Rewriting History and Reclaiming Truth

The truth does set you free.

Note: I am rehosting some of my “greatest hits” - at least they’re my favorites! - from other sites, and I hope you enjoy them!

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August 8, 2021

I was troubled this past July 4th as I sat down to write a commemoration on Facebook for our nation’s 245th Independence Day. After the 15-18 months of world-changing events we had endured, and the ongoing rage in so many people over so many things, I just didn’t feel a sense of celebration.

I thought about reposting one of my old Independence Day messages based on John Adams’ positive prediction that, one day, our nation would celebrate its independence annually with “solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty” and “Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

He declared in his letter to his beloved wife, Abigail, that “Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory.” Such beautiful words and so filled with hope! But on July 4, 2021, I wasn’t feeling it. I decided to write precisely that, and I started to type. Then the words just came out.

The overwhelmingly positive response to what I wrote took me by surprise. I found I had been able to put into words sentiments that a lot of people were feeling, and the compliments and the number of shares for my post were affirming. It motivated me to expand on my thoughts somewhat and to ponder history - how it’s recorded and who records it, how it’s perceived through different lenses, and how it overwhelms cold data and reason in practically any debate. I also pondered my own personal history, particularly my genealogy, and how history, fully told, changed me profoundly and permanently, even at my advanced age.

Because of history’s persuasive power, which I have experienced firsthand, I think I understand why so many people object to a full and accurate account of American history. It is more divisive, however, for a nation to live under a lie than to let the truth have its day and allow God to redeem us through it.

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Let me start by saying I’ve always had a love of history. The “epic tale of great and flawed people” captures my imagination and transports me to the times and places about which I read, and into the presence of the people of whom the authors write. I am particularly attracted to the history of great wars, which portray humankind at its worst, but also at its noblest and best.

As a child, however, I was unwittingly naive about written accounts in general and history in particular. I used to believe that the written word, especially if someone took the time and effort to publish their work in a book, periodical, or newspaper, was sacrosanct. I was a voracious reader as a child, and my parents recall that I used to read encyclopedias and fairytale compilations with equal vigor and at a very young age. I understood at the time that the Encyclopedia Brittanica was a recitation of facts and Grimm’s Fairy Tales a collection of fantastic stories, but that is because neither presented itself as anything other than what it was. While I thought I knew the difference between fact and fantasy, I learned a little later in life that if fantasy was packaged and presented as fact, I could be easily deceived.

When I discovered a stash of supermarket tabloids in our house as a teenager, I sat in my room and read through them with rapt attention to the knowledge that had been hidden from me by conventional sources of news and information. Though I eventually realized what tabloids truly are, even today I confess my attention is drawn to stories in the mainstream press about ghosts, monsters, and UFOs! My tendency to give credence to the written word, regardless of its veracity, led me in the wrong direction when it came to history.

On top of that, my reverence for history was so great that I once considered it one of the incorruptible academic disciplines. After all, history is an account of events that have already happened and which everyone witnessed, so I thought it was impossible for people to deny the evidence of their own senses, particularly when the event was observed and recorded by multiple people. Age and hard-earned wisdom have taught me that history, like so many things that man touches, is just as susceptible to distortion, deflection, and disinformation as any other topic.

So my devotion to the written word and history led me to believe things about my nation and the world that are simply untrue. It took me a long time to reach that conclusion, and I didn’t arrive at it all at once, but through a series of life decisions and episodes that caused the scales to fall from my eyes.

Becoming an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force allowed me to apply my love of public affairs and history and my appetite for information in one profession. It was as an intelligence officer, however, that God began to chip away at my uncritical adulation of history and my trust in what I read.

I spent nearly the first decade of my professional life providing analyzed and finished intelligence to decision-makers who were responsible for defending the nation, and it was impressed upon me from the first day of training that the accuracy of the information I provided could mean the difference between life and death for our troops or the people we were defending. An intelligence failure could cost lives, liberty, or property, and I didn’t want that on my conscience, so I worked diligently to ensure that my analyses and presentations of information to my commanding officers were as accurate as possible.

The intelligence profession is also where I learned about disinformation. America’s primary enemy during my time in service was the Soviet Union, and the Russians throughout history were so adept at lying for strategic and tactical advantage that the English word disinformation was derived from the Russian word dezinformatsiya. As current events have shown us, they continue to be masters of their craft, with technology giving them greater reach than ever before. As a result, I had to be particularly attentive to disinformation, and I required corroboration from multiple sources to assess the legitimacy of anything I read.

I have tried to bring my experience and expertise as an intelligence officer into my other professional pursuits. After the Air Force, I became an information technology systems architect and program/project manager, and my customers, whether they were military or civilian, depended on accurate information to conduct their missions, and my company relied on me to deliver what the customers needed so they could retain contracts and earn additional work.

As a federal chief information officer at FEMA and a senior IT executive at the Department of Homeland Security, my work once again took on life-or-death implications, and my e-government work with the Small Business Administration required the same integrity of information to serve the businesses which drive our nation’s economy.

As an educator, I try to impress on my students the need to verify their research sources, methods, and content to arrive at sound and defensible conclusions. Good scholarship is derived from knowing how to research, verify, analyze, synthesize, and present information with clarity and integrity.

While my professional training and experience gave me the knowledge and the tools to discern truth, it is my Christian faith to which I recommitted myself after I left the Air Force that drives my passion for truth. Jesus describes Himself as “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). When Jesus was being interrogated by Pilate, He established truth as central to His purpose:

“Then You are a king!” Pilate said. “You say that I am a king,” Jesus answered. “For this reason I was born and have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to My voice” (John 18:37).

I returned to the church after over a decade of separation because when I decided to search diligently for the truth, I concluded that Jesus’ resurrection was true and that Jesus is truth personified. The truth matters to the Lord, and the Lord is truth, so the truth matters deeply to me.

However, I have learned over the years that the truth is rarely apparent to those whose pride leads them to conclude they know all they need to know. Author and Bible teacher Chuck Missler said, “The only barrier to truth is the presumption that you already have it.” In fact, it was pride that caused me to walk away from the church in my 20s. There were a number of excuses I gave for leaving the church, but the main one was that I thought there was nothing more they could teach me, and I saw no value in assembling together on Sundays beyond that.

For much of my adult life, I lacked the humility necessary to question my own assumptions about the world. Life had gone very smoothly for me for the most part, and that led me to conclude that my experiences constituted truth, and others just needed to do as I did. Even after recommitting my life to Christ, my pride still blinded me to so many things about the world and the people in it. I didn’t know what God had in store for me, but He allowed circumstances to break me down so I could be built back up into a humble, gracious, & grateful servant for His Kingdom. What makes me shake my head in wondrous puzzlement is that, in order to change me forever, He brought me to a place where my old notions of how things ought to be are widely embraced.

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When I came to Liberty University and Lynchburg Virginia in August 2011, I was uncertain about what was going to happen in this new phase of my life. The only thing I was certain of was that I was in a place that shared my political and cultural worldview. After all, it was the book I wrote describing my life and my views as a black conservative that secured for me a visit to the Liberty University bookstore for a book signing. It was during that trip that I met my future boss and he asked me to apply for an associate dean position he was looking to fill.

I’ve written previously about how God allowed me to be broken physically, mentally, and emotionally so that I could be rebuilt spiritually, so I won’t rehash all of that here. Those experiences, however, brought me to a place where I could empathize with the trials of others and therefore understand more clearly what they were going through. It was then that I started to question a lot of what I had accepted as truth, and those questions, born from a place of humility, led me to do research that profoundly changed my life and my calling.

As a black conservative, I found that my fellow white conservatives often sought out my views on race and public policy, and I would use my own life as an illustration of what I believed. Essentially, I believed in the American story of opportunity and achievement through hard work and integrity, and that racism was an obstacle to be overcome, not an insurmountable barrier to success. As the Lord humbled me in my advanced age, however, I began to look at my accomplishments in a different light. In a previous article, I described how multigenerational trauma had wreaked havoc on the black community, and how I managed to escape it:

Some of us, like me, escaped the damage because of decisions over which I had no influence whatsoever. I had nothing to do with my father joining the U.S. Air Force and making a career of it, ensuring himself a stable income in a safe environment where success is, mostly, determined by merit. I had nothing to do with him meeting and marrying my mother and staying with her for nearly 59 years. I had nothing to do with the safe schools and neighborhoods in which I grew up, the travel which allowed me to experience the world in all its diversity and beauty, or the relocation which allowed me to get an affordable college education and secure steady, reliable work before marrying and having a family.

Some would say I “earned” my relative success because I worked hard and played by the rules, but that’s because these behaviors were modeled for me and I lived in an environment where I saw that they worked. Far too many young black men and women have had neither the role models nor the living conditions to cultivate success.

Once I concluded that the circumstances of my upbringing were exceptional and never under my control, I decided to take a deeper look at the history of black people in America to gain a greater understanding of its impact on the present day. As I wrote in the same article I referenced previously:

Of course, I knew the general story about slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and institutionalized discrimination, and the victories of the 1960s civil rights movement, but it was a largely sanitized story, and the horrors lurking under the clinical accounts of history would break your heart – or, at least, they should.

What I learned from my own research left me stunned, saddened, and, at times, angry. My perspective on American history has changed as I’ve learned more over the years on my own than I was ever taught in school. Setting aside the true horrors of slavery, such as the beatings, rapes, forced separation of families, and essentially being treated like livestock rather than human beings, there are so many stories that have never been told.

I Iearned about The Tulsa massacre, the Red Summer of 1919, whole black communities like Rosewood, Florida eradicated and erased from existence due to white rage, the domestic terror of lynchings, characterized by extended torture and dismemberment before death, the distribution of body parts as souvenirs, and photographs of the murderers posing with the bodies as if after a successful hunt, medical experimentation without anesthesia or consent - so much evil! I now know how much horror was hidden from us, whether by omission or commission, and I understand the present-day consequences of centuries of unmitigated ferocity by white people toward the aspirations of black people to be regarded as equal under the law as they are in the sight of God.

I also realized that the same mindset and condition of the heart that drove that ferocity existed in my lifetime and in millions of people who are still alive today and potentially infected their offspring with the same hateful virus.

As the famed novelist William Faulkner wrote of his beloved South, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” There is an irony in those who tell black people to get over the past while millions of them still celebrate the mythical “Lost Cause” and are fighting to this very day to retain the statues and iconography of a failed insurrectionist nation. Whenever I hear or read that we should let the past be past, my inner voice retorts, “You first.”

Actor Tom Hanks put it very well:

Should our schools now teach the truth about Tulsa? Yes, and they should also stop the battle to whitewash curriculums to avoid discomfort for students. America’s history is messy but knowing that makes us a wiser and stronger people.

The anger you are witnessing across America, supposedly over critical race theory, which no one is teaching in elementary and secondary schools in the first place, is in reality directed at any narrative that would show what lies underneath the veneer of history we were taught in school. I believe that anger is motivated by the fear that, should their children know the whole truth about American history, they would be changed. And they are right. I know this for a fact because it changed me. Contrary to the popular narrative, however, it didn’t lead me to hate America.

My love for my country hasn’t wavered in the light of these revelations. This is where I was born; it is my home, and it is where God intends for me to be. Even with all the evil I’ve learned of over the years, I’ve also read stories of great sacrifice as millions of people invested tears, sweat, and blood in compelling America to fully realize its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

I cannot read those words without feeling a deep affection for what America aspires to be, and for those who’ve devoted themselves to making it so. Healing cannot begin in an individual’s life until the traumas of their past are exposed and addressed, including those inflicted by others and for which neither they nor people in the present day hold responsibility. Likewise, our nation won’t heal if it’s not willing to be honest about the past and responsible for designing a better present and future. It’s not about blame or guilt or shame, at least not to me. If people feel that way when they hear these stories, perhaps that’s the Imago Dei within them spurring them to do something to make it right rather than engaging in a pity party or an angry response.

One way in which I’m able to embrace the conflict between my outrage over the darker narratives of American history and my deep and abiding love of my country is to recognize that my own family history is a microcosm of that conflict. My third-great grandfather was a white farmer and slaveowner and a philanderer who married and divorced at least once before taking up with one of his slaves, a mixed-race woman named Augustine Gradeni or Gradenigo, my third-great grandmother, and bearing nine children with her, including my 2nd-great grandmother, Clementine. Clementine married twice; her first husband died and her remarriage to a black farmer, Francois Toussaint, caused most of the family to disown her. It was this union that produced my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother.

On my father’s side, all evidence points to my third great-grandfather and grandmother, Fred Miller and Lucy Ann Mathews, being the product of rape, as they were the offspring of their respective slaveowners who all lived in the Macon-Fort Valley area of Georgia.

In short, my veins course with the blood of the oppressed and the oppressor. If I am capable of reconciling and moving forward with that inner duality by the grace of God, then so can our nation, with God’s grace and redemption, move forward.

My life’s work, going forward, is to be a voice for diversity under the banner of unity through Christ. If the church can set an example for the world of what it looks like to celebrate diversity, which is God’s creation, and be one in spirit and truth through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, meant for all of us without exception, not only could we heal division, but also create opportunities to share the Gospel and make disciples.

Don’t presume this task will be easy; the church is complicit in a lot of the atrocities perpetrated on black people throughout history. When the church should have spoken out in the name of justice, mercy, and righteousness, too often it remained silent or provided spiritual cover for those determined to maintain white supremacy. The modern church portrays itself as a bulwark against unrighteousness, yet struggles with questions about racism and sexism as revelation after revelation of misconduct reveals an institution whose house is not in order. Jesus himself warned us of this phenomenon in his first recorded sermon:

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is a log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. ~ Matthew 7:1-5

When it comes to history, my admonition is to let the truth be told. Jesus said, “Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The context of this verse is that we are all slaves to sin, and only in humility and repentance can Jesus do His work on us and set us free. I don’t fear history because the God who orchestrated it promises to redeem it someday, and He has yet to break His promise.