I’m involved in life, like many people, and one thing that fascinates me is how we forget our past when it’s inconvenient but trot out certain myths and memes because they are “real” and important.
For example, George Washington is the father of our country (and of little else because he was physically sterile). We have the Washington Monument, Mt. Rushmore, his face on our currency, and even a state named after him (no, not Georgia). We celebrate his birthday along with Abraham Lincoln’s in “Presidents Day,” and we revere his memory.
Yet Washington was a white slaver. He held humans as property in his labor camps, and pursued them when they escaped to the point of his nickname being “slave-catcher George.”
But to the people who remember his past only as the Great White Father, bringing up his other past causes great anger and anxiety. “If we start taking down the memory of George Washington, where will it stop?”
Where, indeed?
Perhaps it will stop when we can look at our past and say “these things happened, all of them. Some were good, some were bad. None of it should just be shoved under the carpet because it affects how we want to remember these people.”
I thought of this tonight as I encountered someone who wants to invent an imaginary past about white Evangelicals and Christians in America. This person asserted, flatly, that segregation and slavery isn’t supported in the Bible, and that some Americans, very few, it seems, got hooked into chattel slavery.
I am just astonished at this.
This is not at all how it happened. A great many books have been written about this, tracing the development of segregation and racism in white Europeans towards black Africans and then to brown American Indigenous when white Europeans invaded the Americas. The nascent racism, justified by philosophy and by racialized Christianity, became hardened in many of the colonies, whether on the continents or in the islands. The racism that supported white slavers’ attempts to maintain and spread their enslavement was justified by their Bible.
The entire American Civil War was preceded by theological arguments that resulted in the churches splitting over slavery. Theology, based upon the Bible, led to professing believers claiming that the Bible supported enslavement.
It might not be comfortable to read this, but we cannot simply erase this history because it makes us look bad.
The past does make us look bad. I get this. My faith, which is broadly identified as “Evangelical,” has been a large part of the establishment, the maintenance, and the spread of white-slaver government and the capture and enslavement of black Africans for the enrichment of white slavers, often to enrich our religious establishments. (See George Whitefield’s embrace of black chattel slavery so that his orphanage would prosper, for example.)
But we have to look at this past. It happened.
We have to look at it, if only to repent and lament with our brothers and sisters whose families past were decimated and destroyed, whose bodies and souls were tortured and damaged for the benefit of our ancestors, and for our brothers and sisters whose Christian experience was twisted and corrupted by their acceptance of white slavers and a church-blessed, slave-centered economy.
And we have to look at it, because we white Evangelicals continue to make the same stupid mistakes about culture and politics, thinking that we’re “winning” when we are again losing our witness and our integrity. This time, it’s over gays and civil rights—we’re convinced as Evangelicals that we are being persecuted when we discover we cannot use our religion as a cover for our discrimination against gay humans. “It’s not fair that I can’t refuse service!” we cry out, and we are determined to make sure that gay people know that we hate them, and that our God hates them almost as much as we do.
I get it.
We want the past not to count. “I wasn’t there with a whip in my hand, so I’m not responsible.” I get that. No, you weren’t. You’re here today benefiting from your ancestors who did, but the lesson here is not only repentance and lamentation, but also for God’s sake, can we stop being so stupid about how we force our peculiar religious beliefs upon our unsuspecting neighbors?
Maybe we white Evangelicals can look at the past and this time learn something from the mistakes our ancestors made, whether it was using the Bible to prove the benefice of slavery or using the Bible to prove that the Indigenous should be extirpated as God “claimed this land for His people.”
Maybe.
I am not sure we’ll learn—our track record is that we never have.
Sigh.