David S. Reif is a partisan of the South who, one suspects, speaks over the heads of those likely to disagree with him, while making his natural sympathizers uneasy.

Twice he's been the featured speaker at regional events, first at the Gov. Claiborne Jackson birthday anniversary dinner, held in Nevada a couple of years ago, then last November at the dedication of the Missouri Brigades Monument near Osceola.

He said more or less the same thing on both occasions: that the American Civil War was "a war of competing worldviews and competing cultures."

Unfortunately, he went on to elaborate in terms that likely put off those who understood him while only further mystifying those who didn't. Unfortunately, I say, because his basic idea, his starting point, is perfectly sound, and one shouldn't let his problematical elaborations obscure it. He's not the first to take a grain of truth and, so to speak, run amuck with it!

He reminded his hearers at the Sac-Osage site that, when the Missouri Brigades mustered there in the fall of 1861, nearby Osceola had just been sacked and burned by Jayhawkers. "Built on classic Greco-Roman philosophy and nourished by Judeo-Christian values and ethics, Osceola was a symbol of ideal Southern culture," he said, "a repository of traditional values."

One's initial impulse may be to doubt that Osceola's destroyers were motivated by hostility to "ideal Southern culture" or "traditional values" so much as by simple thievish greed. Still, is there all that much difference? Aren't these simply two ways of saying the same thing? Obviously, thieves and town-burners have forsworn "traditional values"!

Nor can it be denied that Osceola, a town ofjust 3,000, was home to an amazing cultural flowering. It produced a distinguished statesman, a governor, and a philosopher whose works on Neo-Platonism were locally published, to name only the most outstanding.

"The South stood for a traditional Christian way of life," Reif continued, "while the North represented the modernist culture dominated by materialism."

He's hardly alone in drawing the "worldviews" contrast in just such terms. And it's not to deny that there were Christians in the North and materialists in the South, just as there were Confederate volunteers from every Northern state and vice versa. Such distinctions are never simple. But they must be made. We must generalize in order to think at all. And it's a perfectly valid, indeed unavoidable, generalization that the South "stood for a traditional Christian way of life," at least as contrasted with a North in which "modernist culture dominated by materialism" was already making great inroads even if it wasn't yet quite as pervasive as Reif says, or as it's since become. Even today it's a truism that the South is "more religious."

I've grappled with the issue myself. The Civil War, I wrote, "was a fight between clashing views of life, another battle in the 'culture war,' as it's now known."

The U.S. Civil War, Winston Churchill said, "resembled and reproduced in its passions the antagonisms of the English Civil War." Political commentator Kevin Phillips interestingly elaborates this idea in his recent book "The Cousins' Wars."

Another English writer asserted that all Anglo-Saxon history has been a struggle between Roundheads and Cavaliers. These were the opposing sides in the English Civil War. The Roundheads were the straitlaced Puritans and their business allies (uncannily foreshadowing the Republicans in Civil War America). The Cavaliers were the partisans of tradition (much like the Confederates, standing for state rights and a semi-feudal society). Phillips includes the factions in the American Revolution as representing basically the same cultural split: the Whigs favoring change (American Independence), the Tories holding out for tradition.

In all three cases it was a nearly equal contest; yet in all three the party of innovation won. They were on the side of history. In each case the world had so changed economically that political change inevitably followed. Cavaliers, Tories, and Confederates all were fighting a hopeless "rearguard action" in defense of an older worldview, doomed by "progress."

The important thing, the saving grace, is that English-speaking peoples have always been characterized by moderation and balance. Even though superseding an outdated way of life they always managed to save and preserve the best of the old. After a few decades of extremism the English came to their senses and restored the monarchy. After a spasm of radicalism following the Revolution, America adopted a conservative Constitution. And after the farce-cum-tragedy of "Reconstruction" in the South, America opted for North-South reconciliation.

The conquering North recognized that Southern culture embodied timeless values deserving to be preserved and cherished, values America desperately needed for balance, such intangibles as David Reif cited: "love, devotion, duty, honor, tradition." Such things, being spiritual, not material, even prior to the Civil War were becoming "unreal" to Northerners, who were straying from their once-robust spiritual faith and, just as Reif asserted, embracing materialism.

The great danger today lies in the new radicals, the "terrible simplifiers" Jacob Burkhardt warned of, who are striving mightily to repeal the North-South reconciliation of a century ago, to stamp out utterly those Southern values salvaged from Southern defeat.

Reif admitted his hearers would find it hard to follow him on from calling the Civil War a "war of the worldviews" to terming the Northern worldview not just materialist but Marxist. It's indeed a stretch to see Marxists in the fugitives from the failed 1848 German revolution, many of whom wound. up in St. Louis, and played key parts in the Civil War and its aftermath.

Yet by the standards of their day they were political radicals. Many a "Black Republican" in America had been a "Red Republican" in Europe, where Marxist Communism took shape in just those years before 1848. The seeds of later extremism were present in the thinking of those "48ers" and their nativeborn ilk who created the post-Civil War America in which we still live. Those busily chipping away today at our cultural heritage are building on the good works of the likes of Carl Schurz, one of the "48ers" Reif singles out. Schurz was a "liberal," not a Marxist. But liberalism and Marxism share common roots. Both turn the Christian worldview on its head; both replace the idea of man's innate sinfulness and bent for evil with the notion of his infinite goodness and perfectibility. Gentle eggheads like Carl Schurz have much to answer for!

As Ron Casteel, another Southern paladin, told a local meeting, commenting on another neo-Confederate excess, the idea of seceding all over again: "What would it gain us to secede if our children were still bombarded and seduced by the poison of liberal pop culture?"