Sad

[Christine]

This commentary today seemed to fit this thread.

“All are welcome—no exceptions” reads a sign on Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, but the congregation doesn’t really mean it. Somebody very specifically is not welcome here any more—our first U.S. president.

This is the church that in 1773, George Washington helped create with his donation and the place where he had purchased a family pew. So connected was he to the place that after his death his family Bible was donated to the Church.

Long has this church been an icon in this tradition-steeped Washington DC town that visitors have come to see where Washington went to worship.

As of last week, caught in the frenzy of redefining and tearing up the past through tearing down memorials, Christ Church is taking down a plaque about George Washington that has hung to the side of the pulpit for over 150 years. It is going down with another plaque in memory of Robert E. Lee that has also hung in the Church.

Now there may be many good reasons why hanging the plaque about Robert E. Lee could be debatable, but George Washington?

The church leaders announced it was pulling down the plaque to its one-time vestry man because, as they said in a letter to the congregation, “The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome. Some visitors and guests who worship with us choose not to return because they receive an unintended message from the prominent presence of the plaques.”

Of course, you can guess why Washington’s plaque had to go. It was because he was a slaveholder and though he was the only major Founding father who freed his slaves upon his death, this stain upon him marks him as anathema to the congregation.

It is easy from our present stance and value system to criticize the past, a complex and complicated time with pressures we don’t entirely understand, but nobody can disagree that slavery is detestable. Still even in Washington’s own time the Reverend Richard Allen, who co-founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, eulogized, “To us he has been the sympathizing friend and tender father. He has watched over us, and viewed our degraded and afflicted state with compassion and pity—his heart was not insensible to our sufferings.”

So while Washington was flawed, as were his times, throwing out his plaque is also a nod toward tossing away everything else he and the other Founders stood for. Disrespect them and it is not far to disrespecting our American Founding in general—what was and continues to be in the history of the world–revolutionary views about human freedom, inalienable rights granted by our Creator Himself, the rule of law and the dignity and worth of each human being and the responsibility that all have to determine their own lives.

Ironically, the very freedom to take down his plaque was granted and grew from the Revolutionary War that Washington led. When the people wanted to make him king, he utterly refused the honor and instead defined for us what being the President should mean.

Throw out the flawed in history and you also expunge some of the most important leadership and ideas that have ever been created. In fact, if you throw out the flawed in history, who is left? And make no mistake this belongs to a larger impulse to disdain America which has become the mode in too many places and in too many elite circles across the country.

Did George Washington feel “unsafe” when he was tasked to put a rag-tag army together to fight the formidable British fleet in Boston? Did he feel “unsafe” when, at the end of the hard winter of 1775, initially no man stepped forward to re-enlist? Did he feel unsafe when he crossed the Delaware in unforgiving cold and peril? Unsafe or not, he braved inestimable hardship in a war fought by an impoverished underdog army where victory was never just a given. Thank heaven, quite literally, that he didn’t say that he felt unsafe and scurry home.

As one writer noted of the Christ Church parishioners, “’Unsafe’ seems a bit extreme. Would the individuals who feel unsafe seeing Washington’s name also feel endangered when handling a quarter or a dollar bill?” Do they feel unsafe visiting the city named for the man? Apparently they do it all the time as it is right next door. Make no mistake “unsafe” in this case is not an emotional state, but a political weapon." Maurine Proctor