Early on the morning 8 June 2020, I roused my fifth grade daughter from bed and told her to put her shoes on. ‘Hurry, quick, we're going to see something.’ When we climbed into the car moments later, she guessed: ‘Is the Castleman statue gone?’ It was. After three years of petitions, protests and graffiti, of being hotly debated in grade school classrooms and town council meetings, the Confederate monument in our neighbourhood was taken down. I drove slow circles around the small roundabout where it had stood in the centre. Other families, similarly dressed in jackets over their pajamas, stood on the sidewalks. We took photographs of the empty pedestal, recording the absence.
I approached Cut in Stone: Confederate Monuments and Theological Disruption by Ryan Andrew Newson expecting it to address the very particular issue of Confederate monuments and their possible removal. I found instead a brilliant lens to understand and interpret the political, ecclesial and theological realities of today.
Newson uses history, theology, performance studies and trauma theory to lay out a compelling narrative regarding Confederate monuments. Immediately after the Civil War, grieving families erected memorials as acts of mourning, primarily in ‘death spaces’ such as cemeteries or battlefields. The boom in Confederate monuments came later, after Reconstruction, as white communities in the South struggled with their collective trauma of the war. White southerners were left asking ‘whether God was against them, and whether their loved ones had died in a futile and pointless quest’ (p. 52). Faced with the task of recognising they were on the wrong side of history and addressing their collective trauma, southern whites invented another option: the Lost Cause. This myth was a determined rewriting of history, declaring that the Civil War was not about slavery but states’ rights, the antebellum South was marked by virtue and nobility, and ‘while the Confederacy itself was defeated, God Almighty might enable Confederate principles to succeed in a different form and for a later era’ (p. 31).
Newson analyses how particular monuments performed – what work they did for the community – when they were erected and how they continue to perform today. At the turn of the twentieth century, under a guise of neutral historical memory, these statues created a false narrative about the past and endorsed a white supremacist vision of the future. While the historical reality of slavery is concretely absent from all Confederate monuments in the United States, it was performatively remembered in the many lynchings that took place under the watchful eyes of granite generals and stone soldiers. ‘A particular version of history was enshrined on university campuses and the statehouse lawn, in statues and markers exalting the very men who overthrew a legitimately elected government on explicitly racist grounds’ (p. 30).
Newson deftly analyses the explicit and implicit, avowedly Christian theology of Confederate monuments. Soldiers are seen as sacrifices, their deaths necessary to preserve white southern values and Anglo-Saxon bloodlines. The eschatological future is centred on, and circumscribed by, whiteness. Newson contrasts these points with the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ who is ‘uniquely present among the lynched’ (p. 161), as well as the openness to the yet-unseen possibilities of God's future.
Newson's critiques of Lost Cause theology are skilful but swift, refusing the temptation to extended polemics. His theological focus is on what to do next with these monuments (which are still being erected in the twenty-first century). Leaving them where they stand is a determined choice to continue performing a fictitious past and moving towards an unfaithful future. Simply removing them might play easily into the white fantasy that racism is behind us. Newson suggests various approaches that might shift the burden of memory from the monument to the community, inviting multiple perspectives into conversation and addressing the wounds of racialised trauma that infuse American culture. Perhaps rituals could be held in the space of a monument, artwork could be added, or memorials to those lynched could be placed adjacent to the monument in question. He states, ‘It is vital Americans find ways to face rather than erase’ our history of slavery, lynching and white supremacy (p. 161). Newson acknowledges that, practically speaking, most of these monuments should be removed. However, he challenges the reader to imagine what it would take truly to counter Lost Cause theology.
Such theology was on full display in the events in Washington, DC, on 6 January 2021. A mob of mostly white men invaded the Capitol, many carrying Confederate flags. They removed the flag of the United States and replaced it with a Trump flag, making visually explicit what has been clear for some time: former President Donald Trump intentionally framed himself as the new leader of the Lost Cause. (Just days earlier, Trump had vetoed a military spending bill because it included removing the names of Confederate soldiers from military installations.) The insurrectionists quickly built their own makeshift monuments, including a large gallows. With clothing and flags, members of the mob declared their allegiance to the Confederacy, to the Nazis, to Trump and to Jesus. In the scant weeks since 6 January, the meaning and memory of these events is already being constructed in multiple, conflicting ways. Newson's book provides precisely the tools needed to interpret and respond to these events well.
Of course, the book is not perfect. I disagree with one of Newson's characterisations of trauma; I wish he relied less on speech-act theory in his use of performance; I want him to read M. Shawn Copeland's work. At the same time, there are also stunning gems of scholarship throughout the text. Newson's concise summary of Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination, his brilliant use of Shelly Rambo's Resurrecting Wounds and his razor-sharp discussion of Christian views of memory – each of these had me cheering at my desk. This is a brilliant book, accessible and engaging, appropriate for every adult reader. Every person, class and book club should put Cut in Stone on their reading lists for 2021.
