Mr. McBride made history come alive to me in a way it never had before. I had not realized I could enjoy history; now I was falling in love with it.
In sixth and seventh grade, I took a Minnesota history course with curriculum made of plain black and white booklets. Every now and then, I would discover pictures drawn in the pages, but they never had color and barely had perspective. My brain frequently fogged over as I tried to read the content.
It got to the point, one day, that I cheated and found the score key and filled in all the answers so I could tell my mom I had done my schoolwork and go out and snowmobile for the rest of the afternoon.
Yes, I homeschooled. Yes, we sometimes did things like that (don’t tell me you all who went to school never did stuff like that. I taught for three years—I know!)
Later, my conscience nagged me so strongly that I confessed to my mom what I had done and had to completely redo that section. But that’s another story for another time.
When it came to Mr. McBride’s tenth and eleventh grade history classes, however, I didn’t want to miss them.
Sure, I was taking these classes via distance education with A Beka Academy—I never actually have met Mr. McBride in person. But even over video, his lectures on history were so vivid and story-like, I felt as if we were walking through history itself.
I remember feeling pride as we learned about the first Thanksgiving celebration taking place and the way the Puritans and Native Americans played games together and shared comradery with each other as we all became one big happy family.
I had visceral feelings of disgust for the taxation without representation the colonial states faced back in the 1700s. The final revolting and the revolutionary war felt so justified. . .and freeing.
Wars fascinated me. I grew up in an Anabaptist home. My parents would have never supported me going to war. Now, as an adult, I could not support going to war either. But wars were so much fun to study. The strategy that went into them, and the bravery of different commanders—it all aroused my inner patriot.
And the Civil War, while one of the ugliest and bloodiest parts of American history, seemed like the ultimate proof of America’s fight for the freedom of all people. Abraham Lincoln has always been one of my favorite presidents to study. I remember my family visiting Gettysburg around the time I was studying the Civil War, and I had never been so enthralled with a history tour as I was on that one.
Graduating from high school, history was definitely my favorite subject and I took great pleasure in the history of the United States. We really were the best country in the world, in my mind, and I was really glad to have been born as a citizen of the USA.
But then I got out of high school, and I began discovering a history of the United States that wasn’t neatly selected for a Christian school curriculum.
I began learning about some of the bloody battles between pioneers and Native Americans, and how at times the pioneers would bait the natives only to turn around and slaughter them.[1]
I read more about the Boston tea party and the tar-and-feathering that colonists did in acts of terror and protest against the taxation without representation.
And I gained a fuller picture of everything that went into the Civil War, and how Lincoln himself said if he could have saved the union without abolishing slavery, he would have. While there were plenty of leaders who seemed to truly hate slavery—including, I think, Lincoln—the war was more about saving the union than giving black people their freedom.
History is messy.
Humans are messy, and history is the story of humans. If the way we understand history is in a way that is never messy, then it probably means our people—those who have written the history books—were the ones who made another people’s history really messy.
A lot of good and beautiful things have been done throughout history. So have a lot of ugly, evil things.
A story that arouses affection and pride in one group of people probably ties another group of people’s stomachs into knots.
We are a fallen, broken people living in a fallen, broken world. We don’t live in perfect harmony and peace. Humans never have since Eden, and we never will until Jesus fully restores all things.
This doesn’t mean good and beautiful things can’t truly be done in this fallen, broken world. It just means that in order for truly good and beautiful things to be done, we need to be honest about all the parts of our past.
And as an American, while there are beautiful parts of the national story of America, there are also many ugly parts. Even lost within the beautiful parts is the selective suppression of good and beautiful things being done by people who are not “us.”
February marks Black History month.
Some of us might wonder why there’s a specific month dedicated to the history of black people. Why is there not a “white history month,” or a “native American history month”?
Well, there actually is a “native American history month.” November is “Native American Heritage Month,” and the fact that many of us might not know about it is kind of indicative of the whole problem. (I don’t even know that much about it, yet.)
Which people get most of the attention in our historical narratives? When it comes to inventors and influential leaders, who make up the pages of our history textbooks?
White people.
In my history book growing up, we maybe had a page and a half of “black scientists, inventors, and notable people.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held the largest section of history for black people, and there was maybe a small reference to Malcom X. Folks like Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks were also mentioned.
But I don’t remember learning about Catherine Johnson and her involvement in putting a man on the moon, Sarah Boone who designed what most of us now take for granted in an ironing board, or Garrett Morgan’s genius of the three-light traffic light. There are many everyday items we use and enjoy that were invented by people of color, only we don’t know it because they didn’t write the history books.
Similarly, I didn’t learn in high school how the man who penned America’s constitution—which declares that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights—denounced blacks as biologically inferior and claimed that “a biracial American society was impossible,” while also producing at least four children with one of the young African American ladies he owned as a slave.[2]
I never realized how many Christians during the antebellum period bought into paternalism as a way of rationalizing their ownership of slaves.[3] No wonder those of us who are white sometimes struggle with a “white savior complex.”
Neither did I realize how George Whitefield used slave labor to build his orphanage or that “Southern” in the name of the “Southern Baptist Convention” stood for the nearly 400,000 churchgoers who did not believe slavery was a sin.[4]
History is messy.
Humans are messy, and history is the story of humans.
And as Christians, we believe the Gospel is for all humans.
Whether cognitively intentional or not, large pieces of history go completely forgotten when we only remember history the way “our people” tell it. This is true for whatever people group “our people” stands for.
The way in which we remember history matters because many current events are happening because of things that have taken place in the past. We don’t have to agree with the direction our country seems to be heading or all the solutions people put forward; but we must be willing to acknowledge what has been. Otherwise, when we go to add constructive ideas for how to move forward in a healthy way, we will miss altogether what actually needs to be done.
Why has police brutality become a big hot-button issue for politicians? Because police brutality is an actual experience of certain people in the past. Just because things have majorly improved does not mean we should not wish to see it completely removed.
Why do some people push for reparations today? Because many lives have literally been abused by the system and the people who continue to control the system.[5]
Every one of us lives by a certain historical-national narrative.
Even those of us who are Christian are shaped by the historical-national narrative we grew up in the middle of. The way we perceive the world—the way we interpret Scripture—is shaped by our cultural lenses, and the historical-national narrative we call “history” partly shapes our cultural lens.
The church is the place where every nation, tribe, and language are knit together as one in Jesus Messiah. The wall of hostility—as Ephesians refers to it—made up of cultural, racial, and even theological differences is torn down in Jesus (Eph. 2:11-14).
A more holistic understanding of history helps us better understand brothers and sisters in Christ. It helps us become one, and it helps us avoid building that wall of hostility back up again.
Black History Month is a great time to better understand the history of our black brothers and sisters.
If you have close black friends, it could be a good thing to ask them what you should read about this month. But understand that it is not their responsibility to educate you; it’s your responsibility to glean from the wonderful resources already available so you can better understand and empathize with your friends.
Following is a list I have found helpful in learning more about black history. This month you can get going on this list, but I hope you don’t stop learning a broader perspective of history once February ends.
Keep learning, keep growing. Keep listening to the historical-national narratives of the various people around you. This, I believe, is one crucial step toward greater oneness and unity as the body of Jesus Christ.
List of recommended resources:
- Why Is Black History Month in February? How Do You Celebrate? Everything You Need to Know. (article)
- 33 Black History Month Activities for February and Beyond (article)
- 8 Black Inventors Who Made Daily Life Easier (article)
- Blackpast.org (website)
- Black History Mobile Museum (website)
- 13th (Netflix documentary)
- Hidden Figures (movie)
- When They See Us (Netflix series)
- Just Mercy (book)[6]
- The Color of Compromise (book)
- Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria (book)[7]
Are there any aspects of history you have discovered you needed to gain a broader perspective in? What were they? Share in the comments below.
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[1] See also https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/23/native-american-racism-video-covington-school-nick-sandmann.
[2] Jefferson was essentially creating people for whom he thought life would be impossible.
[3] Jemar Tisby. The Color of Compromise. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019. pp. 66-67.
[4] Ibid, pp. 46-48, 77-78.
[5] Look up Jim Crow laws, Equal Justice Initiative, or Redlining to better understand how these lives have been abused. As Christians, before we bristle too much at the idea of reparations, we must acknowledge that reparations are actually biblical (Exod. 21-22, Lev. 5, Luke 19:1-10).
[6] I’ve not read the book, but I did watch the movie. Now I want to read the book.
[7] I have not personally read this book, yet. It’s on my to-read list as I have read books that frequently mention it.
