Is the Confederate Flag a Convenient Scapegoat?

Perhaps the confederate flag should be removed from the grounds of the State Capital in South Carolina.  I think it probably should be taken down, but I make that statement with some hesitation.  For one thing, I’m afraid that many of you will stop reading after that sentence.  For another I don’t think that removing the flag will actually decrease our racism or the violence that all too often rises up out of it. 

The ancient Israelites practiced an annual ritual on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  The high priest would place his hands on the head of a goat, symbolically transferring the sins of all the people onto the animal.  The goat would then be led into the wilderness and released.  It’s where we get our term “scapegoat.”    

I wonder if we’re using the Confederate Flag as a type of scapegoat. 

Think about it.  This whole flag thing seems to have taken on a life of its own.  It seems to me that the nine innocent people who lost their lives have taken a back seat to conversations about the flag.  It seems like a piece of cloth has somehow been animated by our anger, given life by the sins we heap on it.  Now it can be safely lead away into the wilderness.  

Those of us on Facebook and Twitter campaigning to take it down, and those of us campaigning to leave it up, both seem to gain the same benefit.  If I’m focused on the flag I don’t have to look into my own heart.

You see, if I’m really honest I have to admit that my real problem is not the thing attached to a flag pole.  My real problem is the thing living in my heart. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart.”

The truth is I can’t get rid of my sin of racism by placing it on the Confederate Flag.  

But if I can turn my attention (and the attention of others) to a debate about a flag, then maybe I won’t have to face the contents of my own heart.  I won’t have to face the fact that I don’t have any really close friends of a different ethnicity than my own.  I won’t have to confront the feelings of condescension that sometimes well up in my heart standing in the grocery store checkout line.  I won’t have to face the loathing in my heart when the crime was committed by a person of a different race.  I don’t have to extract the two by four from my own eye because I’m so preoccupied with the splinter in the eye of the other guy.  I can complain about the racist living across the street instead of confronting the racist living in my house.  

According to the scriptures, Jesus Christ became the scapegoat for every human being, including every racist of every race.  Followers of Jesus believe that we can be honest with ourselves about the sin that resides in our own hearts because Jesus has already absorbed it into his being and exhausted it of its power.  We can step into the shame we all share because Jesus has borne our shame.  We can share one another’s sorrows because Jesus has shared all our sorrows.  We can forgive each other because he has forgiven us.   We don’t have to find any other scapegoats.