial Commission for "failing to find a strong presumption of guilt" against Wilkins with regards to his theological views. Following this action, the congregation of Church of the Redeemer voted without dissent to withdraw from the PCA on January 27, 2008 and subsequently joined the
Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Within the CREC, Wilkins is the Presiding Minister of Wycliffe Presbytery. He is a former board member of the
League of the South and founder of the Southern Heritage Society. His biography on
Robert E. Lee, titled
Call of Duty, was called "hagiographical" and omitted any criticism. In the pamphlet
Southern Slavery, As It Was, Wilkins and co-author
Douglas Wilson argued for a view that the status of slaves had not been as bad as is currently taught in American schools. He stated for example that: "slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since." Historians such as
Peter H. Wood,
Clayborne Carson, and
Bancroft Prize winner
Ira Berlin have condemned the pamphlet's arguments, with
Wood calling them as spurious as
Holocaust denial.
Canon Press ceased publication of the pamphlet when it became aware of serious citation errors in 24 passages authored by Wilkins where quotations, some lengthy, from the 1974 book
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by
Robert William Fogel and
Stanley L. Engerman were not cited. Robert McKenzie, the history professor who first noticed the citation problems, described the authors as being "sloppy" rather than "malevolent" while also pointing out that he had reached out to Wilson several years earlier. Wilson reworked and redacted the arguments and published (without Wilkins) a new set of essays under the name
Black & Tan after consulting with historian
Eugene Genovese. ==Writings==