Public Repentance

"He put another parable before them, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.' So the servants said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he said, 'No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.'" - Gospel of Matthew 13:24-29

"Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice." - Philippians 1:15-18

I preface this final blog post for my internship with the Florida Historical Quarterly with biblical epigrams, because while the subject matter is not exclusively biblical, there is much in it explored by the Jesus of the gospels and the first generation of Christians. For a variety of reasons, many former (and to some now neo-) colonial powers, public repentance is very much in vogue. In November of 2017, the Georgia Historical Quarterly lamented its historical role in the myth of the Lost Cause after the Civil War; in March of 2018, the New York Times began a (still-ongoing) series "Overlooked," in which it is going all the way back to 1851 and providing obituaries for minorities and women the newspaper of record did not honor when they passed; and this month's issue of National Geographic was on race, and its opening letter from the editor is titled, "For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It." I would argue that all of this is good, yet in our advertising age of obsessive optics, self-conscious branding, and institutional public relations campaigns, many cannot shake a cynical suspicion that there is something besides nobility driving all of this. Just to illustrate the intensity of this phenomenon, consider that there is a sizable Wikipedia entry for all of the following topics:

Activism 2.0
Armchair revolutionary
Armchair warrior
Concern troll
Dog-whistle politics
Hypocrisy
Moral superiority (disambiguation)
Race Card
Self-licensing
Self-righteousness
Shy Tory Factor
Slacktivism
Social desirability bias
Social justice warrior
Tribalism
Virtue-signaling
Watching-Eye Effect

They all amount to a self-serving virtue-chauvinism tainted with artificiality or insincerity. They combine to make one wonder: how do you separate the weeds from the wheat? The corporation of true believers from the company listening to a top-notch PR firm? When it comes to beliefs, the testimony of (Matthew's) Jesus of Nazareth and Paul's letter to the church in Philippi is the same: you cannot with definitive certainty; if someone's behavior outs them unequivocally as a wolf in sheep's clothing, you do not need to charitably ignore the obvious, but if you are looking for a litmus test for sincerity, you will never find it.

The Lost Cause and scientific racism are being denounced; women and minorities are being remembered. Some doing the denouncing and the remembering may be doing so from altruism that is not pure, but in the spirit of the apostle Paul I say, "whether in pretense or in truth, may what is good be proclaimed, and in that I rejoice."