White 'Heritage' vs. the Gospel

MONUMENTS TO the heroes of the Confederacy that stood for decades in Southern parks and streets went unnoticed by many white people, but black Americans have always experienced them as insults and threats. Since Charlottesville, whether to take them down has become the focus of a national debate. After the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in August, cities across the former Confederacy and in border states—including Baltimore, Durham, N.C., and even Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital—have taken action or indicated plans to relocate their monuments.

The argument made by proponents of keeping Confederate statues in place—that they represent Southern heritage and we must not “erase history”—is patently false when one looks at why the monuments were erected. Most Confederate monuments were built during the Jim Crow era of the early 1900s and as a backlash to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s. They were never just about history or heritage, but rather were meant as a sign of resistance to black citizenship in America and a clear signal threatening terror against African Americans.

These monuments were built explicitly in defense of segregation and to glorify white supremacy. As such, they are and were always meant to be a racial rejection and assault to every black American who had to walk in their shadows, as well as all who fought to end slavery and discrimination during the Civil War and ever since.

Defenders of the monuments also contend that local communities should decide whether their statues remain or not. But several state legislatures in Southern states, afraid of their increasingly diverse urban populations doing precisely that, have passed statewide laws to prevent historical monuments from being moved without state approval. What the monument defenders are actually insisting upon is white approval to remove them.

Perhaps the only appropriate place for memorials and monuments to Confederate leaders would be museums about the Civil War that properly frame the conflict for what it was—a war started and ultimately lost by states that rebelled against their country because they wanted to keep the evil institution of slavery and maintain white superiority.

The best idea would be to not merely remove the Confederate monuments but to replace the newly vacated spaces in parks and public squares with markers to the evil of slavery, such as the horrific sites of slave auctions and lynching, to remind us what people did to other human beings and must never do again. Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, for instance, is building a memorial to the victims of lynching across the U.S. The Memorial to Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala., will focus national attention on the evil done to people created in the image of God. New statues could celebrate the end of slavery and honor those who fought against it—black and white—and depict famous black Southerners who helped to turn their nation around.

In Germany, they don’t build statues of Hitler or monuments to honor him and other Nazis. Instead, they have converted many of the death camps into museums, where people can learn about the Holocaust in the hope that learning the awful lessons of history will help us to avoid repeating them. Such is also the case in South Africa today, where every visitor is exposed to museums and markers of racial apartheid—not celebrated, but remembered as a moral failure.

WE NEED TO LEARN from the evil of U.S. slavery and the lie of racial superiority that is still with us. But to learn from it, we must first acknowledge the moral evil of slavery and the Confederate cause, and not seek to justify it as “heritage.” Such “honors” are incompatible with a society that values all its members and treats them as children of God.

Most important for Christians is to publicly assert that monuments to Confederate leaders are antithetical to the gospel message. These monuments to white supremacy deny the biblical truth that all human beings are created in the image of God and are thus to be treated as equal. They also deny Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, in which he affirms that “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28).

As Christians, we are called to support public policies that conform to what God has taught us about right and wrong. The dismantling of white supremacy in all its forms is itself a monumental task, but removing and replacing the literal physical monuments to this evil is a necessary and overdue step in the right direction.