Rhetoric Race and Religion
I guess one could say that there has been a conversation (some may even say a set of monologues with people talking past each other, and that’s fine), about the nature of race relations, Evangelical Protestantism, and the Confederacy. It’s a conversation that needs to start happening in our pulpits and pews. Last week, Anthony Bradley talked about the veneration of the Ole South (not the Pancake house….ummmmmm delicious) as idol worshipAdventures in Missing the Point: The Idolatry of the Old South; Bradley contended, “Defending the cause of the South attracts racists, Kinists, ethnonationalists, and others, even as those who defend the South teach against racism and oppression.”
Indeed, churches that wrap themselves in not the official CSA flag I mind you, but a BATTLE FLAG, a symbol of the white supremacist struggle first brought back by the Ku Klux Klan. Any good historian knows that the “Confederate flag” proposed by several Southern states to be added state flags is not the real Confederate States of America banner in the first place. The reason why this particular symbol is offensive to racial minorities is the fact that it’s a battle flag under which African American men were lynched after Reconstruction. So if we are going to argue over the Confederacy’s history, let us get it right, with the right flag that the CSA waved, and not the battle flag of a small regiment. In Bradley’s other post last week, “This May Be Helpful,” there was a discussion about white Southerners fearing their numbers shrinking. I don’t think that’s the complete picture. In every culture, people have learned to honor and remember their fallen, except here in the United States. Oh, there may be a few persons who can die and leave behind libraries or statues of themselves, but these do not help communities to deal with loss, to remember the good and bad deeds done by past generations. U.S. American culture, North, South, East West, is devoid of such a ritual.
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