While Americans are nearly evenly divided on whether monuments and memorials to the Confederacy should stay up or be taken down, there is even less agreement about what should be done with those monuments, according to new polling data from…
As the Confederate monuments come tumbling down, half of Americans still favor their presence
It’s no news flash that the presence — or sudden absence — of memorials to the Confederacy is a symbol of America’s divided politics today. Yet a new national study by Public Religion Research Institute puts some hard numbers on…
New platform of Texas GOP is laced with Christian privilege
The Republican Party in the nation’s most populous state controlled by that party has a new platform that invokes the name of God 17 times, calls for special privilege for Christians and demands that Christian prayers, Bible reading and the…
In Charlottesville, an effort to reuse bronze from Lee statue for new public art
A plan to melt down and ultimately reuse the bronze from the Robert E. Lee statue that white supremacists violently rallied to save in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 is an inherently spiritual undertaking that should appeal to many people of…
Of statues and stories: Reckoning with the Lost Cause
A few years back, as I wandered across a broad hill overlooking Washington, D.C., I discovered a monument, the statue of a woman atop a 32-foot decorated pedestal rising above the untold thousands of gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery. I…
It’s the culture, stupid
In the politico world, all eyes were on Virginia last week. Despite obsessing over every pattern in the tea leaves left from the expended campaign strategies and discernible in the exit polls, one striking finding was almost entirely missed by the…
How you view police killings, racism and monuments influenced by faith and party
Religious beliefs combined with racial identity continue to fuel dramatic differences in the way Americans view police killings of unarmed Black men, the prevalence of “reverse racism” and thinking of the Confederate flag and monuments to Confederate leaders as about…
At the intersection of Monument(s) and Avenue(s), a new vision rises
Statues are a funny thing. They say so much about people — their beliefs, their politics, their worldview. I grew up around all kinds of statues. In the home of my birth (and the city I lived in until I…
I’ve got some suggestions for reusing discarded Confederate monuments
The prophetic movement in the streets has begun a good work. There is no stopping until every vestige of white supremacist ideology is erased, not only from public squares, but from laws, institutions, churches, theologies and families.