Don Wildman

If this place is so old, then it predates everything.

And so we belong here as much as anyone who we found here or who we brought here.

You know, it's it's this whole idea of white America attaching itself to this ideal.

But it also has to do with the South.

As you say, there's so much good soil down there.

This Cretaceous soil, which is a black soil, should be worked by black people.

So God had made the soil of the southern states that way for the ease of using enslaved labor.

I don't get the connection between finding black soil and then justifying slavery.

That seems like a leap.

But the pulpit of deep time.

Well, that's the modern world, isn't it?

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It all happens in the context of the Second Great Awakening, which was all throughout the 19th century, which was so much about reaching back to the Bible for strength in the face of this modern emerging world.

That group must have been very threatened by this idea for obvious reasons.

But how do they absorb it and, I imagine, use it to their own good?

I'm taken by your idea that there's two tracks for the average American citizen.

You can go to church, but then you can also make money.

That's the religion, other religion of the United States back then, the emerging mercantile era where making money is part of a spiritual existence where you can better yourself and the growth is tangible.