They Have Builded Him an Altar

Arlington National Cemetery

they shall beat their swords into plowshares, 
and their spears into pruning hooks; 
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 
neither shall they learn war any more.
Isaiah 2:4

When I was a little boy we had a Memorial Day tradition of going to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves of relatives. One time, we stopped for gas on the way home, and my dad went inside to talk with the guys who ran the station, while my sister and I waited in the car with my mother. 

I asked Mom about the flags we had seen at many of the graves and she told me that the flags marked the burial places of veterans. I asked if they had all died in the Second World War, and she said, no, some had died in other wars. But the flags did not mean that they had been killed in a war; the flags marked the graves of all veterans. It meant that they had served in the military.

Then we talked about those who had died in the war and she told me that when a family lost a son they would put a flag in the window (I know there is a tradition of stars, but I think she talked about flags). Mom had been in high school during the war, and she was visibly moved by the memory. 

“That must have been very sad for their mothers,” I said, seeing her emotion. “Yes,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “some families had more than one flag.”

“I wish I had been alive then,” I said. “I wish I had been in the war. I would have killed all those Japanese and Germans who made those mothers so sad!”

I was trying to cheer her up, and I could tell she knew that I meant well. She was quiet for a moment and they she said softly, “You know, Billy, Japanese and German soldiers had mothers, too.”

And I said, “Don’t say that. I don’t want to think about that!”

If we really think about it, it is almost unbearable. But as Christians, it is precisely what we ought to think about. 

Mom’s thoughts come back to me every Memorial Day. 

My other Memorial Day memory is of singing Julia Ward Howe’s epic, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She wrote it with the goal of inspiring the Union troops. Blending biblical apocalypticism with patriotic militarism, she set it to what had originally been a tune used in Methodist camp meetings.

At the time, the music provided the tune for the melancholy, “John Brown’s Body” and Howe wanted to use it for something more inspiring. The result is stirring and encouraging. 

And if you think about it, it is also deeply troubling.

Lest there be any doubt about her belief in the righteousness of the Union cause, the third verse sets it forth with brutal honesty:

I have read a fiery Gospel
writ in burnished rows of steel,
"As ye deal with My contemners
so with you My grace shall deal,"
Let the Hero born of woman
crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on 

The "Hero" is the Union soldier, but the heel that crushes the Confederate soldier (aka "the serpent") belongs to God. Not surprisingly, that verse is omitted from our United Methodist Hymnal.

She is best known for that hymn, but she was also an abolitionist and a suffragist, and she was one of the founders of what we now call “Mother’s Day.” 

Although she never wavered in her affirmation of the cause for which the Civil War was fought, she was appalled by the human cost.

In response to the carnage she had seen in the Civil War, she called for a Mother’s Day of Peace, in which the women of the world would declare a common interest in nurturing and protecting life. Her Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870, presented that bold vision:

Arise then ... women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts!

Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:

"We will not have questions answered 

by irrelevant agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us, 

reeking with carnage,

For caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them 

of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country,

Will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil 

at the summons of war,

Let women now leave all that may be left of home

for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, 

to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel 

with each other

as to the means 

whereby the great human family 

can live in peace,

Each learning after his own time, 

the sacred impress,

Not of Caesar, but of God.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

*This post includes material originally published on this blog in 2010.

Trump Tweets, Confederate Statues, and Our Three Cats

When Moses saw that the people were running wild (for Aaron had let them run wild, to the derision of their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me!”
Exodus 32:25-26

Once upon a time in our family we had three cats.

Their given names were Duster, Longfellow, and Wamba.

Their nicknames were General Lee, General Longstreet, and the Gray Ghost, Colonel John Mosby. Since they were gray there was some logic to naming them after Confederate officers. Duster, always looked dignified with his long gray fur and a beautiful white patch from his chin down his chest that reminded us of Lee’s beard. Wamba was fast and elusive and somewhat of a guerrilla fighter, so Gray Ghost seemed to fit. And Longy had to be Longstreet.

The nicknames came into being when we were reading “The Killer Angels,” Michael Shaara’s brilliant historical novel about the Battle of Gettysburg.

We were reading the book because of an interest in Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who left his position as a professor of Rhetoric and Revealed Religion at Bowdoin College to volunteer for the Union Army. At Gettysburg he led the Twentieth Maine Volunteers to hold the extreme left flank of the Union line against repeated Confederate assaults. Chamberlain’s leadership saved the day, and the battle, and possibly the war itself.

Chamberlain was our hero, but General James Longstreet was the most sympathetic character. Shaara portrays him as a pensive and deeply devout man, shaken by the loss of three children who died in rapid succession in an epidemic of scarlet fever in 1862. He was also a brilliant general who tried in vain to dissuade Lee from ordering Pickett’s disastrous charge.

The nicknames took hold without any conscious decision on our part. They were gray guys and of course they were Confederates.

But when I think about it, it is odd that we did not think it odd at the time.

We were the unlikeliest people to indulge in southern nostalgia.

Elaine and I are Yankees. I am named after my great-great-grandfather, William Crowell Gibbs, who was a Lieutenant Commander in the Union Navy, served under Admiral David Farragut and lost an eye in the Battle of Mobile Bay. And Elaine’s great-grandfather, who was not old enough to fight in the Civil War, was part of reconstruction. He went south after the war to teach former slaves on Wadmalaw Island in South Carolina.

We grew up on Civil Rights. We know about systemic racism. We understand white privilege. And anyone who reads this blog knows that racism has been a frequent topic.

But still.

We named our cats after Confederate war heroes.

Which goes to show how deeply the romanticism of the Civil War is embedded in our national psyche.

I was meditating on all of this as I considered the matter of Confederate Statuary. When the President called the statues part of our culture and history, he was only partly wrong. His advocacy against removal of the monuments was wrong and insensitive. But he was right in his observation. Unfortunately, the statues are part of our history and they remain part of our culture. The myth of the “Lost Cause” which says that the Civil War was not really about slavery, is alive and well. We may be against racism, but we still love “Gone with the Wind.”

But there’s more to our family story

In our little gray trinity, I was surprised to learn that both Longstreet and Mosby became Republicans after the war. They actively supported the reunited Union and each served in the government.

Longstreet’s work after the war was particularly significant. He moved to New Orleans where he played a key role in government and civilian endeavors.

His biography in “The Civil War Trust” views his post war years through a hazy mist of Civil War romanticism:

“In 1867, the New Orleans Times asked several leading citizens to comment on the newly passed Reconstruction Acts. Unwisely, Longstreet suggested that Southerners support the Republicans. . . He supported Grant for president, and when elected, Grant nominated Longstreet to be the Surveyor of Customs for the Port of New Orleans. For this last betrayal of the South he was labeled a ‘scalawag.’”

Longstreet became the target of “Lost Cause” advocates such as Jubal Early, William Pendleton, and Rev. J. William Jones among others. They were so outraged by his support for black suffrage and his willingness to command a biracial force against an uprising of white supremacists that they tried to smear his war record and blamed him for the Southern defeat at Gettysburg.

One of the monuments that the city of New Orleans now proposes to remove is dedicated to the white supremacists that General Longstreet put down in 1874 with an African American militia. It would be fitting to replace that monument with one that honors Longstreet, not for his Civil War exploits, though they were extensive, but for the service he rendered to his country after the war.

Mr. Trump is right that the Confederate statues are part of our history and culture. But we need to reclaim that history from the romantic imagery of the Lost Cause and recognize it for the evil that it was.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

In this case, it is long past time to let go of the past. We cannot and should not forget it. But we should stop celebrating it.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Removing the Confederate Flag

Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death.
Matthew 10:21

The Civil War ended 150 years ago this April.

After 620,000 deaths, the war to end slavery was over. 

In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln was more theologian than politician. He suggested that the war had come to both North and South as divine judgment for the great offense of slavery. In the next to last paragraph, he delivered a confession of faith:

“If God wills, that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

And then the famous conclusion:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

The Dead at Gettysburg

If you doubt that Abraham Lincoln was our greatest President and our greatest public theologian, go read the Second Inaugural. His address would be amazing for its grace and generosity of spirit even if you didn’t know that in the South, Lincoln was our most hated president. And in some parts of the country, he is still the most hated, although our first African American president may have him beaten in some areas.

Lincoln's solemn and sacred reflections are much more in keeping with the picture of the dead at Gettysburg than with with the romanticized picture above. And it is useful to remember that the second picture is real and the first is not. The Civil war was our deadliest and most brutal conflict. More Americans died in the Civil War than in any other war. It was not until the Vietnam War that the total combined deaths in all other wars was more than the number of deaths in the Civil War.

Sadly, the Civil War did not really end at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. And it did not end on June 19, 1865 (Juneteenth) when Union Troops began liberating the slaves in Texas. In many ways, it is not yet over. 

The decision by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to ask legislators to remove the Confederate Flag from the grounds of the State Capitol is important because it is one more step in ending that war and moving the country healing our racial divisions. One hopes that a movement in South Carolina will lead other states to follow suit. 

For many years after the Civil War, the use of the flag was limited to cemeteries and historic memorials. But that changed over time. Popularity of the flag soared after Dixiecrats used it as the emblem of their support for Jim Crow laws and segregation. Strom Thurmond used the flag in 1948. George Wallace raised the flag over the Alabama legislature in 1962.

The flag is important today because it has become a symbol of racial hatred. As South Carolina Republican state legislator Douglas Brannon candidly observed, "It's not just a symbol of hate, it's actually a symbol of pride in one's hatred."

Removing the flag will not end racism in America. But it is important. It is a step. It matters because symbols matter.