Why I Keep Teaching About Slavery

President Trump recently complained about the focus on slavery in a particular D.C. museum. He said, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. This Country cannot be WOKE.” By describing the story of human bondage in America as “woke,” he evoked a magical term that clouds all reason, and with it the capture and sale of my ancestors has once again entered the public debate. 

As Christians, however, we should ask whether we are better off downplaying the sins of the past. Is that the path towards a “bright future” the President seems to prefer? 

I am currently writing a book about the Bible, slavery, and Christianity in America. I am also teaching a course on the same topic. I am not doing so because I want to make my students or readers feel guilty.  Further, it cost me something to do this work. I do not enjoy reading about the capture, transportation, sale, and abuse of my ancestors. I take no pleasure in slogging through the intellectual and religious justifications that ring so hollow in my ears. I often have to stop and turn my attention to other things or simply pray for a while. I have to listen to a bit of gospel music or hum a spiritual that the old deacons in my church used to sing.

I press on because the issue of slavery is revelatory. Some Christians saw in the Bible a God who sets the captives free, while others saw God as the co-signer of empire. Remembering both of those groups today is instructive because it shows the potential good of religion. It also displays how the desire for money, power, and comfort can corrupt and distort even the most honorable things. 

Recognizing that both the bad and the good are instructive is found in the Scriptures themselves. The Old Testament does not shy away from the sins of the patriarchs and matriarchs. It does not hide the foibles of Israel's kings, nor does the New Testament tuck away the failures of the apostles when Jesus needed them most. Speaking of the failures of Israel in the wilderness, Paul said, “these things happened as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil things, as they did” (1 Cor. 10:6).

America is not Israel, and our history is not the Old Testament, but the principle still applies. What has not been exposed cannot be healed. What is set aside can easily be forgotten and repeated. We are in dangerous times as a country, and the worst thing we could do in this moment is forget the wickedness that resides in the human heart.

What Trump is attempting to do with the Smithsonian is repeat a very old retelling of the American story that has been with us for quite some time. The first step is to downplay slavery. Next, you turn the Civil War into a battle about states’ rights, not the ownership of persons. This allows monuments to the Confederates (built from the 1890s–1920 and then 1950s–1960s) to be about history, not the intentional anti-black response to signal the beginning of Jim Crow and later the reassertion of that same anti-blackness during the Civil Rights Movement. The lynchings of the early 1900s are conveniently forgotten, the Civil Rights Movement ends all racism, and a racially harmonious present springs fully formed from a pristine past. Those who put forward this sanitized narrative that allows us to ignore present issues of race and injustice are often enraged by an encounter with the real story or present data.

The problem is that slavery left so many clear after effects. The end of Reconstruction did happen, and the segregation laws were passed. I am not sure how we can teach our kids about the Montgomery Bus Boycott without explaining why the boycott was necessary. The boycott only makes sense because blacks were denied equal access to public transport. Which raises another question. Why would someone think to do something as ludicrous as deny a person a seat on the bus? Try answering that one without explaining the enforced racial hierarchy arising from slavery. The American narrative is not easily sanitized. You cannot change history by executive order.

This does not mean that America hasn’t made any racial progress. It certainly has. There are more educational and economic opportunities now than there were in the past.  Progress is the distance from where you began, not arriving at your goal. If you are driving from California to New York, when you reach Texas, you’ve made significant progress, but you are still far from your destination. To speak of distance from slavery does not mean arrival at justice. We still have a ways to go in this country, and just because some people are fatigued by the journey, doesn’t mean it's at its end.

The story of America’s progress towards the goal of equality only makes sense against a bloody backdrop of our actual starting point. Removing the ugliness also destroys the beauty. What happens to William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Grimke Sisters, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Frederick Douglass, Septima Poinsette Clark, and so many others when you strip them of their historical context? The American story is irreparably diminished.

There are other chapters in our shared narrative. Normandy Beach did happen, and I am glad of it. We have indeed sought our place among the stars and invented marvels. We have been, at times, generous to the helpless and the hurting all over the world.

Nonetheless, these triumphs reveal the contradiction of this country. America has been a glory and a scandal. Both things are true. Both things must be remembered. We are a people in the process of becoming, often taking steps forward and sometimes moving backward. To pretend that progress is arrival is nothing more than a lie imposed on a history that will not bear it out. 

By studying the past, we learn what to run toward and what to flee. By seeing the repulsiveness of what has been, we are warned away from the new horrors that approach in our time. As part of the class I am teaching next spring, we are planning to take a trip to the museum at the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. I am sure that will be a hard trip for the students and for me. But I believe it will cause a good pain and hopefully steel our hearts to be Christians who are sources for good in the world, not evil.

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Esau Mccaulley is Pastor of All Saints Church in Naperville, IL, host of the Esau Mccaulley Podcast, and author of the forthcoming book God’s Colorful Kingdom Storybook Bible: The Story of God’s Big Diverse Family. He serves as an Associate professor at Wheaton College.