History, Memory, and Repentance

“America is built on the blood of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. It is not the promised land. And what it has become is the rot that has always been underneath the jingoism and nationalism.”

The historian Anthea Butler’s words are deliberately unsettling. They are meant to be. Whether one agrees with every part of her diagnosis or not, the force of the statement lies in its refusal of a familiar American assumption: that our problems are recent departures from an otherwise innocent national story.

Many Americans have long imagined the nation through biblical imagery. The continent became a promised land. Settlers became pilgrims. Expansion became destiny. Prosperity became evidence of blessing. The language changed over the centuries, but the structure remained remarkably consistent. America was not merely a nation. It was a nation with a providential purpose.

The difficulty is that there has always been another story beneath that story.

The land was already inhabited. The nation’s expansion involved the displacement of Indigenous peoples. Its economic development depended significantly upon enslaved labor. These are not incidental footnotes to the American story. They are part of its foundation.

To acknowledge this is not to deny American achievements. It is to refuse a version of history that remembers only triumph and forgets its costs.

What interests me most, however, is not Butler’s history but her theology.

The phrase “promised land” is doing important work.

Christians should be cautious whenever nations borrow Israel’s story. Scripture never identifies the United States with ancient Israel. The Constitution is not a covenant. The Declaration of Independence is not Torah. No American president stands in the role of David or Moses. Yet Americans have repeatedly interpreted their history through those categories.

The irony is that when we do so, we usually remember the stories we like.

We remember Exodus.

We forget Amos.

We remember deliverance.

We forget judgment.

We remember the land flowing with milk and honey.

We forget the prophets who warned that possession of the land was never proof of righteousness.

The prophets consistently challenged the assumption that national success signified divine approval. Again and again they asked different questions. How are the poor treated? What becomes of the widow? How are strangers received? Who bears the cost of prosperity? What injustices are concealed beneath public celebrations of greatness?

Those questions remain uncomfortable because they cannot be answered by military strength, economic growth, or patriotic rhetoric.

The prophets understood something that modern nations rarely wish to hear: prosperity can coexist with injustice. Religious language can conceal cruelty. National myths can become instruments of forgetting.

This may be why debates about history have become so fierce. We often imagine that we are arguing about facts. More often we are arguing about memory. We are arguing about identity. We are arguing about whether the nation’s deepest story is one of innocence interrupted or contradiction exposed.

James Baldwin observed that people cling to myths because they fear what they might discover if those myths were abandoned. Yet Baldwin also understood that healing begins where truth begins. A nation cannot repent of sins it refuses to acknowledge. A people cannot be reconciled to a past they refuse to remember.

The Christian tradition has a word for this. It is confession.

Confession is not self-hatred. It is not the denial of goodness. It is simply the refusal to live by illusion. It is the courage to tell the truth about oneself before God.

That may be the most important contribution Christians can make to public life today. Not the sanctification of America. Not the condemnation of America. But the telling of the truth.

The Church’s task is not to declare that America is the promised land.

The Church’s task is to remind every nation—including our own—that no nation is the Kingdom of God, and that every nation stands under judgment as well as grace.

The prophets knew this. Perhaps that is why they remain so difficult to hear.