If you have yet to see Jon Stewart’s opening monologue on June 18 th , please do so now. Our nation’s court jester is the one who managed to place the Charleston terrorist attack in proper perspective, and I applaud him for it. We white Americans should be deeply troubled by his words.

I live in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. My wife works and teaches at the Lutheran seminary here.We moved here after serving a Lutheran church in Jerusalem. The parallels between what I witnessed in Jerusalem and what I see here are astonishing.

When people of differing ideological and religious perspectives seek to consecrate common ground, the tension is palpable in the air. I saw it in Jerusalem, and I see it here in Gettysburg as well. Both locales are shrines of a sort. Jerusalem is home to holy sites for the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The three religions are tools by which politicians
seek to maneuver and exploit the land and resources.

Gettysburg is a shrine to our nation’s civil religion, which is predicated upon the idea that we fought a long and costly Civil War in order to achieve equality and freedom for all people who labor within its borders. That idea is a myth. Dr. David Blight, a scholar of American history, speaks to this myth eloquently in a recent edition of The Atlantic. Please read it.

Yet here in Gettysburg as in Jerusalem, we see people raising up symbols on a daily basis that are racist and ugly; they supposedly represent heritage and culture. I can’t always speak to the situation in Jerusalem, but as an American, I’ll be damned if I once again invoke the power of my white privilege and sit back in apathy and complacency (and if you need to know what white privilege is, go here). For me, Charleston has become a tipping point, and it’s time for some truth-telling.

The flag of the confederacy is a racist symbol. If you claim to fly it under the guise of “heritage,” then let me tell you exactly what this heritage is: racism, torture, and exploitation. For hundreds of years, this nation (north and south) exploited black bodies in order to turn a profit. We built our economy on the backs of tortured black people, millions of whom were sold away from
family members in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, to be marched in coffles to the brutal heat of cotton and cane fields in the deep south. They built our nation’s economy, and in turn, we killed, raped, and tortured them. This is the so-called “heritage” of the rebel flag. Historian Edward Baptist painstakingly maps out this brutality in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

That this rebel flag flies over the state house of South Carolina and is even now omnipresent on the battlefield of Gettysburg shows a monumental failure on the part of Americans to heal the wounds that still weep in our collective psyche. If Germany can ban the swastika because what it symbolized: the deaths of six million Jews in the Holocaust, certainly we as a nation need to
realize that the flag of the confederacy is equal partner in the deaths of over five million slaves. It should be banned. It should be a hate crime to display it. And yet here it is in Gettysburg, marking the monuments of men who fought to keep black bodies in chains. It flies in Charleston, scene of the latest terror attack on our black brothers and sisters. Charleston is a wake-up call for
white America, an overdue, horrific klaxon alarm. And it should be the tipping point for us who have stood on the sidelines for far too long while people suffer needlessly.

In the Lutheran church, our liturgy of confession quotes the book of I John from the Christian Testament: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Rev. Elizabeth Eaton, the presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America said it best in a statement she released on June 18 th :

“I urge all of us to spend a day in repentance and mourning. And then we need to get to work. Each of us and all of us need to examine ourselves, our church and our communities. We need to be honest about the reality of racism within us and around us. We need to talk and we need to listen, but we also need to act. No stereotype or racial slur is justified. Speak out against inequity. Look with newly opened eyes at the many subtle and overt ways that we and our communities see people of color as being of less worth. Above all pray – for insight, for forgiveness, for courage.”

The time for complacency is over. Fellow Lutherans, if our baptism means anything at all, then we cannot rest while racism continues to consume our nation. Fellow Americans, if being a citizen of the United States means anything at all—if we want to honor the sacrifice of the thousands of Union soldiers who died here in Gettysburg—then we should not remain silent while the confederate flag of a racist heritage flies on this hallowed ground. We must not stand idle while people of color—fellow citizens, children of God—are suffering. God help us.