The Confederate Flag: Putting Away Childish Things


My Christianity is highly suspect. But I do find scripture instructive. After I saw @ChadAlexander's fine post arguing for the removal of the Confederate flag I started flipping through a Bible. I landed on 1 Corinthians 13:11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

This is the only scripture you need to understand what to do with the Confederacy and the flag.

The slaveholders and their yeoman farmer militiamen were on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the outcome, and the wrong side of Christianity. The last defenders of racism and slavery in Protestantism, the Southern Baptist Convention, repudiated slavery and segregation in 1968. As the SBC's Richard Moore recently observed:

"In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the biblically ridiculous “curse of Ham” concept, for instance). In so doing, this form of Southern folk religion was outside of the global and historic teachings of the Christian church."

The time to consider the Confederate flag as a mature symbol of anything responsible has long since passed.

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