The following meditation was written by Doug Hood's son,
Nathanael Hood, MA, New York University
“When
he got near the camp and saw the bull calf and the dancing, Moses was furious.
He hurled the tablets down and shattered them in pieces at the foot of the
mountain. He took the calf that they had made and burned it in a fire. Then he
ground it down to crushed powder, scattered it on the water, and made the
Israelites drink it.”
(Exodus 32:19-20)
Every
November 13th in Bristol, England, schoolchildren are given large sweet buns
mixed with dried fruits and tasty spices. These massive buns come with eight
wedge marks, all the better for breaking off and sharing with other children
and their families. It’s a fine lesson in practical charity, and the buns
themselves are named after Edward Colston, one of the most noted
philanthropists in Bristol’s history. When he died in 1721 he left a legacy of
giving that continues to this day—walk the streets of Bristol and you’ll see
buildings, schools, and churches founded or sponsored by Colston still bearing
his name. The one thing you won’t see, at least anymore, is the statue of
Colston that used to stand in the city’s center, as it was toppled, desecrated,
and shoved into the nearby harbor on June 7, 2020 by protestors enraged by the
police murder of George Floyd in the United States. For Edward Colston, benefactor
of Bristol, model of Christian charity, namesake of a delicious children’s
treat, made his fortune selling kidnapped Africans into slavery.
We live
in the midst of a literal historical reckoning. As millions spill into the
streets the world over to protest police brutality and anti-black violence,
people are taking long, hard looks at their countries’ histories and
reconsidering who are worth revering. These “reconsiderations” are particularly
pronounced here in America, a land still steeped in legacies of racial hatred
and mob violence. Statues of colonizers and slaveholders dot our public
buildings and national landmarks, and even now there remain an estimated 1,800
monuments, statues, and official symbols memorializing the Confederacy (most of
which, tellingly, were erected during the Jim Crow era to intimidate newly
freed black communities). And now many of these are getting the Colston
treatment. In Richmond, Virginia a statue of Robert E. Lee was desecrated with
graffiti. In New Orleans a bust of John McDonogh, public school patron and
slave magnate, was toppled and smashed. And in Boston, a famous statue of
Christopher Columbus, one of the greatest butchers in human history, was
beheaded.
The
point of these protests isn’t to erase history, but to tear down the false
idols erected to enshrine false legacies. How can any nation who purports to
believe in egalitarian equality dedicate public space to men who enslaved their
fellow human beings or fought a war to keep them in shackles? In the Book of
Exodus, we can find an eerie parallel to our current national crisis of
conscience when the Israelites, fresh from a 400 year captivity in Egypt,
turned from the God who freed them and erected a golden calf while Moses was on
Mount Sinai. This golden calf was more than just an idol, as some scholars
believe it was an Apis Bull, an object of cult worship in Egypt. It would seem
that just as the Israelites grumbled in the desert for the bread and meat of
their captors, they grumbled too for their gods. Just as we in the West cling
to the imagined legacy of charitable slaveholders and magnanimous colonizers,
the Israelites clung to an imagined history of prosperity in bondage.
Moses’
response was swift, brutal, and effective. Not only did he destroy the golden
calf, he had it crushed, mixed with water, and consumed by its worshippers.
They were, quite literally, forced to choke on their blasphemous idolatry. So
now must we in the West also choke on our own false worship. In particular, we
as a larger Christian community must stand as an example and follow Moses’
example and exorcise the false idols of white supremacy and racial violence
from our pasts. Though we believe in the sanctity of all God’s children and the
ultimate salvation of all who truly repent of their sins and follow
Jesus—slaveholders and colonizers included—there’s no reason to preserve their
legacies of bloodshed and terror. It’s not just the moral thing to do, it’s the
biblical thing to do. It’s time we cast our idols into the harbor next to the
golden calf and Edward Colston.
Joy,
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