Thoughtful About . . . What We’re Remembered For
In recent weeks, there’s been quite a hullabaloo over statues. It’s
started in the US and has even spread to the UK. Voices are raised.
Blood pressure is up. People are shouting at each other from both sides.
On
the news the other evening, I heard someone call for the removal of all
statues of the founding fathers who were slave holders. And something
inside me ached.
First let me say, I detest slavery. I hate that it was ever a part of our nation. I love the differences God put into His human creation, and I think they should be celebrated–not feared or hated or labeled. I was always quite proud to be a West Virginian–the state that formed in order to stay a part of the Union rather than the Confederacy (at least until I learned it was a political stance, in order to gain that statehood, and that the majority of my state’s citizens in fact supported the Confederacy…). I don’t think slavery should ever be glorified.
But…
(Bracing myself)
But…I think it’s wrong to boil people down to ONE stance. ONE opinion. ONE part of their lives and dismiss everything else they did because of it.
Many of our founding fathers were slaveholders. And many of the same recognized that it was an evil. They wanted the country to be rid of the institution. They knew it was wrong. But they didn’t know how to expunge it from their society without ripping said society apart. And so, they left it for another generation to deal with, trusting that something so obviously wrong would die a natural death.
“I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State
could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery …
“Not only do
I pray for it, on the score of human dignity,
but I can clearly foresee
that nothing but the rooting out of slavery
can perpetuate the existence
of our union,
by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”
~ George Washington
It didn’t die a natural death. Instead, people began to justify it. To say it wasn’t evil at all. And finally to embrace it. To be willing to fight for it.
Does that make those founding fathers evil? Because of one stance they didn’t take? Do we judge them according to their failures…or their successes?
Which would WE like to be judged by?
All these people calling for statues to be taken down, for these men to be erased from displays of history…should we judge THEM by their sins…or by their graces? For what they’ve done wrong, or for what they’re doing right?
How can we in good conscience judge our forebears by a standard we ourselves would never want to be judged by?
Don’t we frequently do things we know are wrong? Do we ever participate in
something socially that we know isn’t good for society? Do we take
advantage of the tax system we think is warped? Do we use the insurance
we didn’t think should be passed into legislation? Do we laugh at the
crude jokes that belittle others? Perhaps it’s not on the same scale,
but it’s the same idea of rebelling against a culture.
Does
it ever make you stop and wonder if all the good we work for, all the
love we live out, all the victories we think we’ve managed will someday
turn to dust because of those things we don’t do right? The things we
fail at? The places our love is weak?
That’s what we’re doing when we try to erase people from our own past. We’re saying we don’t care what they built, what good they did, what they had right–that it’s all nothing compared to what they did wrong.
I’m especially saddened by the outrage focused on Robert E. Lee. He wasn’t a perfect man, but he also wasn’t a villain, as people today seem to want to paint him. He was never in favor of slavery–his wife and daughter even founded an illegal school to educate slaves in their area, and helped some gain their freedom. He wrote in a letter to his wife that “slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any Country.” He also wasn’t in favor of Virginia seceding. So why did he fight for them? You might as well ask why a general in England who voted against Brexit doesn’t move to Europe and join one of their militaries–Lee was a Virginian first, an American second. A position very typical of the time, though foreign to us today.
I could go on and on about what made Lee a great man, a great Christian, and one of the most vocal in the South after the war to encourage healing and love, to accept the freedom of former slaves as God-ordained and good, and to come alongside them as friends.
This is the man people today want to hate. Because they see only that he was a Confederate General, and they never ask why. They never ask what he actually believed.
Do we want to be judged as nothing but our jobs? One thing? One stance? One position?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not so simple.
Why, then, do we expect our forefathers to have been?
Please, America. Please don’t brand each other–those who live down the street or those who lived centuries before–as evil based on our failures, or on our perceived opinions of each other. Because if we are so quick to judge, to erase, to willingly forget…then what will we be remembered for?
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.