Icons of hate

Growing up in the American South, I learned how to dissemble regarding the Civil War. Not every white child in the South of my youth was taught to think that way, but I was. The Civil War was thus the "War of Northern Aggression," and the Southern states were not rebellious oppressors but brave defenders of liberty. Slavery wasn't defended, in this telling, so much as shunted aside. The war wasn't really about slavery, I learned.

Of course for the roughly 4 million human beings denied liberty and human dignity under the legal imprimatur of the South, slavery was precisely what that war was about. But the people who needed then---and still need---to absolve the rebel South of this crime never concerned themselves with how the Civil War looked to those creatures of God. Instead they employed a curious logic that runs as follows: Because the North didn't wage war primarily to free the slaves, the South therefore didn't go to war to keep slavery. This is the kind of thinking that allows college frat boys and amateur historians alike to fly the Confederate battle flag today, and to become incensed when you tell them it's wrong.

For most of my life I didn't think so. In my arrogance I've always been attracted to any intellectual position that allows me to assume I know something most people don't. People who get offended at the Rebel flag simply don't know their history, I would tell myself with self-satisfaction.

I don't know exactly when my thinking changed, but I think it came the day I heard a libertarian scholar coolly explain that one of the greatest encroachments on liberty in U.S. history was the formation of the Union's standing army. His point was that this paved the way for militarism. He spoke from the comfortable position of someone free to scribble in his ivory tower precisely because the U.S. military has put a whipping stick to tyrants over the years. But what struck me at the time was the thought that 4 million human beings living on American soil in 1865 owed the beginnings of their freedom to that army. Why would he so casually disregard this fact?

Perhaps because, like me, when it came to the Civil War, he had been trained to think about everything except the stark reality that 15 states held human beings in bondage, and used the Bible to justify their barbarism, and engaged in open rebellion in part to protect this wickedness. I am not the only Southerner to believe that the South's destruction in the Civil War looks an awful lot like the righteous judgment of a just and loving God, and to believe further that we ought to praise God that the South was soundly defeated.

Nor am I the only one to believe that---Shelby Foote aside---no matter what good and decent causes someone claims to invest in the Confederate battle flag today, it will forever be tainted as a symbol of rebellion and oppression. And in light of the depth of that wickedness, a Christian---or just an otherwise decent human being---ought to be ashamed to display it publicly, especially where his African-American brothers and sisters in Christ will see it.

All this comes to mind because I know a handful of Christians---not all of them Southerners---who display the Confederate battle flag with pride. Some are caught up in the it-wasn't-really-about-slavery mentality, while others seem to want to affect an I'm-a-rebel-against-the-modern-Sodom-and-Gomorrah pose. It seems not to trouble them that racists and white supremacists---some of them hard-core Bible-thumping apostates posing as Christians---embrace that flag as well. Would Christian Confederacy aficionados be willing, I wonder, to continue sporting the Rebel flag if gays from coast to coast made it their symbol of rebellion against heterosexual hegemony? I suspect none of them wants for a second to be mistaken for a gay man, yet they seem willing to be mistaken for a hate-filled bigot. That's all well and good, but when they carry the name of Christ into the public arena alongside that flag, they are no longer defaming just themselves.

Perhaps the test, then, ought to be whether you'd feel comfortable hoisting that flag in front of your church on a Sunday morning. If not, perhaps that's a sign that you are trafficking in something that is, at its worst, a symbol of evil, and at best, a stumbling block for many of your brothers and sisters. And for the Christian, that ought to matter.