Iconclasm, White Supremacy, and the New Kingdom: On the Lee Statue at Duke

“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.

And besides, I thought I knew Robert E. Lee.  He was a gallant soldier, a man who worked for peace after the Civil War.  A Christian and a gentleman, I’d been told at least once.  One of my ancestors had fought under him in the army of Northern Virginia, but as a Marylander, I wasn’t a real Southerner.  I didn’t grow up surrounded by evocations of the lost cause.  We flew the American flag and I knew the Confederate cause had been a mistake.  I could separate Lee the gentleman from Lee the slaveholder or the champion of white supremacy. Whoever wielded the hammer probably could not, and that struck me initially as a failure of imagination.

My first instinct was to think of whoever attacked the statue as a vandal (following the cable news headline flashing into the living room).  He or she would probably have described the action as a protest.  But could it be most accurate of all to call the attack iconoclasm?

Iconoclasm is the destruction of religious images, the toppling of statues because they have become objects of worship for a false religion, intolerable rivals to the one true God.  There have been two major rounds of iconoclasm in Christian history, one in the Byzantine Empire in the eighth century and another in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

 Both resulted in the destruction of priceless cultural heritage and both were significantly repudiated by the wider church, the first by the Seventh Ecumenical Council, in 787.  Both movements were led by fanatics who believed that destruction was the only way to correct devotional abuses.  In the process of overcorrection, both movements ran aground on fresh doctrinal errors: the Byzantine iconoclasts minimizing Christ’s true humanity and the Protestants dispensing with much of the sacramental and ministerial structure through which their beloved Gospel was expressed.  Generally speaking, iconoclasts are brashly certain and impatient, unable to acknowledge any fellowship between the present and the past.

But for all its failings in Christian history, the iconoclasts do have an important part of the Biblical heritage on their side.  God commanded the Israelites to destroy the pagan idols in their conquest of Canaan (Dt. 12:2-3).  Moses’ destruction of the Golden Calf (Ex. 32) and Hezekiah’s purging of the temple’s idols (II Ki. 18:3-6) are held up as models of righteousness. 

All images have symbolic value and sometimes, it seems, that symbolism becomes so toxic, its effects so destructive, that God’s people cannot live faithfully in its presence.  The Amorites surely had a kind of affection for their Baals, cherished at least as signs of continuity with their ancestors.  But in this matter, God was markedly intolerant.  Sometimes evil simply must be destroyed. 

Duke’s statue of Robert E. Lee, and images like it across the South: into which category do they fall?  Are they simply dusty relics, to be tolerated for the sake of the long view’s wisdom and the inevitable moral complexities of the people they depict?  Or must they be taken down, because they are toxic, false gods worshipped by evildoers who continue to harm people?

As I have pondered this, my views have changed.  First, I think my former rosy picture of Lee the Christian gentleman was really only a half-truth.  There have been a number of recent pieces retelling Lee’s complicated story, but I found this one by an editor at The Atlantic particularly striking.  Lee was a devout churchman, but he was also cruel to his slaves, an opponent of African American suffrage and perhaps a tacit supporter of the Ku Klux Klan.  I’m not sure if the college officials who put the statue on the Chapel porch in the 1930’s knew all that, but the fuller picture of his life makes setting him up as a model look like a grave error.

It's also very clear that African Americans continue to suffer profoundly today as a result of the same white supremacist ideology that motivated the construction of many Confederate monuments in the twentieth century.  Limited educational opportunities, hiring bias, unjust sentencing, unfair treatment by the police—these are enduring realities of life for African Americans, documented by numerous studies and many compelling personal narratives.  The Lee statue may not have bothered me, but in an important sense, I had the privilege not to notice.  I am, after all, a white man, like all of those depicted on the Chapel porch’s statues and all the students and faculty in the university when they were placed there.  An African American student might well have seen something very different in it, especially in a part of the country where such a disproportionate number of public monuments are of Confederate figures.  The statue could well seem a sign of whose rights really matter in modern America, whose dignity commands respect. 

The statues were certainly interpreted in this way by the neo-Fascists and white supremacists who marched through the streets of Charlottesville, in a mock-Nazi torchlit parade.  For them, Lee is valuable as a symbol of racial pride.  He represents an ideological program that can be used to justify unspeakable violence.  Christian gentlemen don’t run down peaceful protesters with their cars.  We have all seen, though, that votaries of a false religion certainly do. 

In one sense, it isn’t fair to allow extremists to define the meaning of Robert E. Lee’s life.  But monumental statuary does not, as a rule, give much room for ambiguity.  Nor are the meanings of statues determined by those who put them up.  What the people see who live in and around them matter.  And for me, at least, the events in Charlottesville have determined what the statues mean in this moment, in much the same way that Dylann Roof’s massacre in Charleston defined what we all must now see in the Confederate battle flag. 

I don’t condone the destruction of private property.  I also think that distinctions can be drawn-monuments in military cemeteries are different from those on courthouse lawns.  I hope that there will be ways, in cooler times, to tell the fuller stories of these figures, sinful men like us, who also tried to do good amid the limitations of their time, as we all must do.  The statues can wisely be placed in museums, where their complex larger stories can be told (this is planned for Duke’s Lee statues).  But after Charlottesville, their presence in prominent civic places looks too much like an endorsement of white supremacy.  

I believe this is best for our people as an American, but even more as a Christian.  In the face of an increasingly vocal and public face of destructive racism, we must proclaim the equality and dignity of all those created by God.  We must testify to the supremacy of Christ in the face of white supremacy, as my friend Fr. Esau McCaulley recently argued on the Covenant blog.  We are called to be “ambassadors of reconciliation” proclaiming a kingdom in which God has removed dividing walls of hostility between groups of people, so that all nations can serve Him together in unity and peace.  The Lee statue, guarding the entry to a church, seems to herald another sort of kingdom.  Its removal is but the start of the real work of racial healing to which God calls us all.