Maybe I can go back down South now

I am a Union man. The Kingsburys (at least our branch of the Kingsburys) were for the Union, and I am no different. Nonetheless, depending on how you reckon your geography, I have spent about half my life in the deep South (Houston occupying that liminal space which is both entirely the South and entirely the West), and have the very firm opinions about grits to prove it.

I love the South, and I love the Presbyterian Church in America, in which I was ordained a deacon and had the privilege to be licensed to preach the Gospel. But I am a Union man, and I am not naive about the South or the PCA. Racism, albeit of the soft sort, still exists in the deep South and in the PCA (especially amongst her revered old men), and I have a black daughter. It's hard enough to be black in the American West. It occurred to me a while back that I couldn't in good conscience make it any harder by placing her in a white Church, in the deep South, that merely winked at the racism held to and practiced by her revered fathers. I decided that, come what may, I wouldn't be taking my family back to Virginia, much less any place any further south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Then I read this post on a protest at the 43rd General Assembly of the PCA. God bless Ligon Duncan and Sean Lucas. Finally, Southern Presbyterianism is waking up to the original sin at the heart of the American experiment in representative democracy.

Let's be clear: no one has asked me to go back down south, and I don't expect any ever to do so (other than a brief visit to Virginia in the autumn of this year). But maybe now there is a place for a Union man and his black daughter.

And maybe I can find someone with whom to have a reasonable conversation about grits.