Let me just start by saying I’ve re-written the title to this post a hundred different ways and all of them have scared me out of writing this article. It’s such a massively huge topic and I’m so…..white. And so so so late to the conversation. And so don’t have a clue to the decades of hurt and what racism feels like. I can’t go back and re-write history and I can’t undo the past. But I can tell you what right now looks like to me. This is my heart right now.

I went to my Dad twice during the writing of this article to make sure he knew I’d always love and treasure my family, and to make sure he wouldn’t be disappointed in me (he wasn’t). If a topic is a multi-hour teary and passionate conversation with my parents in the kitchen, then I absolutely believe it’s worth writing about here. I believe God has laid it on my heart for a reason, and that it’s important to share, no matter how hard.

Bear with me and please know that you, you reading this!, matter deeply to me.

I’m a white Southerner who gave up the Confederacy for my friends.

What a header, right? Let me explain. Growing up, my sister and I adored the South. We grew up in Florida, and had a Yankee mother from Ohio with generations of pacifism in their bloodlines, and a Southern daddy from Georgia with generations of fighters since the minute we landed in America. Those Fambroughs have fought in nearly every war up until my generation. Which means a lot of my patriarchal history is Confederate. I didn’t know them. I just know my grandparents and my parents weren’t racist and that was good enough for me.

I remember the first time a friend called me a racist for being a Southerner, I went to the bathroom and sobbed for 10 mins. When the friend’s sister found me, I was crying out: “That’s not how I see it. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m not racist. I love your little brother.”

I was so wounded that he thought that of me. Now I’m wounded that my pride had blinded me for so long. Growing up, I always was a bit disgruntled that the Daddy I idolized didn’t like the Confederacy so much. After all, it was his heritage.

He would quietly and wisely say: “The flag doesn’t mean what you think it means. The South stood for states rights but it also stood for slavery, and slavery goes against the very heart of the Gospel of Christ.” He is a man who doesn’t let politics in the way of Jesus.

The flag might have stood for something beautiful in the beginning, but it ended up being a symbol of pride for a world living off the profits of slavery. Seeing it means fear for my friends of color. It means that we may have valued our people a lot but we didn’t value them enough to set them free. It reminds my friends of color that their families were torn apart, killed, and sold. It reminds my friends of color of pain. It reminds them that we didn’t see them as people. It means war and it means slavery.

The historical South was beautiful for our white families. It was not for our black families. And that breaks my heart into a million and one pieces today.

The Sin and Stain of Slavery existed in my own heritage.

I know somewhere back there we owned slaves. It’s in the pictures.

And growing up I believed that states rights were a good enough reason for the South to have won. And I believe the South had some really good Christian leaders and some really dang good points. But slavery wasn’t one of them. As a Bible believing Christian, I believe slavery is one of the ugliest sins we can commit against each other, and it grieves me to think that my family followed a societal norm and owned slaves. I didn’t know those family members; I can’t say I’m ashamed of them. I can say I wish I could say we never ever would have done such a terrible thing.

I can say if someone ever came to me (there are lots of African American Fambroughs out there) and said their family was owned by mine, I would probably sob for months. I’d want to give them everything. And hold them in my arms for a really long time.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have ever ever ever said this in public, and honestly, writing it all out right now and anticipating the feedback (and disappointment) I’m going to get from my friends who love the Confederacy makes me so nauseous I’m sick right now.

I’m not out to make enemies, honest. But I’m also not going to stay quiet about this.

The transfiguring moment I saw my friend instead of a cause.

Because a few years ago, I started really listening to my friends of color. I heard their tears as people were shot in the street a few blocks from their home. A town near us was almost ripped in half after a shooting. It is still deeply segregated.

One of my friends wrote the sentence one night that the man killed in her town could have been her husband. And my heart stopped. I’d been to their wedding. One white girl who could not dance, laughingly pulled in with two of her aunties to dance with all of them in celebration. I couldn’t imagine it being her husband. I couldn’t imagine it being her cousin. I couldn’t imagine it being her son. I couldn’t imagine it being all my friends of color I’ve loved so very much getting to know.

Suddenly I saw deep grief and pain. I saw the green grass torn open for all the caskets and how loss comes to us all: rich and poor, black and white, and the hearts that are torn open along with it. Grief is grief, and my eyes were opened to the racism in my country.

I saw my friends instead of a political statement, and it broke my heart. 

And I started REALLY listening.  I threw the “Us vs Them” rhetoric out the window as much as possible. I started ignoring labels as much as I could. I quit looking for political reasons or explanations and started looking for ways to see Jesus in others not like me and I asked hard questions of my friends. I traveled internationally. I saw outside of a white America and it struck me how not that great we were. I saw beautiful people from many cultures and I wanted them all to know Jesus and to never doubt His love.

And to never doubt God’s love because of something I said or did.

I’ll never forget the moment it woke me up.
It hit me like a rip current and dragged me out to sea of never going back.

I looked at all of history under the light of God’s kingdom, and I suddenly realized if I had to choose between loving and being FOR my friends of color in modern day America, OR romanticizing the Confederacy …. I was 1 million percent going to choose the one that mattered, and it wasn’t a dead war and policy. 

It was going to be my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Because I love them more than I could ever love a history where my forefathers sinned against the image of God (and yes, that goes back a lot further than 1861). And I love my brothers and sisters of color and want friendships and peace and unity with them more than I want monuments in the square (that will crumble into dust one day, and oh hey, Robert E. Lee didn’t even want them in the first place and asked not to have monuments made of himself), and more than I want people to tell me how wonderful it was that so many Fambroughs were so committed to the Southern legacy.

Statues aren’t worth more than my friends. Period. End of story. They’re made of stone and dust and they aren’t God’s beloved children and those statues won’t be in Heaven with me.

The Confederacy no longer mattered to me. Y’all. Y’all, listen. In light of a perfect redemptive history and the most beautiful Kingdom God is building and redeeming from our blood spilled lands, how could the Confederacy matter more to me than the precious ones who will be filling the throne room with me? And why would I let it when that’s a choice I can make?

This doesn’t mean I have to hate my family; I’ll always love my family’s history. I will always love my family and seek to understand and know more about them. But that doesn’t mean I should or will condone evil and sin committed in the hearts of men. And it definitely doesn’t mean I need to flaunt my family’s history when it was wrong. When I’m tempted to argue that my family members were all heroes and that they loved their slaves, I’m not believing or portraying the Gospel. We are all a little racist somewhere, and I’m praying God shows me the places where I am.

Slavery is wrong. But the fall of the South did not kill racism. It couldn’t. Only the Gospel can kill the sin of racism. And that is the Gospel we must preach. 

Let go of a prideful past built on physical bloodlines.

“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” – Galatians 5:13

We cannot as Bible believing Christians, stand for slavery, which means we cannot revel or glory in a history (that could repeat itself) that promotes it. We cannot stand for racism. Or white supremacy. We cannot. We cannot. We cannot.

We cannot choose our family’s history over Jesus.

If we’re going to die on a hill for a cause, let it look like Calvary and like Jesus and
not like our own self built kingdoms that we treasure more than the one He died to bring us and to bring us into. 

We cannot choose our physical bloodlines against the blood spilled from the side of Christ for the freedom from sin for the nations. 

We cannot choose politics and a kingdom quickly fading instead of Jesus and His Kingdom that calls the nations to Himself and is building an all-racial church.

We cannot choose to be on the wrong side of this issue yet again when churches have been given the option so many times and chosen the wrong one. Choose Biblically.

Condemning racism and proclaiming our fellow citizenship with our brothers and sisters of all races should easily go hand in hand, but it hasn’t. And I haven’t done it well. To the people in the back who I’ve been racist to or spoken poorly to, please, PLEASE forgive me. I’m grieved, deeply grieved, by America in our current state and actions, and yet see that me carrying years of a romanticized Civil War may have hurt you deeply.

I renounce any and all white supremacy and have repented deeply to God for any ways I represented that. And yes, I swiftly gave up the Confederacy for my friends of color. 

But that doesn’t make me a hero. That makes me a convicted Christian who realized I wasn’t portraying Jesus as the Jewish Savior Who leveled the ground at the foot of the cross and called every slave free and Jews and Greeks equals {Colossians 3:11}. It doesn’t make me understand any better the generations of agony my friends of color have suffered at white hands.

It still means I’m white, and it still means a lot of days I feel the heavy guilt of my white privilege. But I hope saying this opens the doors to deeper friendships between us, and I hope you’ll continue to teach me what Jesus means to you as I share what Jesus means to me, and I rejoice that one day the guilt and shame that we carry around will be shed and we will join hands and voices as one proclaiming Christ as our King.

“For You were slain, and have redeemed us to God by Your blood. Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation.” – Revelation 5:9

“EVERY nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb…” – Revelation 7:9

Choose Jesus and His Kingdom Cause.

Choose Jesus and You get to be a bearer of the love He sees in His beautifully made image-bearing people. Choose anything over Jesus and you lose that privilege.

Our God and Creator and King doesn’t share His Kingship with anyone; neither does He smile upon those whose words speak against His heart for the nations. The nations don’t always look like China or Korea or Guatemala. The nations are also your African American brothers and sisters and your friends of color who live in your world and hear your words.

Jesus, help us. Jesus, forgive us. 

I want my legacy to be that I chose Jesus over everything the world offered. I want my legacy to be loving my family, yes, but I want my greater legacy to be loving our bigger family full of those that don’t look like me. I want my legacy to be loving Jesus’s family.

Just like He loves me. Even me, a white Southerner who gave up the Confederacy for a greater Kingdom that calls everyone who trusts in the King “Beloved Son and Daughter”.

Glory, glory, glory. 

“All nations whom You have made shall come and worship before You, O Lord,
and shall glorify Your name. For You are great, and do wondrous things; You alone are God.” – Psalm 86: 9-10