Statues of traitors bring us some comfort

There are no statues of Benedict Arnold in the United States because Arnold was a traitor. After a brilliant career in the American forces during the War of Independence, he defected to the British and fought against his former government.

Had the British won, no doubt Arnold would be lauded as a patriot.

On the other hand, Gen. Robert E. Lee also fought against own government. He led the Confederate forces in the Civil War.

Doesn’t that also make him a traitor? But statues honouring him litter the southern states.

Now there’s public pressure to remove statues that honour and promote the Confederacy. Mostly because they fought in support of slavery, which we — well, those of us blessed with a social conscience — now condemn.

Confederate statues and Confederate flags should come down because they perpetuate outdated and wrongful notions.

As a matter of common practice, countries usually honour their winners, not their losers. Does Munich boast a statue of Hitler? Does China sell little statuettes of Chiang Kai-Shek?

Are Confederate monuments a way of claiming that the wrong side won?

Of course, what happens in the U.S. gets copied in Canada. So there are calls to remove the statue of Lord Edward Cornwallis, the founder of the city of Halifax, because he advocated the killing of Mi’kmaq Indians.

The federal government already removed the name of Hector-Louis Langevin from an Ottawa office tower.

Langevin, one of the Fathers of Confederation, was also an advocate of the now disgraced Indian Residential Schools.

Currently, lobby groups want to remove of the name of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, from Canadian schools, because of his racist views.

Come on! Of course he was racist — back then, everyone was. He was also often drunk. He took bribes from railway companies. He was a lousy father; his son, Hugh John Macdonald, fought in the Northwest Rebellion to spite his father.

But Sir John A was undeniably an architect of the country we now know as Canada.

If the movement to edit history continues in the U.S., I wonder what they’ll do with Columbus. His name is commemorated in dozens of town and cities. America has a federal holiday, Columbus Day, coming up this year on Oct. 9.

But the record also shows that Columbus was a brutal, ruthless, racist who makes Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio look cuddly by comparison.

Columbus brought slavery to the Americas; he took Arawak natives back to Spain as slaves. (Most died en route.)

He forced Caribbean natives to supply gold to him, and cut off hands or feet, ears and noses, if they didn’t comply.

Columbus was so ruthless that his fellow Spaniards shipped him back to Spain in chains. Where, in an Arpaio prequel, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella pardoned him.

Monuments, I suggest, should be thought of like stained-glass windows in medieval cathedrals. They’re a teaching tool. In the cathedrals, an illiterate people could absorb biblical stories portrayed in glass.

Today, people can gaze at Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square and ask, “Who was he? What did he do?”

On that principle, if statues of Robert E. Lee can open modern eyes to the evils of slavery, they deserve to stay; if they merely reinforce an ancient tribalism, they should go.

But that principle raises a bigger issue — the mental monuments we carry around with us.

Apparently, 80 per cent of people say they still believe in God. But what kind of God? A distant engineer, who keeps the universe unfolding as it should? A tribal God, who looks after His favoured few while smiting everyone else? God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth?

Those names and images recur in Christian worship services. They’re built into the historic creeds, the Lord’s Prayer, and the traditional liturgies of many churches. I suspect many people no longer think of God out there, or up there. If they bother thinking about God at all. But the familiar words have become a comforting mantra, a verbal security blanket.

The Ten Commandments forbid making images of God. Including verbal images. People can become as attached to a verbal image of God as they can to a Confederate flag or a statue of a general.

Like the statues, continuing to affirm those wordings perpetuates bygone understandings. And misunderstandings.

And like Confederate statues, abolishing familiar formulas from worship liturgies — and from mental mindsets — inevitably results in angry resistance.