It is striking to witness the current war on the South and its symbols.  Those of us with some sort of connection to the South, or some sort of sympathy with the South might be forgiven for asking (either aloud or to ourselves) if in fact perhaps Reconstruction never really ended.

Jennifer Steinhauer has written a piece for the New York Times, "Historical Symbols in the Midst of a 'Purge Moment'" (September 1, 2015).  The piece surveys some of the recent developments--mainly the current trend whereby there is great pressure to remove this or that symbol of the South (she touches on more than the South, by the way).  Thus, there is pressure around the nation to "purge" symbols of John C. Calhoun, Robert E. Lee, and others from display.  There are a lot of reasons to oppose such moves, but that is not really not my interest here.  Rather, my interest is the intriguing title of her essay, and what it reveals.

Steinhauer's piece uses an important word: purge. Our English word "purge" comes from Latin.  The Latin verb "purgo, purgare, purgavi, purgatum" means: "to cleanse, clean; to clear, clear away, remove; to clear of a charge; to excuse, justify; to refute; to purify ritually; to purge (the body)" (John Traupman's Latin Dictionary).

Given the nuances and possible connotations of the Latin word, it is understandable that in the history of the West the word "purge" has been used often in an explicitly religious or theological sense.  And I suspect what we are witnessing in our day is a certain kind of religious crusade to cleanse our culture of certain symbols.  That is: our current cultural elites are engaging in their own type of ritual purification.

Conservatives err by not grasping this.  I suspect it is important to grasp that all culture is in one way or another religion externalized (see Henry Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture or Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism).  One of liberalism's great moves has been to advance a certain vision of cultural reality while hiding the fact that this vision of reality is theological and religious at its core.  It has been, from a strategic standpoint, utterly brilliant.

We only think that the religious wars stopped in the 1600s.  They never really stopped.  The current war on the South and its symbols is simply a particularly interesting version of religious warfare.  And occasionally even the New York Times gets this right by calling the current effort by its true name, a purging.

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