Monuments to Stonewalling

By Audrey Stallsmith

I originally was a bit puzzled by the antagonistic African American reaction to old statues of Confederate generals. To me, those monuments covered by bird droppings were just history—and rather ancient history at that! 

Once I got to pondering the events of a more recent war, however, I was able to understand the “pull them down” attitude better. If you were a Jew in present day Germany who still was seeing statues of Hitler and his generals everywhere, how would that make you feel?

You probably would think your country really didn’t regret the Holocaust that its citizens had allowed to occur among them. In fact, you likely would assume that Germany still was looking back with some wistfulness on what it perceived as its glory days, with all of its supposed repentance being merely a sham. 

Granted, the Confederacy didn’t attempt to wipe out an entire race as Hitler did, though there were instances of African American prisoners of war being slaughtered. But I have a hard time believing truly good men could view the enslavement of an entire race as being any more acceptable. So even the best of the southern generals, including the reportedly highly religious Stonewall Jackson, had to be stonewalling (obstructing or evading) their consciences. Even if they convinced themselves that they only were defending their states and those states’ rights.

Since most Confederate soldiers weren’t wealthy enough to own slaves, we can only assume that they, too, convinced themselves they were defending their states rather than the institution of slavery. But, just as the German people turned a blind eye to what was happening to the Jews, those poorer southerners would have had to turn a blind eye to what was happening to the enslaved among them.   

Now that we all know what willful blindness can lead to, we need to be prepared to call out our governments over their sins. No state or country is worth the sacrifice of our principles. Such political entities aren’t eternal, after all, but our souls are. And God is going to hold us accountable for how we treated all of his children. 

These days, it seems to be the white supremacists who are enslaved—by their inability to let go of their hate. So, if those statues are helping keep the South bound to its past by causing the idealization of men who shouldn’t be idealized, maybe it is time they came down. 

I doubt their destruction is necessary, since they could be consigned to museums as lessons for future generations. But, as G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown commented about ecclesiastical art, “If you don’t know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don’t know so much about my religion as you think you do.”