Posted on 06/20/2015 12:35:53 PM PDT by Republican Wildcat
This week the nation reels over the murder of praying Christians in an historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. At the same time, one of the issues hurting many is the Confederate Battle Flag flying at full-mast from the South Carolina Capitol grounds even in the aftermath of this racist act of violence on innocent people. This raises the question of what we as Christians ought to think about the Confederate Battle Flag, given the fact that many of us are from the South.
The flag of my home state of Mississippi contains the Confederate Battle Flag as part of it, and I’m deeply conflicted about that. The flag represents home for me. I love Christ, church, and family more than Mississippi, but that’s about it. Even so, that battle flag makes me wince—even though I’m the descendant of Confederate veterans.
Some would say that the Confederate Battle Flag is simply about heritage, not about hate. Singer Brad Paisley sang that his wearing a Confederate flag on his shirt was just meant to say that he was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan. Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped, “Little known fact: Jefferson Davis—HUGE Skynyrd fan.”
Defenders of the flag would point out that the United States flag is itself tied up with ugly questions of history. Washington and Jefferson, after all, supported chattel slavery too. The difference is, though, that the United States overcame its sinful support of this wicked system (though tragically late in the game). The Confederate States of America was not simply about limited government and local autonomy; the Confederate States of America was constitutionally committed to the continuation, with protections of law, to a great evil. The moral enormity of the slavery question is one still viscerally felt today, especially by the descendants of those who were enslaved and persecuted.
The gospel speaks to this. The idea of a human being attempting to “own” another human being is abhorrent in a Christian view of humanity. That should hardly need to be said these days, though it does, given the modern-day slavery enterprises of human trafficking all over the world. In the Scriptures, humanity is given dominion over the creation. We are not given dominion over our fellow image-bearing human beings (Gen. 1:27-30). The southern system of chattel slavery was built off of the things the Scripture condemns as wicked: “man-stealing” (1 Tim. 1:10), the theft of another’s labor (Jas. 5:1-6), the breaking up of families, and on and on.
In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the biblically ridiculous “curse of Ham” concept, for instance). In so doing, this form of southern folk religion was outside of the global and historic teachings of the Christian church. The abolitionists were right—and they were right not because they were on the right side of history but because they were on the right side of God.
Even beyond that, though, the Flag has taken on yet another contextual meaning in the years since. The Confederate Battle Flag was the emblem of Jim Crow defiance to the civil rights movement, of the Dixiecrat opposition to integration, and of the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils of our all too recent, all too awful history.
White Christians ought to think about what that flag says to our African-American brothers and sisters in Christ, especially in the aftermath of yet another act of white supremacist terrorism against them. The gospel frees us from scrapping for our “heritage” at the expense of others. As those in Christ, this descendant of Confederate veterans has more in common with a Nigerian Christian than I do with a non-Christian white Mississippian who knows the right use of “y’all” and how to make sweet tea.
None of us is free from a sketchy background, and none of our backgrounds is wholly evil. The blood of Jesus has ransomed us all “from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet. 1:18), whether your forefathers were Yankees, rebels, Vikings, or whatever. We can give gratitude for where we’ve come from, without perpetuating symbols of pretend superiority over others.
The Apostle Paul says that we should not prize our freedom to the point of destroying those for whom Christ died. We should instead “pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (Rom. 14:19). The Confederate Battle Flag may mean many things, but with those things it represents a defiance against abolition and against civil rights. The symbol was used to enslave the little brothers and sisters of Jesus, to bomb little girls in church buildings, to terrorize preachers of the gospel and their families with burning crosses on front lawns by night.
That sort of symbolism is out of step with the justice of Jesus Christ. The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire. White Christians, let’s listen to our African-American brothers and sisters. Let’s care not just about our own history, but also about our shared history with them. In Christ, we were slaves in Egypt—and as part of the Body of Christ we were all slaves too in Mississippi. Let’s watch our hearts, pray for wisdom, work for justice, love our neighbors. Let’s take down that flag.
(Russell Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the moral and public policy agency of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.)
This raises the WWWD question: what would Woodrow do? Did anyone since Lincoln more expand FedGov power? And did the Princeton President, icon of the Left, disavow the flag in question?
The guy who shot innocent people at a black church.
bet you’ve never shot people, I pray ... God and Generals ... flags and heritage ... Few winners, on this planet, mostly just whiners .... or the condemned ...
Hmmmm, thanks for the kind words ..... is that a quote from somewhere ? Sounds like one.
The Biblical view of slavery was what it was in the Old Testament. There was no flash revelation in the canonical Books of the New Testament that slave-owning was henceforward a sin and abominate. That is to say, in mathematical terms, there was no [d(R)/d(t)] moment at which slaving and slavery became offenses to God, revealed and taught.
To say that opinion changed is therefore non- Biblical and an interpolation of canon law and Revelation congenial to modern sensibilities. Which seems to be getting us into a lot of trouble in other areas, too.
You don’t know that.
All you know is that he hates Blacks. He may fly the flag for entirely different reasons.
Well, he's still alive, so thankfully we can ask him if was just coincidentally waiving the confederate flag around while preaching hate speech against blacks. It's also theoretically possible he was wearing the British-colony era Rhodesian flag for reasons other than preferring the country under white rule. Maybe he just liked the design and colors of the old Rhodesian flag better than the current Zimbabwe flag, and it had nothing to do with his feelings about segregation).
I suppose both are possible but I wouldn't bet on it.
Was he flying all those flags?
The larger point I’m trying to make, is that it seems clear to me that the percentage of people who fly that flag for purely racist reasons is extremely small.
You’ve got a wing-nut here and folks are trying to extrapolate meaning from his lifestyle which is pretty much pointless.
If this was truly evidence everyone that owned a Dixie Flag (Rebel flat or whatever) was a violent racist it would be far more apparent than than this.
Where’s all the evidence that these folks are violent racists, or even racists at all across the board?
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