Monuments: From Bondage to Freedom

Photograph courtesy NPS / Victoria Stauffenberg

By Asante Todd

Public monuments keep, document, record, or commemorate notable persons, actions, or events. A recent cohort of Austin Seminary’s Pastoral Leadership for Public Life program visited Washington D.C. to tour national monuments and to discuss our national myths and the roles that religion and national monuments can play in such stories. Our tour also included visiting the Museum of the Bible, the African American History Museum, and historic churches and sites in the D.C. area, as well as conversations with local religious, civic, and community leaders. These visits allowed us to get a sense of the conversation regarding religion and national mythology. According to The Atlantic, the top five of the “15 Most Visited National Landmarks in Washington, D.C.” (2015) were the Abraham Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, respectively. We used the national narratives presented at the museums to read, interpret, and reflect on the monuments, and we allowed our reflection to renew our approach to public theology.

The five most visited monuments may serve as touchpoints for a narrative about the growth of U.S. identity, originally rooted in liberal democratic values like equal rights and liberty, but also in practices of race-based land colonization and imperial expansionism. From the time of Lincoln to the Vietnam war, the U.S. changed from a liberal democratic imperial slaveocracy to a liberal democratic, racially segregated global power. Lincoln’s struggle to preserve the Union against the conflicts over slavery marks the beginning of this story, followed by the struggle against Western European fascism in World War II and against East Asian communism in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The awe-inspiring national monuments ascribe a sense of mystery and fascination to the values of freedom and sacrifice, and, ultimately, to the nation, which has always also been framed by a Protestant ethos of “chosenness.” Thus Lincoln, described by his wife as “a religious man always” but not “a technical Christian,” often deployed religious language to preserve the Union, asserting that a “house divided” could not stand. From Lincoln’s time until at least the 1940s, many have found it difficult to distinguish the American body politic from the body of Christ and have imbued the secular republic with messianic powers. The Lincoln Monument is described as a “temple,” and Lincoln’s Bible was used to swear in Presidents Barak Obama and Donald Trump, in much the same way that the Museum of the Bible swears in America’s status as Christian Nation, New Israel, and Global Messianic Hope. Such religious adoration can blind us to the country’s deeply rooted, racially charged vision of Manifest Destiny cum American Exceptionalism, which, in the most tragic of ironies, manifested in

At least as early as 1787, another story of America has lived on these shores, one that rose among the Free Africans of the North and the slave “hush harbors” in the sacred swamps of the South. This narrative, one reflected today in spaces like the African American History Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, is of a people’s pilgrimage from bondage to freedom. This story doesn’t take for granted America’s status as a chosen nation but proceeds from the underside of U.S. imperialism, scrutinizing U.S. liberal democracy’s perennial renewal of its racial contract and its attendant militarism and economic exploitation. Through the language of Frederick Douglass, who imagined God’s justice as a “flaming sword … upon the nation,” and Fannie Lou Hamer’s God as having “sounded the trumpet … [and] keeping watch on this nation,” or King’s talk of a “God of power who can cut [slumbering giants of injustice] down like grass,” black public theology questioned the nation’s sense of exceptionalism, calling it to account for its failure to rise up and live into the true meaning of its creed, that all persons are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. This story is all the more relevant in our current context, where the U.S. has become more economically liberal and less democratic; where socio-economic conditions resemble the Great Depression years that ensued shortly after the Lincoln Memorial was erected. With the fierce urgency of now, this story of a journey from bondage to freedom calls for more public monuments and policies to the vision of America as a land not only of freedom, but also of racial justice, equality, and neighborliness among the world’s different peoples.

Dr. Asante Todd (MDiv’06) is associate professor of Christian ethics at Austin Seminary. Todd’s general area of research is public theology and the ways in which theological and religious commitments impact public debate, policy, politics, and opinion. He also desires to think with religious communities about social consciousness and democratic responsibility. the chambers of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.