Joel is a Southern Baptist Pastor and blogs at themelios.
Four miles from the site where the church I serve as pastor gathers for worship each week—just across the Potomac River—is Antietam Creek, Maryland. On that hallowed ground in 1862, Union General George McClellan finally caught up with General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The first day of that battle—the first battle to take place on Union soil—became the bloodiest single day skirmish in American history. More than 22,000 from both sides gave the last full measure of devotion there. Today, the solemnity of that ground is marked to honor those who fought on both sides of that battle.
This September will mark the 154th anniversary of that battle. If you visit Antietam, or any part of the larger Sharpsburg Maryland area during that time, you will see multiple expressions meant to memorialize the dead—including Confederate dead. You will hear many conversations about the complexities that surrounded what is possibly the most awful chapter in our national history. Most significantly, you will feel a deep sense of loss on both sides—still felt more than a century and a half after the Civil War.
It’s that sense of loss that fuels the heat surrounding any debate over modern expressions of the 19th century southern Confederacy, which is why I was not surprised to see a negative reaction to my friend Dwight McKissic’s proposed resolution on the Confederate Flag. I feel that sense of loss myself. My great-great grandfather fought in the Confederate North Carolina 4th—my wife’s great-great grandfather in the South Carolina 2nd. Neither ancestor owned slaves. Both enlisted voluntarily to defend what they believed was the invasion of a foreign army into their recently declared independent states.
The truth of the Civil War is far less simple than so many make it out to be today. Yes, slavery was the driving wedge issue that propelled us into war. But what gave rise to the conflict between north and south was also heavily fueled by conflict over industrialization, agriculture, taxation, and most importantly, how the federal and state governments should relate to each other. Furthermore, while institutionalized chattel slavery was confined to the south, the larger issue of racism was rampant through the whole country. If you were black in the 19th century, by and large, you only had two choices—live in the south where you would have food and shelter in exchange for being someone else’s property, or live in the north where you would be “free” but largely hated and marginalized. The plague of racism infected our entire nation at that point.
In short, the southern Confederacy was a highly complex social compact. As such, its various flags, now enshrined in history, represent a complex heritage that is neither all good nor all bad.
Yet with all that in view, my hope is that Pastor McKissic’s resolution makes it out of committee, and that our larger Southern Baptist family doesn’t just approve it, but that they embrace it! Why do I feel this way?
The Flag has been corrupted. When Dylan Roof killed nine African American worshippers in Charleston SC last summer, my family and I were vacationing in nearby Mount Pleasant. This tragic, heartbreaking event brought more injury when Roof’s racist motivations were discovered—and captured fully in a picture of him wrapped in a Confederate battle flag.
But Dylan Roof is far from the first to take a symbol that once meant many things to many people, and transform it into a symbol of racial hatred and bigotry. My home state of South Carolina flew the battle flag over her state house for more than forty years, and it wasn’t placed there in the 1950s to promote “southern heritage.” It was ordered to the mast by then South Carolina Governor Earnest Hollings as a means of protesting racial desegregation in our public school systems. Whatever that flag meant to anyone else, it became a symbol of hatred the moment South Carolina’s head of state ordered it up the flagpole. I celebrated when it was finally removed, not because I am ashamed of my southern heritage, but because the reason behind the flag’s placement corrupted my heritage. Similar stories—many of them—could be shared throughout other parts of the country, and not just the south. Currently, the greatest hotbeds of racism exist in southern Pennsylvania—a “union state” where many confederate flags fly to this day.
So when our African American brothers and sisters see the “stars and bars” displayed in these ways, we should not be surprised that they view it as a symbol of hatred, because in most contexts where it is displayed today, that’s precisely what it is. Whatever we make of its past, the Confederate battle flag has been corrupted, and followers of Jesus should have nothing to do with corruption.
The Flag represents a part of our own history we need to lay down permanently. Pastor McKissic isn’t suggesting that we scrub every vestige of the Confederacy from our history. He has mentioned nothing of sandblasting Confederate tombstones or removing historical monuments. In fact, I’m assuming he would agree that to do so would severely compromise our ability to learn from our past mistakes. What he is suggesting is that a single flag—the “battle flag” that has been so corrupted over the past few decades—represents something in our own denomination’s past that hasn’t been fully repented of
The worst kept secret in the Southern Baptist Convention is that our beginnings are rooted in the support of institutionalized chattel slavery. We not only believed it was OK to own another human being created in God’s image. We used the worst forms of eisegesis to suggest such an institution to be supported by God’s Word, and even supported the appointment of slave-owning missionaries!
Fast forward a century and a half, and the grace of God is abundantly evident in our denomination, which now worships Jesus in more than 116 different languages each Sunday. Rather than destroy us in fire, as we would have certainly deserved, God instead gently, and with great patience, brought us to repentance of our former ways. Yet like any individual sinner, a corporate desire to cling to past dysfunction is evident when we are unwilling to separate ourselves from symbols anyone outside our tribe would automatically associate with the genesis of our tribe. When we cling, even at the expense of our fellow African-American Southern Baptists who are stung by our unnecessary offense, we only give more evidence of the fact that we have still not yet arrived. When I preach about addiction or counsel privately with people about sinful habits, I often say that your greatest idol is the last thing you are willing to let go of for the sake of the living God and His glory. I hope for Southern Baptists, we can let this one go for the sake of a greater mission.
The Flag represents a dead kingdom. When the Confederacy was defeated, it substantively redefined the way state and federal governments in our country relate to one another. I don’t have the space here to delve into the details, but as I observe what I believe is massive federal over-reach that continues to grow, I can’t help but trace that trajectory all the way back to 1865. A part of me wonders if, as punishment for the racism and slavery of a century and a half ago, God isn’t directing the trajectory of our nation in a way that we have now enslaved ourselves to our own government. His memory is long, and His anger burns hot when His image is diminished in the way our country insulted it during the 18th and 19th centuries.
I may be right, or I may be wrong. But either way, the Confederacy is dead.
One day, Jesus will return. In that moment, the kingdoms of this world—ALL of them—will become the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ. We rightly preach that we should not compromise the coming Kingdom of Christ for a temporary one. How much less room should there be in our hearts for a kingdom that has already long been dead?
For these reasons, I am thankful for Pastor McKissic’s leadership in our Convention and pray we embrace his call to lay down the last symbolic vestige of our collective and historic sins. If demographic trends continue, 50 years from now the “minorities” in our network of churches will be the “majority,” and should be leading us into our collective future. Let’s take an important step in that direction in St. Louis this June by laying down the symbol of a dead Kingdom now used as a Satanic tool of racial discrimination, so that all of us—red, yellow, black and white—can march together into the muti-racial, multi-cultural picture in Revelation 7 we are all destined for.