Thoughts After Charlottesville 

Posted on by Marie

Gentle Reader,

You know I’m a pacifist, but I wonder how we got from Captain America punching Hitler to, “well, Nazis aren’t that big a deal” and, “it’s probably all a conspiracy because Soros and Antifa.”

How did we come to idolize Robert E. Lee, a slave owner who fought against his own country?

Why do we still doubt that the Civil War was about slavery?

Why are people who call themselves Christians saying, “we will not be silenced?” Chanting, “blood and soil?” (That’s a Nazi slogan, if you don’t know).

A woman died and dozens more are injured. All for a statue that shouldn’t have been erected in the first place.

And, yeah, I know. Free speech is a thing we have here. People can assemble and say stupid, ugly things. I support that. Doesn’t mean that I will shy away from labeling that speech “stupid” and “ugly.” 

After sitting with and mourning this for 2 days, I wonder: Could we Christians lead the way here by no longer screaming about our rights? By refusing to see the government – local, state or federal – as an entity meant to protect us? What if we truly rested in the promises of Christ, knowing in our bones that He will see us through whatever happens? What if we decided to esteem others and consider their needs before our own, as Paul admonishes in Philippians 2? What if we recognised that this world is not our home and that the spread of the Gospel is more important than politics? What if we looked to our brothers and sisters in hostile countries and emulated their example? Those of us who are white, what if we took the time to really listen to and empathize with people of color – not to take on false guilt, but so we can understand what they deal with?

I wonder what would happen. I wonder if we’d become agents of healing and shine brightly in dark places.

Meditate on these passages:

2 Corinthans 5:20; 6:4a, 6b

2 Corinthains 5:9

Philippians 2:3-4

Philippians 2:14-15

Philippians 4:5

Colossians 3:8

1 Thessalonians 5:5

James 2:8-9a

Matthew 28:18-20

Romans 12:17-18

Galatians 5:24

1 John 4:9

Revelation 7:9-10

Racism has no place in Christianity. May we be courageous enough to examine our own hearts and repent if needed. May we be brave enough to vocally condemn this evil. May we be loving enough to reach out to those who are different.

Skin is skin.

It doesn’t matter.

Lord, teach us to love as You love. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear. Expose what needs exposing. Help us to prioritize preaching the Gospel over and above all else. Kill the selfish ambitions and vain conceits that strangle our hearts.

Break us and remake us.

Forgive us, Jesus. 

Red, brown, yellow, black and white – all are precious in Your sight.

10 thoughts on “Thoughts After Charlottesville ”

  1. We all bleed red, and pain knows neither race nor creed. I learned that a long time ago, in a place where violence was the local currency, and civic discourse involved shooting.
    Statuary is a tricky subject, because we see those immortalized through modern eyes. Lee was a slaveowner, but that he betrayed his country is a more difficult question; back in the day, the US was a confederation of states to which inhabitants felt far more loyalty than they did to the corporate whole. Lee was a Virginian first, and I think we have to respect that. The notion of a nation really began with the Civil War.
    Too, there is a touching generosity in allowing the losing side to maintain monuments to their heroes. Throwing this away is perhaps not a good idea.
    Slavery’s a touchy issue, because we focus on it in a slightly sneaky racist way…many of the native American tribes we hold in high esteem today, such as the Creek, Pawnee, and Comanche practiced a form of slavery that was quite similar to that of the American colonists…and perhaps because they are ‘Noble Savages’, we, in a grandiose gesture of implicit racism, give them a pass. WE should be expected to know that slavery is immoral, but the benighted heathen can’t be expected to be held to our standards. WHITE standards.
    And about a third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Do we white-out (BAD pun) their names, or do we invalidate the document? Or at the very least, consign it to the archives?
    History is messy. There are very few real heroes, and trying to hold the dead to standards we don’t really keep ourselves (‘bracero’ is alive and well in the Southwest) is the height of a snobbish double standard.
    My point (finally) is this. leave the state, call it Lee Park, and make sure that the events whioch created them never happen again. Let it be a monument to folly, rather than fuel for revisionism.
    And if the idiots who know not a blessed thing about the nazis want to march, let them, and let the three people who turn out along the route (out of curiosity) be the only watchers. Then let them crawl back under their rocks, egos shredded by the magnitude by which they were ignored.
    And, yeah, if they got tansported back to the good ol’ days of the Third Reich, they’d have been executed.

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      1. It’s late and I’m (legally) drugged, so I’ll keep it short: Put the statues and flags in museums, where they can be contextualized.

        I’m so tired of all this crap. Jesus can come back now. I’m ready.

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          1. I share your indignation. Going to jump off here and pray for you before I sleep. God loves you so much. He’s right there in that valley with you. When all you can taste is the dirt, know that He’s laying on the ground, too, covering you and holding you close.

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  3. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I’m heartbroken over the state of our nation. Praying for God to intervene. We need His wisdom and grace, for His light to shine in the dark places, for a revolution of love to break out. Blessings!

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