John Wycliffe Begins Translation of the Scriptures into English, 1382

2024-01-15T14:54:45-06:00January 15, 2024|HH 2024|

John Wycliffe Begins Translation of the Scriptures into English, January 16, 1382

An Oxford Don possessing great academic prowess and enjoying the perks of royal patronage—the “Morning Star of the Reformation”, as he became known—was an unlikely figure of subversion, and his weapon was none other than the Word of God. It is perhaps testament to both Wycliffe’s doctrinal triumph and his own personal humility that the movement his arguments and translation produced loomed large over his own reputation and fame.


John Wycliffe (c. 1328-1384)

As a new decade dawned in the latter half of the 14th century, worldly prospects were bleak. The Black Death had decimated nearly a third of the world’s population and the Western church was torn apart by the Great Schism with multiple popes laying claim to Saint Peter’s Chair.


A page from the Ellesmere Manuscript edition (c. 1410) of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with a portrait of Chaucer in the page embellishments

John Wycliffe’s own native England had long been consumed with the bloody Hundred Years War against France. The cost of this conflict left England drained of resources and moral surety, governed by a child King whose uncle acted as Regent. So while Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales in an effort to reignite some spark of the old chivalry, and Dante imagined his nine circles of hell, John Wycliffe became convinced the anecdote to the despair and collapse all around him was reliance upon the Divine promises of God. Yet how was the Word to be a universal comfort—much less used as a foundation for living—when the general populace and their preachers had no intimate contact with it? Except for the few and privileged, men educated fluently in Greek, Latin or Hebrew and positioned in places such as Oxford where the venerable text was housed, few in that generation had ever seen a copy of the entire canon.


A map of the nine levels of Hell, as imagined by Dante in his Inferno


The beginning of the Gospel of John in a copy of John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible, from a pocket-sized copy which was made in the late 14th Century

While there is much contention regarding what extent of the now eponymous Wycliffe Bible was translated by the man himself or by his students and fellow Lollards, his endeavors brought forth the first complete Bible to be written into middle English, predating William Tyndale’s own extraordinary translation by over one hundred and forty years. Drawn from Jerome’s Vulgate translation, Wycliffe’s Old and New Testaments were completed two years after the project began, although further updated versions were done by Wycliffe’s assistant John Purvey and others in 1388 and 1395, after Wycliffe’s death.


1 John 5 from the 9th Century Vulgate

By that time, and despite being too early to employ the prolific distribution by printing press that Tyndale’s Bible had profited from, these hand-written testaments were spread widely throughout England and eventually Europe.


The opening page to the Gospel of John in a 1526 edition of William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible—cleanly mass-produced with the help of the printing press

The established church was infuriated by these Bibles, and felt threatened by the doctrine their common language suggested. In Wycliffe’s own words the Bible taught:

“Neither place nor human election makes a person a member of the church but divine predestination in respect of whoever with perseverance follows Christ in love . . . Go and preach, it is the sublimest work; but imitate not the priests whom we see after the sermon sitting in the ale-house, or at the gaming table . . . After your sermon is ended, visit the sick, the aged, the poor, the blind and the lame and succour them.”


Wycliffe Giving ‘The Poor Priests’ His Translation of the Bible, by artist William Frederick Yeames (1835-1918)

Wycliffe followed these translations with sharp polemics, calling for the renouncing of sin, reliance solely on Christ for salvation, condemnation for the superstition of transubstantiation and immorality of the clergy, and his denial of the Pope’s authority. All of these later became indisputable tenants of the Reformation of the 15th and 16th centuries. Wycliffe’s readers agreed and, driven by the holy zeal of the freshly-awakened, spread what they insisted were not new doctrines but ancient ones—those assurances of Saint Paul and the reasonings of Saint Augustine that had been too long buried under pomp and ignorance.

For more than a hundred years, the bishops harried these Christians out of their parishes, seized their fragments of manuscript Bibles, attempted to force them to recant, forfeited their property and burned many of them at the stake. Wycliffe himself was allowed a peaceful death, despite severe harassment in his lifetime. But his grave was given no such clemency.


The Trial of Wycliffe A.D. 1377, by Ford Madox Brown, a mural at Manchester Town Hall

In 1415, more than thirty years after his death, the Council of Constance formally condemned the forty-five “errors” of Wycliffe, decreeing that all his works were to be burned along with his bones. To quote the eloquent words of a seventeenth-century writer:

“They burned his bones to ashes and cast them into the Swift, a neighbouring brook running hard by. Thus the brook conveyed his ashes into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the narrow seas and they into the main ocean. And so the ashes of Wycliffe are symbolic of his doctrine, which is now spread throughout the world.”


Exhumation of John Wycliffe, from The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, vol. 3, 1837 edition

Unearthing those figures who lit a torch during the “dark ages” is one of the most fascinating and hopeful areas of Reformed study. And while in no way discounting the impact of giants such as Luther, Calvin and Knox, it is emboldening to learn of those who, like Wycliffe and Hus, did not enjoy having the popular tide of opinion on their side but were drawn to the truth centuries before those rewarding days of the Reformation. Their sacrifices, translations and guardianship of the Gospel is indeed our precious inheritance to maintain and defend.


Detail of the Luther Memorial below, portraying John Wycliffe seated at the back right corner of Luther’s pillar, from the viewer’s perspective


Martin Luther Memorial (Lutherdenkmal) in Worms, Germany: Luther’s central statue is surrounded by the figures of his lay protectors and earlier Church reformers including John Wycliffe

Queen Wilhelmina Sentences a Traitor, 1948

2024-01-15T17:47:13-06:00January 8, 2024|HH 2024|

Queen Wilhelmina Sentences a Traitor,
January 8, 1948

On January 8, 1948, having been condemned to death for treason against her country, Madame Anna “Ans” van Dijk made a final appeal for clemency to her sovereign, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. A more distinct paradox could hardly be conjured than the wartime disloyalty of the supplicant and the unflinching duty displayed on the part of the Monarch in the recent conflict. However, not a single female Dutch collaborator had been executed as yet, despite many being sentenced to incarceration for up to twenty years for their complicit activity. Upon reviewing the case, Queen Wilhelmina found, just as the courts of her nation had, that Ans van Dijk was guilty of treason and responsible for the deaths of up to 700 Jews and members of the Dutch resistance—including those who had once protected her own Jewish heritage by offering up their homes and their lives to hide her identity. How did it come about that a Jewish woman of well-to-do origins became one of the Gestapo’s leading “Jew Hunters” in Holland during World War II? And by eventual justice the only Dutch woman to be held fully responsible for her crimes?


Ans van Dijk (1905-1948) standing trial in Amsterdam, February 24, 1947

For much of the 1930s, Queen Wilhelmina—who had steered her country through many events including the Boer War and Holland’s tenuous neutrality during World War I—had desperately tried to rouse her ministers to brace for a brewing storm of Nazism in their neighbor Germany and amongst their own populace.


Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1880-1962)

A proud descendent of Protestant heroes such as William the Silent and William of Orange, Queen Wilhelmina was an ardent student of history, ambitious to be foremost in the line of duty and disparaging of all false optimism in regards to Adolf Hitler’s plans for empire. Unfortunately, she was almost alone in this foresight. She wrote: “by the spring of 1938 when Hitler invaded Austria, it was plain to me that German policy would result in a European catastrophe,” but to her despair, the Dutch people and their ministers were “quietly asleep on a pillow called neutrality… Shortly before the war it was necessary for me to point out that our soon-to-be enemy had written a book (Mein Kampf), and that it might be of some use to examine its contents.”


King Williem III (1817-1890) and Queen Emma (1858-1934) of the Netherlands—Queen Wilhelmina was their only child


10th anniversary meeting of the NSB (Dutch national socialist party), 1941

By 1939 Hitler had invaded Poland and caused complete devastation there. Terror fell from the skies on Norway next, in the form of the Luftwaffe’s legendary blitzkrieg. Holland had little time, resources or tactics to deploy before she was under attack along with Belgium and France. Their invaders dropped by the thousands, parachuting into fields carpeted with tulips, overtaking the peaceful streets of Holland. Other than a brief uprising in 1830, the Dutch had been at peace for 125 years. Upon finding themselves suddenly occupied by a ruthless and seasoned enemy, their defenses broke speedily. The German forces quickly seized all vital motorways, government buildings and, after a brief struggle, practically obliterated the Dutch Air Force. Nearly unhindered, they now advanced towards The Hague to carry out their Führer’s explicit order to take Queen Wilhelmina and her family alive. Previous broadcasts made by the Führer to the Dutch royals—appealing shared Aryan blood and other imagined commonalities—had all been derisively ignored. Determined not to be caught alive, Queen Wilhelmina first called the King of England to personally beg for reinforcements. When informed that he had already sent Belgium all he could spare, she readied her family and fled for England.


SS recruiting poster urging Dutch people to join the fight against Bolshevism


A man climbs over a barbed-wire barrier which separates the significant Jewish district of Amsterdam from the rest of the city

Well aware that her abandonment of the country would be devastating for the morale of her people, Queen Wilhelmina arrived in London determined to return a conqueror. She set up headquarters in the bomb-pitted shells of Piccadilly Square, and from there refused to budge, hosting noteworthy exiles such as Charles De Gaulle and the president of Poland, conspiring with them to create an effective league providing supplies and leadership to the resistance cells already forming back home. Such staunch resistors were indeed forming en masse, and while the disorganized initial attempts often led to cruel discovery, eventually a substantial network sprang up in Holland, the tales of which are now notorious and include such heroes as Corrie Ten Boom.


Dutch resistance fighters in Winterswijk, Netherlands, 1941

Using the same “slow boil” method that had crushed Poland, German laws were soon placed on Holland’s economy, religion and most significantly their Jewish population. All detractors were singled out and forced under greater and greater oppression until they were eventually sought out and executed. Ans van Dijk was one of these Dutch Jews discriminated against by the new laws. The milliner shop she ran in Amsterdam along with her female partner was forcibly closed, and as restrictions soon escalated, she found herself depending on resistance members for hiding places to escape discovery and subsequent deportation to the murder camps.


Massive canvassing with the National Socialist (NSB) weekly magazine Volk en Vaderland in Amsterdam by officials, with the slogan: “Our nationalism your salvation, our socialism your future”—the NSB carried out the campaign “The Battle for Amsterdam” for three months, from March to June of 1944

Despite this, Ans van Dijk was caught and arrested in 1943 by Nazi intelligence detective Peter Schaap, of the Office of Jewish Affairs of the Amsterdam police. As per her testimony after the war, she was released after promising to collaborate with the Nazis by infiltrating the same resistance groups that had protected her. Returning to these patriot groups she pretended interest in taking a more active role in the resistance, and so began providing safe houses herself for Jewish refugees, who she would then inevitably betray to her overlords. One hundred and forty-three Jews were sent to their deaths in this manner, including her own brother and his family. She herself was paid handsomely for each innocent man, woman and child she betrayed. It is speculated that amongst her victims were Anne Frank and her relations. Soon, as the war grew more dire, any resistance member who suspected or troubled her was summarily dealt with.


Kamp Schoorl in the Netherlands, photographed sometime between 1940-45

Eventually Holland was retaken, liberated by her Allies. A wave of fury swept the country then as the hunted now became the hunters, ferreting out any who had aided the late savage and vile regime. And worse yet, any who had fed it by craven acts of self protection such as Ans van Dijk.


Members of the NSB (Dutch national socialist party), also called “collaborators”, are rounded up and humiliated (some by having their heads shaved) in 1945 Netherlands

Found living in the Hague on her earned blood money, she was arrested and imprisoned until her trial in 1947 where even her erstwhile Nazi commanders spoke highly of her eagerness to cooperate, defeating her pleas of working under duress. In a court of Dutchmen who had recently lost so many and sacrificed so much under duress themselves, the motive of self preservation was rightfully interpreted as the vice it was: cowardice. She was condemned as a traitor. Ans van Dijk’s last hope was to appeal to Queen Wilhelmina for clemency, but if the traitor thought a comparison could be made or a sympathetic ear reached there, she was gravely disappointed.


Queen Wilhelmina addresses the American Congress in Washington DC, on August 6, 1942

From the day Queen Wilhelmina had fled to England, she took to the BBC to broadcast fiery, achingly human, and most of all, rousing encouragement to her occupied subjects. As Winston Churchill once quipped of her “I fear no man except Queen Wilhelmina.” The mood of her country that had once held animosity for her abandonment soon considered her the exiled light of hope keeping them spurred on and connected to a free and committed outside world. She returned to Holland with a tiny retinue comprising only her daughter and three others before her nation had even been completely liberated. Such devotion and ferocity displayed by their once regal queen of the old order earned her the same respect, loyalty and status amongst her countrymen that had been given her glorious ancestors.

In one of her last acts as Queen, she sentenced Ans van Dijk to death by firing squad—a martial, just and brutal message against those who would embrace pragmatism over love of honor, duty and sacrifice.


Queen Wilhelmina in 1942

Samuel Pepys’ First Diary Entry, 1660

2024-01-01T16:10:16-06:00January 1, 2024|HH 2024|

“Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain… I lived in Axe Yard, having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three.”—Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys’ First Diary Entry, January 1, 1660

With this inauspicious summary of the state of things, so began the diary of Samuel Pepys who would, in an astounding twist of providence, prove our greatest contemporary source regarding such impactful events as the Great Fire and Plague of London, the restored court of the Stuart Dynasty, The Anglo-Dutch war and the social aspect of post-Reformation England. For six years Mr. Pepys would chronicle in coded shorthand the various machinations of the English court that he was privy to as a chief Naval Officer. He candidly commentated upon theater and culture, on social catastrophes, on military might and personal infidelities.


A facsimile of a portion of the first entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary


Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)

If it were not for a neglected spark in the kitchen of the King’s Baker on the night of September 1, 1666 that spread into an inferno from Pudding Lane to engulf an eventual four fifths of London, Samuel Pepys’ diary may have sunk into obscurity, his previous recounting condemned as humdrum. It was not enough to have survived the Great Plague the previous year—Providence now chose to put Pepys in a peculiar position to witness and record one of the most devastating disasters in western history.


Plague-stricken London in 1665 showing a cart for gathering bodies

On the early morning of September 2, 1666, Pepys was awakened in his London home by a servant who had spotted the fire in the distance, warning that 300 homes had already been lost and it was feared London Bridge might be destroyed. Pepys rushed to the Tower of London to gain a better vantage point over the destruction which he might then report to the King at Westminster. From this view he wrote his eyewitness report in his diary:


Map of central London in 1666, showing landmarks related to the Great Fire of London, including Samuel Pepys’ home (just left of the Tower of London)

“Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. Having staid, and in an hour’s time seen the fire: rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire, and having seen it get as far as the Steele-yard, and the wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, and among other things the poor steeple by which pretty Mrs.——– lives, and whereof my old school-fellow Elborough is parson, taken fire in the very top, an there burned till it fell down.”


London burns in the background while people flee in boats to safety

It was upon Pepys’ advice that King Charles II issued the order for houses to be leveled in an attempt to create a firewall. The very next day Samuel Pepys himself abandoned London and all his belongings, seeking safety in the countryside. Upon his return to the city days later, the sight of his capitol so destroyed “caused me to weep.”


The London Gazette reports on the Great Fire of London on the morning of September 8, 1666

13,000 houses had been razed, St Paul’s Cathedral and many other landmarks destroyed, an estimated 100,000 people left homeless. Amongst such destruction Pepys found his own house untouched by the flames, and in it, his invaluable diary.


A six-volume edition of Pepys’ diary manuscript

London was soon rebuilt, its churches restored with loving care that made it the glory of its time, its modernized streets broadened and fireproofed by brick and stone, creating the iconic metropolis we all now know and love. Samuel Pepys abandoned his journaling in the year 1669 out of fear of permanently losing his eyesight. He personally bequeathed the beautifully bound record to Magdalen College, Cambridge, which had been his alma mater, and there it was promptly shelved and neglected for generations. Not until the early nineteenth century did a curious young student pull it from its nook, decipher its multi-language code and uncover in it a vast and priceless historical first-hand account of many events which served as turning points for the 17th century.


The Pepys Library in Magdalene College, Cambridge houses the diaries of Samuel Pepys along with his other books

The Christmas Truce, 1914

2024-01-01T15:53:24-06:00January 1, 2024|HH 2023, HH 2024|

“And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”—Isaiah 2:4

The Christmas Truce, December 25, 1914

 

Entering 2024, we will soon mark the 110th anniversary of the commencement of the First World War—“the war to end all wars”. In 1914 the nations of Europe collectively produced the greatest human catastrophe in the history of Western Civilization, the causes of which are still debated to this day. In four years of war, about eleven million men died on the battlefield and twenty million were wounded, many of whom later died of wounds. More than seven million civilians died in the war. Improved machine gun and artillery technology created battlefields in which killing proceeded on an industrial scale. The bereavement and sorrow that accompanied this unnecessary tragedy still resonates today, especially in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada.


British and German troops meet in no-man’s-land during the unofficial truce


The Christmas Truce on the Western Front, 1914

The repercussions of the war among “intellectuals” and purveyors of cultural mores in Europe, reflected in their art and philosophies a wholesale abandonment of biblical ethics, moral restraints, and hope in the future. An unrestrained moral turpitude and relativism, born in the evolutionary theories of the previous century, reached their climax in the post-war era. They quickly sifted down to popular culture and produced equally unrestrained offshoots of reaction and nationalistic paganisms represented in the Fascists of Italy and Nazis of Germany, not to speak of the revolutionary excesses of the Bolsheviks in Russia. In modern parlance, The First World War was the tipping point of world-wide change, and not for the better.

On December 25, 1914, with the British and German troops facing each other in their respective trenches across the frozen wastes of no-man’s-land—over which both sides had already shed much blood—a remarkable phenomenon occurred about which entire books have been written. Almost spontaneously, men on both sides began singing Christmas carols. Men so determined the day before to exterminate each other, probably for the last time in all of their lives, commemorated the birth of Christ in music. On the German side, men wore belt buckles stamped “Gott mit uns” (God with us), believing that they were on the side of right. On the English side, numbers of men came from Christian homes, and remembered the carols of safe and warm family celebrations where they sang hymns composed by German and English writers.

Unbelievably, several men climbed out of the trenches with hands up, from both sides, and met in no-man’s-land. Someone kicked out a soccer ball and they formed teams and played. Others exchanged souvenirs and talked about home and families. A few years ago, Sainsbury’s grocery chain in England memorialized that famous Christmas truce with this ad:

When the generals heard about the fraternization with the enemy going on all along the entrenchments, they called a halt to it and ordered the war to resume. Some believe up to a hundred thousand men participated in the informal truce of Christmas 1914.

In the early months of the war, the two sides sometimes agreed to bury bodies, otherwise irretrievably lying between the lines. This event was different—widespread and visually stunning, many men wrote home about it, from both sides. The Christmas truce provided a small shred of humanity in a war that would abandon any pretense of it in the coming years. Not only did that war not end wars, it provided the reason and impetus for a bigger and more destructive one twenty-one years later.


British and German soldiers play a soccer game during the truce


An artist’s impression of the truce from The Illustrated London News

Man has sought to find a solution to war through institutions like the League of Nations and the United Nations, treaties, policies like “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD), and legislation. No attempts at eradicating the sins of men and nations nor ending their never-ending pursuit of war through government action can or will succeed without the true salvation and peace of Christ in the hearts of leaders and people. God promises that He will bring about His peace in history future when His kingdom shall extend from shore to shore around the world. All Christians should pray to that end; every other kind of peaceful resolution is just another Christmas truce.

Removal of the Reconciliation Monument at Arlington, 2023

2023-12-19T19:45:06-06:00December 19, 2023|HH 2023|

While Michael Cassidy is being prosecuted for tearing down an alter to Satan in the Iowa Statehouse last week, the Federal Government began its destruction of the Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Monument—a symbol of reconciliation and unity for well over 100 years. Yesterday a judge’s order halted the destruction pending a hearing tomorrow morning so it stands for at least another day. We asked Mr. Potter to help us understand what the memorial is and why it is important. Know your history, know your Bible. Join Bill Thursday at 7pm CST on a FREE Zoom call: Historiography and the Christian Historian.


Kevin Turley and Bill Potter at Confederate Memorial

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” —Prov. 29:2

—Kevin Turley, Landmark Events

Removal of the Reconciliation Monument at Arlington, 2023

The year was 1898; war with Spain loomed on the horizon. William McKinley, the last Union Civil War veteran elected to the presidency, realized the psychological and social wounds of the Civil War, which had ended thirty-three years earlier, still festered in some parts of the nation, especially the South. His predecessor had taken overt steps to ameliorate some of the continuing animosity between the sections by returning captured battle-flags and successfully courting the southern Democratic votes. McKinley went one better by calling for the nation to take better care of the graves of Confederate soldiers. He soon would also appoint ex-Confederate Generals to serve in high-ranking positions in the War with Spain.


President William McKinley (1843-1901)


Unveiling of the Confederate Monument, Arlington National, June 4, 1914

In that spirit of reconciliation, two years later, Congress authorized the Confederate section at Arlington Cemetery. Numerous reinterments followed, totaling eventually more than four hundred, who await Judgment Day, along with the more than 16,000 Union soldiers also buried there. In 1906, Secretary of War, Ohioan William Taft, approved a request by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to commission Moses Ezekiel, one of the most famous sculptors in the world, to design the monument that would demarcate and celebrate the Confederate soldiers buried in their section.


President Howard Taft (1857-1930)


Wreath laying at Confederate Memorial Day Services by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1922

Ezekiel was the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, and a member of the Corps when they fought in the Battle of New Market. After the War he moved to Italy to develop his skills, becoming an internationally renowned sculptor. Upon his death in 1917, Moses Ezekiel was buried next to the monument, desiring only the words recounting the service of his youth in the Civil War: Sergeant of Company C, Battalion of Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute.

The magnificent bronze monument, with multiple symbolic devices, is topped by a woman representing the South, in her right hand a pruning hook resting on a plow stock in a gesture of peace and reconciliation. The thirty-two figures adorning the frieze around the monument include every sort of Southern person from the war period, including a black Confederate soldier. The Reverend Randolph McKim, a Confederate officer and chaplain in the war, submitted, in part, the following words:


Moses Ezekiel (1844-1917)

“NOT FOR FAME OR REWARD—NOT FOR PLACE OR FOR RANK—NOT LURED BY AMBITION—OR GOADED BY NECESSITY—THESE MEN SUFFERED ALL—SACRIFICED ALL—DARED ALL—AND DIED”


Inscription as seen at the base of the north-facing frieze

President Taft spoke at the cornerstone dedication in 1912. His excellent speech is available for reading today. The unveiling took place in 1914 on Jefferson Davis’s birthday, overseen by President Woodrow Wilson who gave a heartfelt and magnanimous address to the thousands assembled. And so the monument has stood for 110 years, a symbol of reconciliation, respect, and honor. But no longer as of this week.


Frieze detail from the Arlington Monument


President Woodrow Wilson speaks at the 1914 unveiling ceremony

In 2021 Congress established “The Naming Commission” to devise a plan to “rid the military of its statues and monuments commemorating the Confederacy.” After renaming many military bases named after Confederate heroes, the Commission recommended that the Confederate Monument at Arlington be torn down, mandated to be accomplished before January 1. The destruction began today on orders of the Defense Department. Lawsuits by Heritage groups and others to stop the desecration have been set aside by the Army. Virginia Governor Younkin has conceded the action after protesting, along with forty Republican Congressmen who signed a letter demanding the “defense” secretary Lloyd Austin stop the proceedings—also ignored.


Naming Commission Chair, Michelle Howard


Monument foundations are laid, 1912


Beginning the monument’s removal, 2023

The Unity monument is joining the hundreds of other Confederate monuments around the country which have been dismantled or destroyed by the purveyors of a new narrative of American history based on Critical Race Theory and new revolutionary Marxist dogmas—substituting “racial oppression” for capitalism as the basis for all American history interpretation. This “march through the institutions of society” by revolutionaries is not new. The ideological overthrow of the Church, educational system, business, the military leadership, and politicians has been an ongoing enterprise for several generations and merely reflects the modern iteration of a spiritual war begun in Eden.


Removal of a Charlottesville Lewis and Clark / Sacagawea monument in 2021

When the rich and powerful declare courage, honor, sacrifice, and defense of home and hearth antiquated evidences of “patriarchal white supremacy” and fit only for destruction, we cannot stand by and hope the wave goes over our heads. We need to plant our banners, speak against the spirit of the age and show our children and grandchildren there are issues worth fighting and dying for. A monument may be a small thing in the larger scheme of the war, but the decision-makers need to know we’re still here and will continue the resistance, leaving ultimate outcomes to the Providence of God. Let us keep building monuments that are reminders of the truth that duty and obedience to God are sublime and eternal responsibilities.


Our Heart of American History tour guests at the Monument 30 days ago

Go to Top