Cathedral set to remove flag windows
Last week, a famous church made a decision about an infamous flag. The Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., is finally beginning the process of removing two images of the Confederate battle flag that appear in a large, stained-glass window.
A year ago, the Very Rev. Gary Hall, then dean of the Episcopal church, issued a statement on the church’s website. He said that the windows, installed in 1953, were designed to honor “the lives and legacies of Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Both windows display the image of the Confederate battle flag.”
Explaining the intentions of his predecessors who approved the installation of the panes, a gift from the Daughters of the Confederacy, Hall said that it had been “hoped [the imagery] would foster reconciliation between parts of the nation that had been divided by the Civil War. Because this Cathedral is the ‘national’ cathedral, it sought to depict America’s history in a way that promoted healing and reconciliation.”
But six decades have passed since then, Hall noted, so “it is time to take those windows out….We know that celebrating the lives of these two men, and the flag under which they fought, promotes neither healing nor reconciliation, especially for our African-American sisters and brothers.”
The decision to delete the window was made, he continued, “in the aftermath of a year of racial tensions and violence – from killings of unarmed black men by police to the shootings of nine members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.”
Those events, Hall said, prove that “the Confederate battle flag has emerged as the primary symbol of a culture of white supremacy that we and all Americans of good will must repudiate.”
Putting it even more directly, he added, “There is no place for the Confederate battle flag in the iconography of the nation’s most visible faith community. We cannot in good conscience justify the presence of the Confederate flag in this house of prayer for all people, nor can we honor the systematic oppression of African-Americans for which these two men [Lee and Jackson] fought and died.”
But the alteration wouldn’t happen overnight, Hall explained last year, “because changing windows in a Gothic building takes time, energy and money.”
Last week, the interim dean of the Cathedral, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, told The New York Times that the glass images will be taken out “as soon as we can do it.”
What will replace them has not yet been announced, but the church still has plenty of flags. Its nave contains a display of state flags.
Regrettably the creator of the beautiful stained glass windows chose to use the CSA battle flag in that panel instead of the First National flag of the Confederacy that was used in other windows. I am offended as both an Episcopalian and an American that we are rewriting (or in this case, erasing) history because something is deemed offensive. It seems that “we the people” should expand our horizons by admitting and learning from our mistakes, educate others so that similar errors are not repeated and strive to reach a reasonable compromise.