Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Pagan
Lughnasa: Bad Harvest

Lughnasa: Bad Harvest

Last updated on: July 25, 2016 at 5:00 am by Melanie Morel-Ensminger

Lughnasa: Bad Harvest 2016-07-25T05:00:59+00:00 Melanie Morel-Ensminger

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Lee Circle in New Orleans during Black Lives Matter protest July 8 (Robert E. Lee statue not shown)

At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere as we look toward Lughnasa, the traditional Celtic celebration of the harvest, and our country spirals harder into a particularly ugly election season, my mind turns toward what we as a nation are reaping from our history.

As a white person growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s, the Confederate statues and symbols all around me, in place since the Jim Crow Era, gave me uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. My parents taught me that the South was wrong to have fought for slavery, and that it was a good thing that the North won, saving the Union and freeing the enslaved people.

And yet, my elementary Louisiana history class taught me that Reconstruction was terrible; my high school’s fight song was “Dixie.” My parents taught me that integration was a good thing; in the days before the black students arrived, my high school teachers warned us we didn’t have to speak to or interact with the black students.

Battle of Liberty Place monument that honors killing of police officers defending Reconstruction

During the Civil Rights era, when we traveled, my mother would half-jokingly say we ought to obscure our license plate with mud so no one would know we came from Louisiana, and yet we were always proud of being New Orleanians and counted the generations our family had lived here. My parents taught me to admire Martin Luther King Jr.; at my high school, students celebrated when he was assassinated and no teacher rebuked them.

It was hard to reconcile what my parents were teaching me with what my teachers and peers were saying, and what was obvious all around me.

It’s easy for non-Southerners to say, “All of that is YOUR problem” but the deadly harvest of racism and white supremacy pervades our whole country. Because the state of Texas is the biggest purchaser of school textbooks, companies providing such books have literally altered American history to appeal to Southern sensibilities.

Statue of Confederate General who fired first shot
at Fort Sumpter, showing Black Lives Matter graffitti.

All over our country, school children are taught that the Civil War was fought over taxes, over individual and states’ liberty, over Constitutional principles, and only incidentally, maybe a little bit about slavery. All over our country, school children are taught that those who fought for the Confederacy were “honorable.” All over our country, school children are taught that Reconstruction was bad thing, corrupt, an overreach by the federal government, and that it was a good thing when federal troops were withdrawn from the defeated states.

But none of those things are true. They are deliberate and intentional lies, promulgated for the purpose of reinforcing white supremacy. And we are all damaged psychically and spiritually from being fed these lies.

All thinking people know, at some level, that the South was on the wrong side of history, that slavery was a terrible evil, that the carnage of the Civil War was the fault of the South, that Reconstruction brought a small measure of justice and equality for African Americans, that to laud Confederates is to honor traitors —and yet this knowledge must be suppressed and denied. We must pretend that those who fought for the Confederacy were “heroes” and that all those Confederate monuments and flags uplift some neutral “history” and “tradition”and thus are not offensive.

We say in pagan circles that what you put out comes back to you in multiples. When our country puts forth lies for decades, teaches those lies to all our children, and ignores the damage those lies do — what then comes back to us, in what multiples?

In order to live and work around the monuments to the Confederacy, white people either have to pretend that they don’t mean what they mean, or be outright supporters of the Lost Cause and white supremacy. White people have to find a way to reconcile the “liberty and justice for all” with the subconscious knowledge that the monuments say instead “white = right.” Whether we want to or not, we white people imbibe imbibe from the monuments a message of internalized superiority.

For black people and people of color, the effects are different but just as insidious and spiritually damaging. As black people around the country have said over and over again “you just have to ignore it” since the monuments mean “the South must’ve won the Civil War” as Southern cities have no statues honoring Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglas or the first black elected officials from Reconstruction. The South was pro-slavery and they get heroic statues and the phrase “liberty and justice for all” becomes just another hoax perpetrated on black citizens. The monuments are another link in a chain of indignities and lies that produce internalized inferiority in people of color.

We are all of us harmed in our souls by this perverse harvest. The ongoing dissonance between the truth of history and the lie of the Lost Cause, between civic proclamations like “equal justice” and the lived reality of black people, between right ignored and wrong honored, causes rage and shame. There is a kind of spiritual death brought about by a sense of moral helplessness and demoralization. We cannot be our whole and wholesome spiritual selves while living within this contradiction. We cannot be in right relationship with the Divine and with other human beings while living in a moral world of “let’s pretend.”

As my grandmother used to say: Tell the truth and shame the devil. Our ancestors who fought for the Confederacy were wrong and fought for an evil cause. We can mourn their lives and grieve that their cause was so inhumane, their principles so deluded. We must own that religious people normalized the evils of slavery, and that religious people were on the forefront of getting the Confederate monuments installed after the Civil War. They were wrong; by so doing they participated in evil. They perverted the principles of the faith they were ordained to proclaim.

Those who follow and honor pagan paths are not absolved or exempt. We who often are drawn to paths first walked by People of Color owe a duty to reject the bad harvest handed down to us. We must step forward and be among those calling for truth to be taught in history classes and for monuments to evil to be torn down. We pagans have an obligation under our stated principles to right this great wrong and prepare a better harvest for those who will look to us as ancestors.

(Melanie Morel-Ensminger is a Unitarian Universalist minister and an eighth-generation New Orleanian. Photo of Lee Circle by the author; Liberty Place from Wikipedia; Beauregard from the Internet.)

Unitarian Universalism

Previous Post

July 22, 2016

Conflict & Apology

Next Post

July 28, 2016 What Lammas Is and Is Not

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Current Events CUUPS Press Release Interfaith liturgy Media Review podcast Religious Education Seasonal Reflection Spiritual Practice Summary Uncategorized

Select a Month July 2026 June 2026 April 2026 January 2026 December 2025 October 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 February 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz