A few years ago, a neighbor invited me over to talk. His daughter had come home from school the day before, deeply upset, and he needed to tell someone what had happened. They had been learning about the Civil War, and the teacher had described it as a conflict over “economic differences between the North and South.” The girl, ten years old and Black, raised her hand and asked, “Wasn’t it about slavery?” The teacher said it was “complicated”.
My neighbor told me this story with a weariness I recognized. It was the weariness of someone who has watched the same lie get dressed up in new language, generation after generation. As he spoke, I felt something shift in me, because I realized I had heard that same weariness before, in a completely different context. I had heard it in the voice of a college professor who once described what it was like to watch churches explain away the hard passages of Scripture and to watch congregations treat the Bible like a greatest-hits album rather than the sprawling, blood-soaked, unflinching testimony it is.
The connection between those two acts of editing, the editing of our national story and the editing of our sacred story, is what I want to explore here. I have come to believe that they are not merely similar. They are expressions of the same spiritual sickness. And they produce the same spiritual result: the impossibility of repentance.
The Bible That Does Not Flinch
The Bible is not a safe book. Anyone who has actually read it knows this. It is full of stories that would never pass a school board review. There is incest in Genesis, mass slaughter in Judges, and a king who watches a woman bathe and then arranges to have her husband killed in battle. The prophets do not whisper their critiques of Israel; they shout them. Ezekiel uses sexual imagery so graphic that many congregations skip those chapters entirely. Amos tells the wealthy women of Samaria that God considers them fattened cows ready for slaughter (Amos 4:1).
And the New Testament is no less confrontational. Jesus tells a rich young ruler that his wealth is the very thing keeping him from the kingdom. Paul catalogs his own failures with a specificity that would embarrass any modern church leader. The book of Revelation is a fever-dream of divine judgment against empire.
The Bible does not shy away from the sins of God’s people. That is one of its most remarkable features. Unlike the propaganda literature of other ancient Near Eastern cultures, which portrayed kings as flawless and nations as righteous, Israel’s scriptures insist on telling the truth about Israel. Abraham lies about his wife. Moses commits murder. The nation itself, fresh from liberation, builds a golden calf and worships it. The prophets interpret national disaster not as evidence that God has failed but as the consequence of the people’s own unfaithfulness.
This is not accidental. The Bible’s willingness to name the sins of God’s people is the very foundation of repentance. You cannot repent of what you refuse to name. You cannot turn from a road you pretend you were never on. The entire structure of biblical faith depends on this sequence: we did wrong, we name it, we confess it, and only then do we receive mercy and begin again.
The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, literally means “to turn” or “to return.” But you cannot turn if you do not know which direction you are heading. Naming the sin is not optional. It is a prerequisite. When David is confronted by Nathan the prophet with the story of a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb, David’s outrage at the injustice is real. But the turning point, the moment that makes repentance possible, comes when Nathan points his finger and says: “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12:7).
This is the work of honest storytelling. This is what Scripture does again and again: it points its finger at the people of God and says, “You are the ones who did this.”
The Slaveholder’s Bible and the Slaveholder’s History
But there is another way of reading Scripture, and it is older than we care to admit. It is the tradition of the slaveholder.
When European Christians arrived on these shores with enslaved Africans in the holds of their ships, they did not abandon the Bible. They edited it. They preached Ephesians 6:5, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters,” while skipping the Exodus narrative that made liberation the central act of God in history. They built a theology that made whiteness a sign of divine favor and Blackness a mark of the curse of Ham, even though the text says nothing of the sort. They created what Frederick Douglass would later call “the Christianity of the slaveholder,” a religion that looked like the real thing on the outside but had been hollowed out from within, its prophetic core surgically removed.
This is the tradition that author and activist Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove identifies as “slaveholder religion” in his important work Reconstructing the Gospel. It is a Christianity edited to serve power rather than confront it, a faith that comforts the comfortable and ignores the afflicted. Wilson-Hartgrove helps us see that this editing project did not end with emancipation. It continued through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow, through the civil rights era, and it continues today. The same tradition that edited Scripture to justify slavery is now editing history to avoid accountability for it.
This is the connection my neighbor’s weariness helped me see. The teacher who told a ten-year-old girl that the Civil War was about “economic differences” was participating in the same tradition as the plantation preacher who told enslaved people that God wanted them to obey their masters. Both were editing a story to shield the powerful from the consequences of the truth. Both were cutting out the parts that might lead to repentance.
In his Revolution of Values, Wilson-Hartgrove traces how the religious right learned to misread both Scripture and American history to serve a distorted moral narrative, one that baptizes the existing social order as God’s will and treats any challenge to that order as an attack on faith itself. This is the deep root of the crisis. The people who are most aggressively sanitizing American history in our schools and legislatures are, in many cases, the same people who have been sanitizing Scripture in their churches for generations. They have had practice.
The Idol of Innocence
In recent years, we have watched this editorial project accelerate. States have passed laws restricting how teachers can discuss race, slavery, and systemic injustice in classrooms. Books have been pulled from library shelves. Curricula have been rewritten to minimize the horrors of chattel slavery, reframe the Civil War as a dispute over states’ rights, and present the forced removal of Indigenous peoples as an unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of westward expansion. In some cases, enslaved people have been described as “workers” or “immigrants,” as if language alone could undo chains. The idol at the center of this sanitized history is innocence. It is the belief that we, as a people, are fundamentally good, that whatever wrongs were committed were exceptions to our character rather than expressions of it, and that dwelling on those wrongs is itself a kind of sin against the national spirit.
This is the same idol the prophets confronted again and again in Israel. Jeremiah raged against the temple theology of his day, the popular belief that because God’s temple stood in Jerusalem, the city was safe from judgment. “Do not trust in these deceptive words,” he warned. “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord” (Jeremiah 7:4). The triple repetition was meant to mimic the mindless chanting of a people who believed their chosenness exempted them from accountability.
The same dynamic is at work when Americans invoke the language of exceptionalism to shield the nation from honest self-examination. “We are the greatest nation on earth” becomes a kind of secular liturgy, repeated not to invite reflection but to foreclose it. Like the people of Jeremiah’s day, who chanted “the temple of the Lord” as a protective spell, we repeat “the greatest nation” as if the words themselves could ward off the need for honesty.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw this clearly. Writing from a Nazi prison, he observed that the church’s great temptation was not outright evil but the cultivation of “cheap grace” that offered forgiveness without confession, absolution without accountability, and new life without the death of the old. What Bonhoeffer identified in the church, we might now identify in the nation: a cheap patriotism that offers pride without reckoning, celebration without confession, and a future without an honest account of the past.
But the prophets teach us that the community that refuses to confront its own sin is not strong. It is brittle. It is a community built on a lie, and lies, no matter how patriotic or pious they sound, eventually collapse under the weight of the reality they try to suppress.
“We Have Sinned”
What does it look like to tell the truth?
It does not look like despair. It does not look like self-flagellation. The Bible presents a different model. When the people of Israel confessed their sins and named what they had done and where they had gone wrong, the result was not the destruction of the community but its renewal.
The great prayers of confession in Scripture are not prayers of people who have given up. They are prayers of people who love their community so fiercely that they refuse to let it remain trapped in the consequences of its unacknowledged sin. Daniel, praying in exile, does not distance himself from Israel’s sins. He does not say, “They did wrong, but I had nothing to do with it.” Instead, he says, “We have sinned and done wrong” (Daniel 9:5). He takes the sins of his people onto himself, not because he personally committed all of them, but because he understands that the health of the community depends on someone being willing to name the truth and bring it before God.
This is what honest history does for a nation. It is not an act of hatred. It is an act of love. When we teach our children the full truth about slavery, the systematic destruction of Indigenous cultures, Japanese internment, and the long, continuing legacy of racial injustice, we are not teaching them to hate America. We are teaching them to love America as the prophets loved Israel: honestly, fiercely, and with an unshakable commitment to the possibility that things can be different.
Frederick Douglass understood this when he delivered his famous Fourth of July speech in 1852. He did not reject America. He held America to its own professed standards. He named the gap between the nation’s ideals and its practices, and in doing so, he performed a prophetic act as old as Amos and Isaiah. He said, in effect: “You claim to be a people of liberty. Let me show you what you have actually done. Then let us see whether you have the courage to repent.”
Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust, though imperfect and ongoing, stands as one example of a nation that chose to confront its own horror rather than bury it. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, for all its limitations, was built on the insight that a nation cannot move forward unless it first tells the truth about where it has been. These are not perfect models, but they share a common conviction: the truth, however painful, is the only foundation for genuine peace and justice.
My Own Unfinished Conversion
I wish I could write all of this from a place of completed transformation. I cannot. I am a white Christian raised in the comfortable suburbs, and the slaveholder religion Wilson-Hartgrove describes is not something I observed from the outside. It is the water I swam in as a child. It shaped how I read the Bible and American history long before I had the language to name what was happening.
The monastic tradition has a word for the work I am describing: conversatio, the daily commitment to being changed, to submitting again and again to the truth that unmakes us so that God can remake us into something closer to who we were meant to be. It is not a single moment of enlightenment. It is the long, patient, often humbling practice of letting the unedited story do its work in you.
I think of my neighbor and her daughter. I think of what it cost that ten-year-old girl to raise her hand and say, “Wasn’t it about slavery?” She was doing the work of the prophet in that classroom. She was pointing to an edited story and saying, “This is not the truth.” She was doing what Nathan did to David, what Amos did to Israel, and what Douglass did to America. She was insisting that the real story be told, not because the truth is easy, but because without it, there is no turning. Without it, there is no way home.
A Bible whose sins have been removed is not a Bible. It is propaganda in a leather binding. A national history that has had its sins removed is not history. It is mythology in service of power. Neither propaganda nor mythology can save us. Neither can produce the teshuvah, the turning, that alone opens the door to mercy.
Only the unedited story can do that. Only the truth, told in full, received with humility, and answered with a willingness to change, can set a people free. The people of God have always known this. It is time for this nation’s people to learn it again.
