Is It Wrong to Display a Picture of Robert E. Lee? My Response
— Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 —
Back before I went on this extended hiatus (finishing up this new book), I received a question from a reader about whether it was ethical and neighbor-loving to display a picture of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. You can read his query here, along with comments from other readers about what he should do. Below are my thoughts on the situation.
Dear Not-a-Neoconfederate,
As I write this, I can see on my wall the flag of my home state of Mississippi, and I’m deeply conflicted about it. The flag represents home for me. I love Christ, church, and family more than Mississippi, but that’s about it. Still, the flag makes me wince because emblazoned on it is the Confederate Battle Flag, which was used so often in my home state, and elsewhere, as an emblem of backlash in support of the ugly epoch of Jim Crow. I supported a referendum changing the flag in 2001, but the voters of the state kept the old flag design by a vote of 65 to 35 percent. The more I think of it, the more I believe my conflicted feelings about that flag aren’t all that unusual for a Christian.
When it comes to Robert E. Lee, I can’t agree with those who would equate this picture with one of Adolf Hitler. Virtually every biography, by his contemporaries and future historians, would commend the General for his personal character and his sacrificial leadership. As biographer Roy Blount Jr. demonstrates Lee’s views on race were, in some ways, much more progressive than those of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and other Northerners.
Lee, like many in the army he led, saw himself as fighting, not for slavery, but for home. This doesn’t mean they were right, but it does mean that an easy caricature isn’t possible. Based on Lee’s own writings, he sounds much like an antiwar American who, nonetheless, when drafted, fights for his country.
The question is complicated more by the home for which Lee was fighting. As a localist Agrarian-leaning political type, I agree with a good bit the Vanderbilt scholars of I’ll Take My Stand found commendable in some isolated economic/cultural aspects of the antebellum South, especially compared to the whirl of the industrial rootlessness that came after. But the agrarians, right as they were on so much, were still too close, I think, to the Civil War to see the moral enormity of the slavery question.
But the Confederate States of America was constitutionally committed to the continuation, with protections in law, of a great evil.
The idea of a human being attempting to “own” another human being is abhorrent in a Christian view of humanity. That hardly needs to be said these days, thankfully, but we ought to remember just what was at stake. In the Scriptures, humanity is given dominion over created things but he is not given dominion over his fellow image-bearing humans (Gen. 1:27-30). The southern system of chattel slavery was built off of things the Scripture condemns as wicked: “man-stealing” (1 Tim. 1:10), the theft of another’s labor, the destroying of family ties, and on and on and on.
In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism mostly of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the spurious “curse of Ham” concept, for instance). The abolitionists were right.
So what should a pro-civil rights son of the Confederacy do with the memory of those who fought for a Lost (in more ways than one) Cause?
Several comments on the original post pointed out how tainted virtually all history is. Yes, Lee fought for slavery, but so did the American Founders, in writing in allowances for it into the American Constitution. Does the picture of Thomas Jefferson I have in my study endorse his theological liberalism and his slave-holding or does it recognize his far-sighted commitments to human dignity and religious liberty? Does the bust of Theodore Roosevelt endorse his Darwnism or his awful views on eugenics?
The problem with a simple view of history is that it leads to a totemic use of historical figures. Some have romanticized, for instance, the American Founders in a way that doesn’t allow an honest conversation about the real problems there. Fourth of July sermons that treat Jefferson and Franklin and Adams as exemplars of evangelical Christianity aren’t really defending the gospel, nor are they honoring those founders. They are simply not treating persons as persons, turning them into slogan-supporting icons instead. The same thing is true with the cult of the Confederacy that has emerged in the last century, except often in much more malevolent forms. The Confederate dead have become a kind of cultural short-hand for white supremacy and racial resentment. It is a long drop indeed from Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Wallace and David Duke.
The fetishistic use of historical figures is precisely what leads to the kind of “absolute good vs. absolute evil” characterizations we often see among Christians in the way they view current leaders. Why did so many evangelicals send around email forwards with the urban myth that the then-President of the United States had led a little girl to pray to receive Christ on a rope line? It’s because so many wanted to think of this political leader as a spiritual leader too.
That’s the kind of hagiography that led to George Washington’s cherry tree inability to tell a lie. Well, George Washington was a great man, but he was also a liar. And so am I, and so are you. Unless there was a star shining over Washington’s birthplace (and there wasn’t), then Romans 3:10-19 applies to him as well as to all of us.
But this messy historical ambiguity ought not to surprise those who are being shaped by the Bible. Think of the brutal honesty with which the Scriptures give us the sins and foibles of our fathers in the faith, while honoring them just the same. Think of the very sinful, conniving picture we get of Jacob in Genesis and then think of the fact that he is commended in Hebrews 11 as a man of faith. Think of the genealogy of our Lord Jesus, filled as it is with scoundrels. And we know they were scoundrels because the Bible tells us so.
The Christian isn’t called to a rootless, ahistorical existence. We are commanded to show honor to our fathers and mothers (Exod. 20:12). That doesn’t mean hagiography. Jesus pointed out that his fathers had died in the folly in the wilderness (Jn. 6:49). Peter pointed out that the revered David was now just a pile of bones, and thus at least one sin short of a Messiah (Acts 2:29-35). This means we have a skeptical honor that recognizes both the good graces God has given to sinful men and women, and the fact that even the best among us is a sinner.
Should you keep up that picture of Lee, with his quote about what it means to be a gentleman? I don’t know. I can’t tell you one way or the other because what’s more important than a single picture is the general ethos of a home. Years ago, I had an African-American civil rights activist friend with a portrait of Lee in his home, and I never questioned whether he might be a Klansman. I have a portrait in my office of Fannie Lou Hamer, who supported the Equal Rights Amendment (I think), but I don’t think anyone sees that picture as an apologetic for feminism.
The issue is love of neighbor and the mission of Christ. That’s why the Apostle Paul refuses to lay down simple rules about eating vegetables or eating meat (Rom. 14:1-23). If that picture would hinder your being able to show hospitality and love with your brothers and sisters of every background and race, take it down.
But, if you keep it up on the wall, let it be, like every historical portrait, a warning.
I’d like to think that if I’d been born in 1841 Mississippi instead of 1971 Mississippi that I’d have been leading slave escapes. I’d like to think that if I’d been born in 1941 Mississippi that I’d have been singing “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington. And maybe I would have.
But a gentleman as devoted to character as Robert E. Lee, who had thought long and hard about the evils of slavery, was so conditioned by his time that he couldn’t see past his blind spot. So what makes me think that I could have escaped a similar blind spot? And what is so common in our culture right now that we can’t even see it, as we think we’re serving the Lord?
Jesus addresses something of this when he says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrite! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets’” (Matt. 23:29). Those are chilling words for one whose bloodline has come down from the slave-holding South through the Jim Crow oppression to the present day.
As I look at that Mississippi flag, I can’t demonize it. I’m grateful for the people, the family, the place it represents. But I wince at the symbol that was used to enslave the little brothers and sisters of Jesus, to bomb little girls in church buildings, to terrorize preachers of the gospel and their families with burning crosses on front lawns by night.
All that ought not to prompt a pretending that you come from somewhere other than where you’ve come. That would be ingratitude. It ought instead simply to lead you to say, “I am a man of unclean lips, and I come from a people of unclean lips” (Isa. 6:5).
None of us is free from a sketchy background, and none of our backgrounds are wholly evil. The blood of Jesus has ransomed us all “from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet. 1:18), whether your forefathers were Yankees, Rebels, Vikings, or whatever. The gospel also then frees us to give honor to whom honor is due (Rom. 13:7), without the pretense that any human being is without sin or dishonor.
Robert E. Lee was a complicated figure, a sinful rebel (in more ways than one) who bore the image of God. And so are we. Lee was gifted in commendable ways even as he used those gifts sometimes in ways that ought to horrify. So do we. We ought to be honest, in both directions, about Lee and about our neighbors and ourselves. And that ought to cause us to search out our own lives for that hidden sin, that secret hatred, that conforming to the pattern of this age that we don’t see and don’t think to ask about. Ultimately, no matter how we seek to whitewash our heritage or our personal stories, we’ll only conquer it all at the resurrection from the dead. Until then, we watch our hearts, pray for wisdom, work for justice, and love our neighbor.
Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome some day.
What’s your ethical dilemma? Send me an email at questions@russellmoore.com
Dear Sir:
You should be ashamed of your despicable slander of General Lee–and Southerners in general. I am saddened by the proliferation of those who speak ill of our brave ancestors and heap scorn on our people. You should be ashamed. You are not deserving of them.
@R. Matthew Lee,
Are you responding to Dr. Moore’s post? Because, if so, you need to re-read it. Dr. Moore is not slandering General Lee nor Southerners (Dr. Moore himself being a Southerner); he is pointing out the biblical truth that we are all sinners in need of God’s grace.
@Mr Lindsay,
Apparently, I interpret his post differently. The scope of the whole (at least as I read it) is that Lee (and the Confederates), were participants in ‘evil’ and were ‘wicked’ because of it. Those are not words to just throw around. The very fact that he accuses Lee, et al. of ‘evil’ due to their allegiances is what I take issue with.
I stand by my initial comments.
@R. Matthew Lee, Mr. Lee, I really do believe you missed Dr. Moores point as Andrew pointed out. When we look at our lives, mine and yours included we are sinful creatures along with General Lee. We have offended a Holy God by breaking His Law. We have lied, stolen, blasphemed God’s name etc. I could go on and on. We are law breakers and deserving of God’s wrath and also deserving of Hell. The Bible commands all men to repent, turn from their sin, and place their faith and trust in Jesus Christ and Him alone. Jesus lived a perfect life and did NOT sin as we do. Yet he nailed to a cross through God’s preordained plan, and God’s wrath which we deserved was poured out upon Him. He died and was raised again on the third day defeating death. Our hope should be in Christ alone, and after that if there are any blind spots (sin) in our life that we choose to over look as General Lee did, we need to repent of that sin and keep walking in Christ.
General Lee’s wickedness was his sinful life, whether it was lying, stealing, killing, and yes both the north and south were participants in an evil war where both families and friends were torn apart by death and destruction. Was it God’s will for men to have slaves, no it wasn’t. If general Lee didn’t repent of his sins and place His faith and trust in Christ alone, He too is in hell. Why would he be in hell because of His wicked sins before a Holy God.
All Americans should be ashamed of this war, the way their forefathers fought over the issue of slavery. We should use history to our advantage, to learn from it, to study and use it in our lives as examples of how sinful men lived and died so that we can avoid their same mistakes.
@R. Matthew Lee,
General Lee killed and killed again to attempt to keep black people as slaves to white people.
He knew it, you know it, I know it. There is nothing more despicable.
Call him what he was, a murderous racist.
Your well thought out response has given me much to ponder in my own heart and life - thank you.
Amen Dr. Moore… Thank you for a very thoughtful and balanced response to the original question…
It’s a strawman to say that those who oppose Robert E. Lee’s commendation as a Christian hero think he was pure evil.
re: confederate flag….
The Nazis had a symbol, too. If modern Germans wanted to keep the symbol around for them because it meant much more than the Holocaust, it meant their heritage, would you oppose that?
Is there any difference then?
The only offense I want my life to produce is the cross of Christ. It is near impossible to believe that the confederate flag is not offensive to masses of people. Hold to it, but don’t be surprised when the conversations about Christ are cut off, not because of Christ, but because of the systemic violence and injustice done in his name, represented by the flag you hold onto.
It may not mean injustice and oppression to you, but to millions of others, it does.
having read somewhat, though not exhaustively, of men who stood their ground against northern aggression during that time, I’ve come to learn that they, almost to a man, were well aware of the impending end to chattel slavery as it was practiced in the ante-bellum South. Slavery was NOT the issue of that conflict, the sovereignty of each state was, as intended in the Constitution of these United States of America. That issue remains with us today, as we see a runaway federal government on a wild rampage to control every aspect of every individual’’s life, even when some expatriate to a foreign nation to escape it. Those men KNEW full well slavery would not long persist, and believed that, over time, a moral and equitable end to the practice would be effected. Many, and both Lee and Jackson were amongst them, pressed for the education and training of the negro, to enable them to become self-sufficient, no longer dependent upon their masters for their livelihood. It seems likely that, had that War of Northern Aggression not been prosecuted by Lincoln and his minions, by the time the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted and the ensuing “reconstruction” was more or less completed, economic and cultural changes would have brought about the end of slavery and the assimilation into society of the former slave class. If one carefully studies the history of Reconstruction, one finds the roots of rabid racism there, and not in antebellum slavery per se. Imagine millions of individuals, having little to nothing in way of possessions, skills, sustenance or shelter (remember, they were suddenly turned out, en masse, from the only homes they had known), left to fend for themselves wherever and however they might. They were forced to become as a plague of locusts, wherever they went they were trouble. Thus the mere sight of a coloured person became abhorrent, in no small part due to the fact it had all been brought about by the hated North, who, remember, had wreaked unbelieveable wanton destruction most places they went. Read of General Sherman’s March to the Sea, when everything along a wide swatch from Atlanta to Savannah was destroyed utterly. Had any of Hitler’s generals perpetrated such a heinous feat, he’d have been tried at Nuremburg and executed.
No, I’ll display a portrait of the very honourable and righteous General Robert E. Lee any time… with NO shame and no apologies. Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, no, thanks all the same. History has been written by the victors, and needs to be corrected. We are heading down the very same path today, what with Obamacare, the FDA launching SWAT team raids on sellers of raw milk and honey, drones assassinating Pakistanis, and a steady pressure to disarm the entire population, if need by, by the surrender of our National sovereignty to a United Nations treaty.
@Lewsta,
You were doing great until that last paragraph.
Dr. Moore,
Your (unnecessary) white guilt is showing. Please try to get over it.
The war was not about slavery. Slavery was legal and constitutionally protected in the U.S. No need for the South to secede over this issue. The conflict was really more over the nature of federalism. The Upper South probably would not have seceded, except that Lincoln illegally called for troops to invade the Deep South states. Lincoln’s radical republican party wanted a war to control the resources of the southern states. The horrors of Reconstruction prove this. Lincoln is totally to blame for the horrendous loss of life of the war. What a great God-fearing country an independent South would be today. The apostasy that is being forced upon us is emanating from the northern politicians–just as in 1860. General Lee, President Davis, and everyone associated with the Confederacy should be admired and respected. We have a proud and wonderful heritage–including our beloved SBC. Thank the Lord we broke with the northern Baptists, a liberal and dying denomincation.
Dr. Moore,
I wish that there had been a decent state flag offered in the election you mentioned to change our state flag. Unfortunately, the alternatives offered to the current state flag were substandard at best. My feeling is that the deck was stacked against change, and if Mississippians were offered an up or down vote on the current flag, they would vote to change it.
To say the war was not about slavery is to miss what happened in the 1840’s and 1850’s. The Kansas/Nebraska Act and subsequent “Bleeding Kansas” events. The compromises made by Congress at the time involved slavery, not states rights.
The only right that the south we’re fighting for was the right for the states to govern themselves and then their right to leave the Union. Had they gone on their own, slavery would have continued in the south for some period of time.
Lee, Longstreet, Jackson, Davis, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and Meade all had the same problem. They were every bit evil and wicked as you and I are. They need a Savior every bit as much as we do. To put the southern leaders on a pedestal, believing they were honorable in every regard borders on idol worship. I think Lee and Jackson would be horrified if they saw how they are being written about today.
I read the comments here and weep. Is Christ honored in this? Are we putting our heritage above our Lord? That is how it comes across. What are we thinking?!
I am not a Southerner or a Northerner, I was raised in the western United States. I don’t have the deep reverence my wife (born and raised in western North Carolina) and her family has for the Confederate flag and Robert E. Lee. I was taught in history class that the Civil War was generally fought because of slavery and the skirmishes that preceded the actual war. If you like history, you’ll know of the long history of territories and the new states having to decide on whether to be slave or not.
I am not Caucasian, so I know my wife isn’t a racist, but I’ve found it puzzling how she claims that the flag to her is a symbol of home and her family’s affinity of Lee is not because they are secret racists. I think it is how society around her saw nothing wrong in it, they just revered it as a thread of their own history and something to be proud of. I’m quite sure Robert E. Lee was and always will be a true man of honor and integrity as set forth by his contemporary values. Lee will always have a place for Southerners, I think you can agree that he can be honored for some of his ethics and be denounced for others. Until society truly embraces equality you will always have die hard Confederates that long for the 1860s to return.
God has allowed history to transpire as it did, we all need to get over the fact the C.S.A. lost and truly set our minds to God’s work- divisiveness is not part of that work. The 1860s was not Heaven on earth, especially for non-whites and to lose so many brave men (and women), because of either “states’rights” or the issue of slavery is sad…too much blood had already been shed. Since we are human and sin is still within us, that explains the ignorance that finally turned ideas into a reality of war. Lee is a symbol of bravery and steadfastness that military officers and soldiers should have and as a veteran myself, I can see that in the man. As a human I can also see the faults he did possess, but as a Christian I pray that he did repent for some of his views.
As for the Confederate flag, I see the flag used for two different reasons. I see my wife’s notion that it is a symbol of the South and not necessarily a racist symbol, but for others it is a belligerent symbol to provoke a notion of superiority of the white race (which there is only one race- the human race). I take offense to those who use the Confederate flag the latter way. Since we do live in the U.S.A., you have the right to fly any flag in any way you want. Just think to yourself, would God be happy with my thoughts?
The place of deepest humility to which to aspire is to honor our fathers and mothers, their deeds, their values, their glories, their achievements, their bravery, and to acknowledge freely as well their sins, their iniquities which have come down to us, and to walk in repentance for the sin of “me and my people” before a forgiving God (Nehemiah 9; Ezra 9; Daniel 9).
Robert E. Lee was a great American who deserves honor for his life, faith, and deeds which honored Christ. He deserves honor for brilliant military service to both the United States military and his native Virginia. Lee set his slaves free long before the War and for much of the War advocated offering freedom to any slaves who would fight for independence.
The Confederate government finally approved that measure in March 1865, too late for anyone to notice or for it to affect the war, but that decision gives weight to the argument that there was more for which the South effused the blood of thousands of white men than for some superiority complex of keeping one people under the neck of another.
The world is a complicated place. All our American hands are crimson from the blood of slavery and its subsequent iniquity.
Lincoln sold his wife’s inherited slaves instead of freeing them. He advocated the colonization of Liberia to send as many people of African heritage back to the African continent as possible because he did not believe whites and blacks could live together in peace and equality, that blacks did not have the mental and social capabilities of living in a free society. His Emancipation Proclamation, a bald political move to pull the United Kingdom back from the brink of formally recognizing the Confederacy, guaranteed the perpetuation of slavery to any territory or state which would lay down their arms and come back into the Union. If slavery was all Lee and the South wanted, none of them took advantage of the offer. U.S. Grant retained his slaves until he was forced by the 13th Amendment to give them up.
There is a reason that slavery was not long tolerated in the North. Northern whites could not abide the presence of people of African descent. That is why the Northwest Territory had a provision that no one of African descent could own land in what is today the MidWest.
The US Army was dispatched to manhandle violent rioters in the streets of New York City when residents found out the Lincoln Administration wanted to change the direction of the War to include freeing the slaves.
The war crimes, rapes and torture of slaves, contrabanding of medicines and Bibles, and the total war strategy of making war on defenseless elderly, women, slaves, and children, that Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln prosecuted were sins of incalculable depth toward both white and black Southerners.
The politics of Reconstruction set Southern blacks and whites against one another as a strategy of the Northern victors to maintain a level of social and political control in the American South. ‘Separate but equal’ was an imposed Northern idea. The resulting post-War racism and Jim Crow codes were a direct result of that Reconstruction strategy. Southerners’ sinful resentment and bitterness about the prosecution and results of the war led to the sinful way freed blacks were treated for a century.
Slavery and virulent racism has not been just a Southern sin. It was and continues to be an American sin.
Thank you so much for addressing this issue. It is refreshing to witness a Christian leader speak of our history in such a truthful and frank manner. I believe that as Christians, we damage our witness when we choose to look at history through rose colored glasses rather than appreciating the actual events.
As a lover of Christ and a huge civil war buff I too have wrestled with feelings of respect and disappointment for such figures as General Lee, Stonewall Jackson and the like. Learning from their shortcomings as well as their strengths can only leave us wiser and less likely to repeat mistakes.
I look forward to reading more of your posts. Thank you for your contribution to this ongoing discussion.
I think Dr. Moore had an excellent, well-balanced article. Many of the subsequent comments are also well-thought out. Having lived my life, over 50 years, in Michigan the aspects of Southern life are clearly matters I have not personally dealt with. I believe God is honored by many of these contributions.
Herb Kraker
As a Southern Baptist who is African American, it is always disheartening when I see a conferate flag flown, and when I see Robert Lee picture up anywhere in the south. The KKK used to ride around with this flag to put fear in black people. They also use this flag when they wanted to kill, lynch, and rape my ancestors. You have a right to feel what you feel about Robert Lee or the confederate flag. But just know that we as African Americans will never embrace the confederate flag or Robert Lee, especially of its history of supporting slavery.
Thank you, Dr. Moore, for your honest reflections on the blindspots of Christians throughout the ages. Please to not back down on your prophetic call the Church–both North and South–to acknowledge and repent of the sins of her past.
Thank you too for your balanced view that neither white-washes America’s history in jingoistic idolatry nor disrespects this great nation that God has indeed blessed.
–Jacob
Equating two men’s portraits is different than equating their character. I made the comparison to hanging Hitler’s portrait not because I necessarily disagree with hanging Lee’s, but in order to discover the double standard I suspected from the comments I read.
There is no problem with the argument that historical figures are complex and deserve neither to be idolized, demonized, or turned into generic symbols. There’s no problem with the argument as long as the person using it is consistent.
That person better be supportive of a Hitler portrait, and if they are supportive: good. If not, if Hitler is too offensive to them, not only are they going against their own argument about the complexity of historical figures, but also, they will need to wrestle with this fact: the association they have with Hitler, many of their fellow countrymen and Christians have with Lee.