Lively conversation happening over at The Atlantic on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog. His post “The Myth of Black Confederate Soldiers” reminds me of conversations I’ve had in the past with folks who attempt to downplay the role of slavery and race in the Civil War. This is always surprising to me.
I’ve told the story before about how, when I was editor of Today’s Christian, I heard it big time from Confederate sympathizers who took me to task for publishing an article about the origin of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Silly me; I didn’t anticipate that emotions were still so raw over the outcome of the war. At the same time, I find it both revealing and truly miraculous that we can get on as fellow believers quite well (and, heck, you might even be a faithful reader of a magazine that I edit), yet we can hold fundamentally different views on issues so central to who each of us are. I think this is a testament to the unifying power of God’s love—but also to the fact that there are a lot of difficult things still left to talk about, if we ever hope to move our relationships from thin to thick. In any event, the discussion following Coates’s post offers some good food for thought.
Reconciliation Blog 