America is good at remembering its sins

When destroying statues was bad

We're not so good at forgiving them.  Contrary to popular belief, America has spent most of its times reflecitng on its sins, even if it didn't awlays take decivie measuers to make them right.  It's just that in recent years, using America's sins as a justification to eliminate America as it was historically understood has taken confession of sins to a new and  depraved level.

Mitch Landrieu, who has been pushing the great American Iconoclasm, linking the Confederacy to a Nazi styled phenomenon, and insisting it's time to see things from only one point of view, is out promoting his book which has come to define post-modern America's understanding of itself.  He brilliantly demonstrates where this trend of remembering but never forgiving is taking us.

The goal of the Left in our post-modern age is to burn the heritage of the United States and the larger Christian West to the ground.  Racism, being real and being a fact of the past and the present, is the best club with which to beat down the United States.  It is used to define, to attack, and to destroy.

The Confederacy, which - like all things in history - was a complex phenomenon in our complex past,  doesn't stand a chance in our post-truth, post-nuance age.  It has been boiled down to America's version of Nazi.  Traitorous too.  If the general lack of concern about treasonous behavior over the years has you concerned, look no further than the unwavering resentment and unbridled condemnation aimed at the Confederacy for being the traitors that they were.

All Confederates are now Nazis.  Treasonous Nazis.  All who fought for the South are to be forgotten.  All are guilty with no possible hope for redemption or forgiveness.  And from there, of course, we'll soon move to other parts of The Great Satan's history.  As my boys said, nothing proves the old adage that 'history is written by the winners ' more than what is happening to the Confederacy and the history of the United States today.

Naturally you don't dare complain.  After all, since the Confederacy was nothing but Nazi racist, and all about racism, and any attempt to remember the Confederacy a celebration of racism, to do anything other than seek its elimination from the public forum must mean you're a racist, too.  I'm sure when other popular monuments to slave owners begin to come down, we'll have the same line of reasoning.

Remember, Christianity demanded forgiveness, and that had an impact on how we viewed struggles and conflicts in the West's past.  It was in our bloodstream, below the surface, and was likely how the West was able to let bygones be bygones, even if it did so imperfectly.  It's why we used to look at other cultures that held thousand year grudges and wonder what they could be thinking. 

The new secularism, like most cultures and civilizations, has no such command.  Forgiveness can be a polite response or even a smart one, but it is not mandated.  Expect more and more of America's history, as well as that of the greater Christian West, to go the way of the Confederacy in the years to come. 

After all, when resentment and retribution replace forgiveness and reconciliation, then they will become ingrained in our psyche and become part of the bloodstream in the way humility and forgiveness were in ages gone by.  The fruits of an imperfect application of forgiveness can only be superior to the fruits of a perfect application o revenge. The results will be interesting, but more likely frightening, as most moves away from the Gospel message tend to be.