We can’t undo the past. But we can repeat the past. Indeed, we do repeat it – until we take the hard look back and make the courageous changes needed to redeem the past.

We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church shows how the unresolved past still fetters our nation, our churches, our families, us. It urges us not to reenact, but instead to redeem.

NOTE: The Kindle version, now reformatted, contains a few corrections and updates, including a new Author’s Note and an updated author bio. I also changed the language in a few places to clarify that the sexual issues addressed in this book are not “sexual immorality,” but rather sexual abuse by people in power. Otherwise, this is my cry as I originally sounded it.

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Redeeming the past

More than 150 years after the American Civil War, We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church takes readers into a past still being re-enacted in the US Evangelical church.

We Confess probes the history of the white church culture in the 19th^_century Deep South, and especially the denomination identified most closely with the region, the Southern Baptist Convention.

We Confess explores the stunning choices made by the churched, from the settling of the region, through secession and Civil War, and then through Reconstruction and reassertion of “white rule.” It confesses the disturbing reasons behind these choices, as well as the tragic results. In all this, it exposes what remains undealt-with and still unresolved.

We Confess:

• Calls the white US church rooted in the Bible Belt to see what we haven’t wanted to see – ways we’ve dehumanized whole groups of people, sabotaged ourselves and misrepresented Christ.
• Urges all who call Jesus Lord to recognize when we’re pursuing a false identity and excusing a divided heart.
• Suggests God-honoring first steps toward wholeness, blessing and reconciliation: for those willing to face the church’s current issues and their root causes; those willing to begin by examining themselves.