by Dave Roberts » Fri Aug 18, 2017 9:14 am
In response to a friend's post yesterday, I began to think about something. I need Confederate monuments. That's right! I need them. I need them as my call to repentance before God. They call me first to repent of the system my ancestors created to enslave people in order to enrich themselves. Okay, maybe these weren't my physical ancestors, but they were my social and religious ancestors. Second, I need them to remind me to repent of the sins of my religious ancestors who insisted God had given the "curse of Ham" so that He intended for people of African descent to be enslaved. Religious people knew better, but they even created divisions in most of protestant Christianity in order to spew their subjugation theories.
Third, I need the Confederate statues to remind me of the 600,000 Americans who were killed in the Southern Rebellion against the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. It was indeed a terrible war of brother against brother with both sides claiming the same God, but was God ever pleased with that war. I had ancestors who fought doing what their leaders had persuaded them was right but who never themselves owned another human being. I need the reminder of how wrong sometimes we can all be. Those statues of anonymous Confederate soldiers are a powerful reminder of how we can be led astray in large masses to do what we would never envision individually under the guise of protecting something.
Fourth, I need the Confederate monuments to remind me of the context in which they were created. Those little date plaques on the bottom often bear two sets of dates. The first mass group was erected in the 1920's across the South in recognition of the height of the power of the KKK as the bastion of white supremacy. This coincided with the rise of Jim Crow laws creating separate waiting rooms at bus and train stations, relegating people of color to the back of the bus, separate water fountains, and separate treatment for those of color in hospitals where they were treated in the basement rather than in the areas where whites were treated. (This I remember personally from one of the hospitals in my home town.) The other time large numbers of Confederate statues were erected was during the 1950's and 1960's following the Brown vx the Board of Education decision ordering the integration of public schools and in the time surrounding the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Fifth, I need Confederate monuments to remind me of my ancestors refusal to educate black children. The African-American school in my home town only went through the eighth grade. If a black teen wanted to attend high school, they had to board a bus at 7 a.m. each morning and ride 40 miles one way on what were sometimes treacherous mountain roads. They would be retuning home around 5 p.m. in the afternoon thus denying them a chance to work after school which many needed to do. I remember asking one of the leaders of my community about this. A paraphrase of his answer was that they didn't need more education than the eighth grade to stack lumber, sweep floors, or be domestic help. Whenever I remember that system and that attitude, I must say, "God, forgive me."
Sixth, I need Confederate monuments to remind me of how I would rather perpetuate a lie than to see the truth. Many of those Confederate statues glorify Robert E. Lee, but few of those who erect them talk about Lee's life after the Civil War. In reading a recent work dealing with Lee, I learned more about his work after the War Between the States to seek to reunify the nation. His graciousness toward those against whom he had previously fought is seldom mention nor is his desire to see this be again one nation. Rather than dealing with the truth, we in the South have perpetuated the Myth of the Lost Cause, even glorifying the South as morally and religiously superior to the North. I remember reading one of the Convention Sermons of the SBC in the 1950's that proclaimed that Southern Baptists were "God's last and only hope." God, forgive us for preferring a lie to the truth that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
Seventh, I need Confederate monuments to help me remember how offensive I can be in the face of other Christians. When I see those statues, I am reminded of how I violate the Golden Rule. I do not consider how the descendants of a slave might feel looking at a monument that glorified a history of oppression, division, deprivation, and wrong. I need these monuments as a call to repentance, not just of my personal sins but of my involvement in the corporate sins of my culture. I need the historical content provided by those statues to remember my sins and to hear God's call to repentance.