“You shall hew down
the graven images of their gods, and destroy their name out of that
place.” Deuteronomy 12:3
I spent a few days in
Durham, North Carolina last week, visiting college friends. The evening we arrived, the cable news
headlines were proclaiming that a statue of Robert E. Lee, set into the doorway
of Duke Chapel, had been literally defaced, chunks of stone hammered out by an
unknown vandal. A few days later, Duke’s
new president announced that the statue would be removed for the safety of
worshippers and “to express the deep and abiding values of our university.”
I have, like most of you,
taken notice of the removal of Confederate monuments across the South over the
past few weeks, and the hate-filled outrage that the action produced in
Charlottesville. But for me, this particular
action struck a bit closer to home. Our
host for the visit was one of my oldest college friends, like me, a student of
American history. He still sings in the
Chapel Choir where we met over twenty years ago, and serves on Duke Chapel’s
advisory committee. We talked about the
attack, the university’s response, and all the complicated issues evoked by it
late into several nights.
It may seem foolish, but
my first response on hearing about the vandalism was shock. I walked by the statue hundreds of times on
my way to services and rehearsals. It
had never struck me as an offensive image.
It’s an odd choice, to be sure, but so are the rest of the figures in
the doorway, who collectively form a Southern Protestant hall of heroes. My grumbles, such as they were, were reserved
for Thomas Jefferson, who stood next to Lee, a slaveholder and an avowed heretic. I
thought of the Lee statue as quaint, a relic of another era. We wouldn’t put it up these days, but eighty
years of presence afforded the statue a certain deference.
