Yet another post with the infamous statues at its heart. But there is a twist. The twist begins with me admitting that I never really gave them much if any thought before. The only statues in my home town were Abraham Lincoln. The only statues I know in my current town are busts of FDR (this is his home town, after all) and Winston Churchill. Oh and one of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt sitting on a bench.
But in the hoopla, name calling, and serious dialogue over the statues of Confederate officers, there are other considerations. First, as Andrew Young (yes, the iconic civil rights leader, mayor, congressman, and ambassador) noted, focusing on these symbols of antebellum pride takes away attention from other crucial jobs before us - like reducing the industrial prison complex that traps so many of our young black citizens. Or reducing the income gap, which disproportionately affects African Americans in the negative. Or housing disparities. There are many.
His argument is not that he loves the statues but that there are other more important battles. Besides, he said on a more pragmatic level, you need at least some of those defenders of the statuary to make progress on the important issues. Why unnecessarily anger them?
These are good points. Are we best expending our energy on removing statues? Will their removal, over time, have a net positive impact on society?
I suspect that in the long run, removing the statues will have a modest positive effect. Will it be worth it? Hard to know. I do believe there are bigger issues to address.
One might also like to ask those who defend the statues if they are really worth all the energy. Why not just let them go? What are you really losing?
And here is another consideration in our discussion of the statues. The people who love them - even if, in my view, wrongly - are still people. More than that, they are my brothers and sisters because in my faith, all people are my family. Regardless of ethnic background, physical features, age, language, political stripe, gender… all are God’s children.
What that means is, it’s more important to me to preserve and nurture those relationships than to win. It’s more important for me to treat each person with dignity and respect so that, even if we get into a heated discussion of, say, statues, it is as family that loves each other.
From my Christian perspective, I am never allowed to forget that. The people involved are more important than the statues themselves.
This does nothing to blunt my belief that the statues are inappropriate. It does nothing to mitigate their suspicious timing, being erected just as Jim Crow, and later, the anti-civil rights movements were growing.
But it reminds me that the people who love the statues might be more open to new ways of thinking if they know in their hearts that they are, in fact, family.
Andrew Young tossed out an idea when talking about the largest Confederate monument of them all, the Stone Mountain in Georgia. Showing Generals Lee and Jackson as well as Confederate president Jefferson Davis, it was conceived in 1912 and completed in 1972. It’s massive. Even if you wanted to get rid of it, you couldn’t - not without a lot of expense and time and effort - and a revolt the likes of which you really don’t want to see.
Andrew Young suggested not getting rid of it at all. Rather, he said, why not put a Liberty Bell near it to remind us of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of liberty? In fact, there are plans by the state of Georgia to do just that. They plan to build monuments to Africa American soldiers as well. It should be noted, however, that many in the south hate the idea because they view Dr. King as evil, and anything that detracts from the glory of the Confederacy as northern meddling.
I guess you can’t please everyone.
Still, I like the idea of putting the monuments in context. Or creating new monuments, even if it’s somewhere else. Spend some energy erecting statues to heroes of the Civil Rights movement, to the countless escaped slaves who fought for freedom, to the even more numerous enslaved people who suffered and died under the whip.
I have no idea how the whole statue issue will end. I’m not even sure how I feel about it. But I do know that I need to keep the humanity and dignity of everyone involved at the forefront. It’s not easy, but as a Christian, I have no choice.
(I thought I posted here but, here it is again.)
ReplyDeleteIt is always encouraging to see people who think before they write and you are truly one of them. St James couldn’t have done better.
I agree with everything you have said. Like most, I’ve given little thought to monuments. They seem either to emphasize the locality by associating it with someone larger or emphasizing the national. It is either the promotion of the locality or the strengthening of national identity.
What worries me is the tendency to see history through the contemporary perspective. That’s been a sin of the past that we should guard against. For, by doing this, we will be glorifying ourselves and never grasping how our views came into focus. That our views were built over time we will never understand. We will see contemporary views, whether for better or for worse, as ‘obvious’ and even everlasting and the past as flawed at best. This will never lead to self understanding.
Looking more narrowly at the statue issue, while we certainly do not want to glorify monsters from the past, we need to keep in mind that, after any war, the victors need to be gracious to the losers. Otherwise, the resentment will fester and it will all be replayed for ever and ever. Think Sunnis and Shiites. Better to remember Lincoln’s famous “With charity to all and malice to none”. With this in mind, the themes should be remembrance and reconciliation.
ReplyDeleteI am also reluctant to judge those living in earlier times by today’s standards. You could say that Lee was at fault for supporting slavery. You could criticize Henry Ford as a racist. But when you examine the records from the times, you see these were common views. People mostly reflect the values of the societies and times that they live in. Whatever the values of some future society are, we likely are not living up to them so, in their eyes, would be seen as deficient.
The true saints, understanding that there is no separation between themselves and others, have none of these problems. The rest of us will just have to work harder at it.
Hi Herb, I’ll limit my response to the issue of placing contemporary values on past societies (in part because the North was among the most gracious of winners, given the loss of life they also endured, and that the south fired first).
DeleteWe are trained in seminary to be careful about imposing modern values on the past. At the same time, we have to look at past events through the lens of present understanding. Nevertheless, observing the era of slavery through a purely mid-19th century lens, we see that most of western society at the time condemned chattel slavery as barbaric. Americans were slow to embrace abolition, but there were those early in - and in the south as well as in the north - who worked tirelessly for decades to end slavery. At some point, in every society and age, we have to decide whether or not an action or system is right or wrong. Germans (and Americans as well, for that matter) during the Nazi era had to decide whether to be pro-Hitler or anti-Hitler. It does no good to say that the times were different. In the same way, many whites thought exterminating Native Americans was desirable although it was objectively wrong on every level. Giving a pass to evil because it was acceptable to much of society at the time simply can not pass muster. They knew when they whipped men to death that these people neither chose to be enslaved nor desired to be treated worse than cattle. They understood this which is why they wrote such tortured apologies of their system. We are always responsible for our treatment of others and are answerable to those who come after us. That is always the burden of the present. A saint is not one who is better but one who understands their responsibility to something greater than their own self interest.