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.)
Let me supply some background and, dare I say it, focus.
The campaign against the Battle Flag was begun by The New York Times in 1991 with piece by a Southern renegade writer named Ray Garganus, who "suggested" that it was time to put away the Confederate flags.
This coincided with a new push by the NAACP to spike up black voting turnout, which has been low except in certain years, by waving the bloody shirt and shouting "cracker, cracker! Right over there!!"
Bill Clinton has always demonized the white South with quotes uttered for consumption in the black community about "them" and "those people" (meaning white men), and about how bad and hateful they are. If anyone got up and said something like that about the black race, every journalist in the United States would have a stroke.
The "Confederate flag controversy" is an artificial one, and it has always been a political exercise in blackguarding and demonizing southern white voters, for the benefit of Northern liberal politicians. The "controversy" and the identification of the Battle Flag with "segs" and "haters" and "them" has been purely a project of northern Journolisters and the NAACP.
Sorry, but there it is. Sorry you've been influenced by their clear-eyed malice.
re: “Let us leave the divisiveness behind us, and that includes the confederate battle flag. We have a bigger, and more deadly enemy in front of us, POTUS #44 BHO and the Democrat Party. A better symbol of resistance and freedom is the Gadsden flag.”
Well said, and I completely agree with you. Didn’t know much about Russell Moore, thanks for the word of warning.
A lot of common sense coming from IronJack, right there. Common sense makes everything so easy.
Every photograph is the ‘way to run away’ ...
re: “The “Confederate flag controversy” is an artificial one, and it has always been a political exercise in blackguarding and demonizing southern white voters, for the benefit of Northern liberal politicians. The “controversy” and the identification of the Battle Flag with “segs” and “haters” and “them” has been purely a project of northern Journolisters and the NAACP.
Sorry, but there it is. Sorry you’ve been influenced by their clear-eyed malice.”
I think you mis-read my entire post. I do not view the Confederate Battle flag, nor any of the Confederacy’s flags, with hatred or racism. But, whether we like it or not, the media has been successful in identifying it as such.
But, whether people view it that way or not - it is up to the people of South Carolina and Mississippi as to whether or not they include the Battle flag on their respective state flags. It is none of my business since I do not live in either of those states - nor your’s if you do not live in one of those states.
pedals start to fade by the picket fences .... nobody calls one to ‘pull into a different drum’ ... ‘We’ tried our best ....
Hi D1,
As always, we are seeing eye to eye. My comment would be toward more emphasis - I don't think there is a another more powerful symbol of legitimate rebellion in American culture...
As an instance, if a state were to depart the Union under her own flag, that would be something, alright - But if she raised up that Rebel flag, that'd be a whole 'nuther thing, and the impact would resonate like a bell throughout the South, the lower Midwest(perhaps all of the Midwest), the Desert Southwest and the Rockies. And black, brown, red, yellow, or white, everyone therein would not see it as an endorsement of slavery, but rather, the singular, only, and ultimate symbol of American rebellion that it most certainly is.
Something very much akin to the reaction here. There isn't a Country kid anywhere that doesn't hear that, or that doesn't know what it means... If the Gadsen flag is 'NO!', the Rebel flag is 'Aw hell, NO!"
And that is why the 'PTB' need so very much to discredit it.
yep, it ‘holding a picture’ to save ‘breath’
Just a reminder that, when you're white, you're always still too white for some people.
Now the state flag is a Confederate National (1861) with a Georgia state seal in the middle of the union of 13 stars.
Very clever.
‘am’ accepting what is all alone ...
I do.
‘when the hour is going South’ blame the South ....
it is close to being ‘better’?
sniff ... sniff ... Pretty Girls?
It's also highly un-common these days.
No, it isn't. Nor is it disingenuous to point out that the ethics and morals of owning and working slaves was referenced in Numbers and Deuteronomy; likewise, Abraham's wife Sarah owned the slave-woman Hagar, a "woman of Egypt", and Sarah even pimped Hagar to Abraham as a vehicle for a child, when Abraham and Sarah were childless but after God had promised them that Sarah, who was very old, would bring forth the child would would be the progenitor of Israel.
Of course, that was a sin, but Abraham and Sarah sinned not in owning Hagar, nor even in progenerating on her (she bore Ishmael, whose descendants are the House of Araby), but in doubting God's word and proceeding as if He had not uttered His promise to Abraham.
Georgia now flies the original Confederate Stars and Bars with one small change, and not a peep.
And what about Alabama, Arkansas, & Florida, who incorporated the St. Andrews cross of the battle flag into their state flags? Where are the protests?
wonder why moslems say ‘give me an open window’ ... no daylight moves a moslem but ‘in the end’ the words so hard to find are jihad ...
I thought I'd seen every wackdoodle name for the Civil War by now but this is a new one. Congratulations.
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