I’m not sure whether the American Civil War (1861-65) continues to be taught in public schools, and if so, in an objective manner. Simply consider the San Francisco Unified School District’s decision in 2021 to dishonor such terrible people as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and even former liberal icon Senator Dianne Feinstein by removing their names from public schools.
Apparently, they weren’t “woke” enough…maybe Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, Che Guevara,
or Mao Zedong would suffice.
Thankfully a huge public outcry from ordinary citizens (in San Francisco no less) kept this from happening, but that only put the tiger back in the cage—a tiger that still loudly roars in our culture.
Of course, the American Civil War of the 19th century was a turning point in our development as a nation. It not only established who we would be for generations to come but continued the refinement of our culture rooted in freedom and equality for all. From there we established the 13th (end to slavery), 14th (citizenship to all born in the U.S.), and 15th (African American right to vote) “Reconstruction” Amendments to the Constitution. And 100 years later we continued this trajectory with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and eventually elected our first African American president in 2004.
We seemed to be moving in the right direction, but something strange happened with Barack Obama’s election as president. The progress we’d been making as a country exposed an underlying and deep divide, many decades in the making, much like a contractor discovering mold or rot beneath the floorboards of a home renovation.
Where an opportunity for unity might have presented itself with the election of our first African American president (yes, biracial to be more accurate, but still novel), instead we became viscerally polarized—not merely racially but ideologically. President Obama became a poster child for Leftist philosophies, appearing to yank the country toward socialism, from traditional values to radical philosophies, from unity to class warfare. At least that’s what people perceived, and the extreme push back was the eventual election of Donald Trump who fanned the flames of division in ways that were heretofore unknown in politics.
And it’s getting worse. President Obama and others like him, once viewed as radicals, are now seen as lightweight liberals at best. Non-Trump traditional Republicans are vilified as weak, ineffective waste of votes. We have retreated to our respective corners, engaged in an MMA-style conflict that pits one extreme against another with a multitude of combatants who are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, so to speak.
Gone are the days of “traditional” marriage, parenting, education, and personal responsibility. In largely Marxist style, each of us is now assigned a social value (i.e., intersectionality and identity politics), which resides within the larger scope of class warfare comprised of “victims” and “oppressors.” We are allowed (dare I say, encouraged) to hate, to violate personal property and space, to attack others verbally and physically, and indoctrinate children in this worldview. By creating generations of people who are either ill-informed or ignorant, who cannot think critically, who cannot process information outside of 60-second sound bites, who do not believe in the existence of objective truth and reality, we are back on the trajectory of another civil war.
And it won’t be pretty.
Two years before his presidency, in a speech as candidate for the U.S. Senate Abraham Lincoln invoked Matthew 12:25— “A house divided will not stand.” He knew then the nation was headed for very troubled times if the divisions could not be resolved. As president he navigated through the explosion of these rifts, in which over 600,000 Americans died…more than the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, combined.
Some, like Lincoln in the mid-19th century, may believe a civil war looms on the horizon. No doubt some are fanning the flames of such a catastrophe in support of their worldview—either as a continuation of our course as a nation (whatever that means) or a return to “traditional” values (whatever that means). In essence, the “tiger” of intense cultural disunion is never really caged, just hidden in the jungle waiting to pounce.
So, what’s a biblical Christian to do?
Thankfully we have a model to follow—the early Church, which for centuries endured not only an increasingly divided Roman Empire but persecution as well. The world has always been fractured at its root, unstable in its foundation, and the exquisite ornamentations we construct on top of this, whether political, economic, social, or even religious, are facades that quickly crumble. The early Church did not build on this foundation, but instead, a perfectly stable and enduring one:
“Everyone then who hears these words of Mine [Jesus] and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it?” (Matthew 7:24-27)
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18)[1]
[1] The “rock” to which Jesus refers is not simply the Greek petra (for Peter), which translates “rock,” but in context Peter’s declaration that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, as confirmed in Jesus’ words that precede Matthew 16:18. The Church is built upon the faith accepted and lived out by its members, upon Christ Himself (1 Corinthians 3:9-19).
Pondering 