THE CROSS AND THE CONFEDERATE FLAG
There are symbols that lift the heart toward heaven, and there are symbols that chain the heart to the soil of a broken past. Yet in the South—where pews are filled with Bibles, and porches are lined with stories—many believers cling to both. They hold the cross in one hand and the Confederate flag in the other, calling both “heritage,” calling both “identity,” calling both “sacred.” But the gospel will not share the throne with any lesser loyalty—not even a cultural one.
The cross is the place where Christ broke every dividing wall, where Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female were invited into one family under one blood (Galatians 3:28). But the Confederate flag—no matter how gently some describe it—represents a cause built, defended, and sustained by division. It is a banner under which men fought to keep an entire population in chains. You can try to soften that reality with phrases like “states’ rights” or “Southern pride,” but history is stubborn; it refuses to bend under sentimental pressure. And when Christians elevate that flag as their “heritage,” they forget the heritage that truly matters—Calvary.
Some insist, “It’s not hate; it’s history.” Yet symbols preach louder than words. And when a symbol that once flew above slave markets and battlefields is raised beside the symbol of Christ’s love, the message becomes painfully clear: We have not fully surrendered our identity to the gospel. Just as a “Black Night” on a lectureship reveals more about the heart than the planners realize, so a flag defended with fierce passion exposes an allegiance that competes with the way of the cross. The psychology is the same: people believe they are upholding something innocent because they do not understand how deeply the symbol wounds those who have lived its consequences.
The cross calls us to die—to die to pride, to die to our old loyalties, to die to the stories we inherited but never questioned. The Confederate flag calls us to remember a world divided by color and kept by power. These two symbols cannot walk together; one liberates, the other binds; one exalts Christ, the other exalts a culture. When Christians fight harder for a Confederate banner than they do for the unity of God’s people, they reveal that their heart has not yet been shaped by the mercy of Jesus.
The gospel gives us a new identity in a new Kingdom—a Kingdom where no earthly flag can claim supremacy, a Kingdom where our true heritage is forgiveness, reconciliation, and the radiant love of Christ. We honor our forefathers best not by preserving their errors, but by walking closer to the light they never saw. And when we finally lay down every rival banner, every ancestral loyalty, every symbol that divides rather than heals, we discover that the cross is more than enough to define us—yesterday, today, and forever.
BDD
