Erasing Uncomfortable History

The Bible tells stories that make people uncomfortable because they portray “heroes of the faith” like King David in a bad light.

Like many other pastors, I usually preach from the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year list of scriptures that forces preachers to visit passages we might otherwise ignore, so we’re not just preaching our favorite stories and ignoring the rest of the Bible.

About a month ago, the lectionary gave us 2 Samuel 5:1-5 and 9-10. Verses 1-5 were about David being proclaimed king, and verses 9-10 were about David making Jerusalem his capital city and growing in strength because God was with him.

I was immediately curious what was in the three missing verses. Verses 6-8 were about the natives of the land, the Jebusites, saying the city of Jerusalem was so strong that people with disabilities could defend it, and David saying some mean things about people with disabilities, and then conquering the city.

I can understand why that part was left out. That’s not something you can say today. But we lose something important when we leave it out. We lose the human sinfulness of this “hero of the faith.” We lose the opportunity to think critically about David, to reflect on whether it was right for him to go take a city that didn’t belong to him, and to (presumably) kill those who lived there, for no reason other than he wanted to make it his capital city.

Many people in this country want to similarly remove stories from our history books that make them uncomfortable, and replace them with stories that make America look better. Many southern history textbooks try to gloss over the cause for the civil war by pretending it was about “states’ rights” and not slavery. In Florida, schools are required to teach “how slaves (sic) developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

In my own K-12 education, I didn’t learn much about the genocide of Native Americans, countless broken treaties, or anything about forced boarding schools for native children, but I learned a lot about Squanto and Sacajawea. Founding Fathers were revered, and their enslavement of people rarely mentioned. Nazi death camps were highlighted as awful and Americans as saviors, but American concentration camps for Japanese-Americans were given very little coverage, and none in my history textbooks.

Scripture is inspired by God, and God was involved in the process in which humans decided which stories were going to be in Scripture, and the editing process of those stories. Modern compilers of the lectionary removed the story of David and his men doing things that rightly set off our modern moral alarm bells, but the Bible did not.

If the divinely-inspired human writers of Scripture included parts of their national story that made their heroes look bad, and it could be profitable (2 Timothy 3:16), surely America can leave in parts of our history that make our national forefathers look bad.

This article by Rev. David Schell originally appeared in the Herald-Palladium on July 27, 2024.