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September 3, 2023

Gettysburg is a small Pennsylvania town with a small school district, a small seminary, and a small college surrounded by apple orchards.  It is best known for the most important battle of the American Civil War and the location of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech.  Every summer, a million tourists visit to see the battlefields.  These tourists are historically knowledgeable and are good for the community.  They are history tourists, not amusement park tourists.

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Gettysburg was a three-day battle that became the turning point of the Civil War.  In his Gettysburg Address just a few months after the fighting, Lincoln used words like “consecrated,” “dedicated,” and “devotion.”  He called the ground “hallowed.”  Most visitors to Gettysburg understand these principles.

Gettysburg, like nearly all historic communities in the United States, has a long history of Christian influence.  During the battle, the seminary, the college, and the local churches served as hospitals.  Some of them overflowed with blood and had to cut holes in the floorboards to drain it.

Gettysburg Seminary was founded in 1828 by Simon Schmucker.  Schmucker was an abolitionist theologian who desired to train courageous pastors to be salt and light in the community, preaching against the sins of their age, toward repentance and forgiveness in Christ.  Thaddeus Stevens, also a Christian abolitionist, gave a ridge on the west side of Gettysburg to the seminary.  When General Lee invaded Pennsylvania, his army took over the Seminary Ridge and made the seminary buildings his headquarters.

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For the three days of fighting, this abolitionist seminary became a Confederate hospital for dying soldiers.  Abolitionist theologians and pastors-in-training had to wipe confederate blood out of their buildings and start over again when the battle ended.  For decades after the war, this seminary produced humble, strong, and faithful pastors who knew with certainty that the wages of sin is death.

Decline

It is hard to say exactly when or how, but this community, which was built around a seminary, a Bible college, and then a battle, slowly turned secular.  For decades there was a large nativity in the center square of town every December.  Sometime in the 1990s, the city planners moved it off the square, into a small nook behind some trees.

Around this time, battlefield ghost tours became popular among certain types of tourists.  Tour guides used teenagers dressed in battle uniforms to spook tourists at night.  These battlefield ghost tours did not hallow the battlegrounds.  They took the hallowed history of the ground and turned them into present-day silly experiences for tourists looking for a chill.

Naturally, the ghost tour industry spawned a kind of witchcraft and summoning industry that dabbles in darker things.  Wiccans and mediums periodically attempt to summon spirits out of bloodstained artifacts, and ghost-hunters move through the cemeteries and battlefields at night, not to honor the dead, nor remember the past, but to play games with spirits they do not understand.  These things attract different kinds of tourists, who do not hallow the ground or the memories of heroes.  This growing obsession with the ghosts and spirits of war that laid waste to the city and the nation is not good for the community.  There is in fact a spiritual war, exactly as the Bible describes, and this spiritual war has tangible effects.

While the ghost industry was on the rise and the Christmas nativity was in decline, the seminary was in a nosedive.  The Gettysburg Seminary, built on Thaddeus Stevens’s land, is now a rainbow-flying, trans-affirming school with an openly gay president.  It trains up proud “pastors” who walk in pride parades through town every June, dancing, frolicking, and spreading “glitter blessings” over the blood-soaked land.