Slavery, Oppression, and America’s Prosperity
00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:00:03.280 | Pastor John, recently you have been
00:00:07.160 | thinking about Andrew Jackson and giving some fresh thought
00:00:10.560 | to slavery in American history.
00:00:13.520 | What would you like to share with us here?
00:00:15.280 | We visited the hermitage, it's called,
00:00:18.360 | outside Nashville, the estate of Andrew Jackson,
00:00:22.960 | the seventh president of the United States.
00:00:25.600 | He was president from 1829 to 1837.
00:00:31.960 | And the reason this is troubling to me,
00:00:36.240 | and I wanted to talk about it, is
00:00:39.000 | because I was confronted there head on, again,
00:00:43.680 | with the bothersome foundations of our country,
00:00:49.420 | the troubling ones.
00:00:51.120 | I watched this 20-minute video of Jackson's life
00:00:55.880 | and presidency, and then I read the plaques in the museum,
00:00:59.560 | and then I strolled through all the grounds
00:01:01.900 | and gardens of the mansion and the slave quarters.
00:01:07.120 | And the heavy realization came again
00:01:10.280 | that our country is built in significant part
00:01:14.360 | on the soil of stolen land and the backs of stolen men.
00:01:20.440 | That's the phrase I came away with.
00:01:23.960 | Land taken from Native Americans and cultivated
00:01:28.040 | with African-American slaves.
00:01:29.560 | Andrew Jackson was a great war hero
00:01:32.800 | in his battles against the Creek Indians in 1814
00:01:35.920 | and the British, especially at the Battle of New Orleans
00:01:38.720 | in 1815.
00:01:41.400 | He was incredibly popular among Southern whites,
00:01:46.980 | and he was a wealthy slave owner.
00:01:50.440 | And the whole slave system of how his estate was profitable
00:01:55.480 | is evident from the archaeological work that's
00:01:58.600 | preserved there at the Hermitage.
00:02:00.000 | You can walk, and they have the outlines of the slave quarters
00:02:03.400 | and the buildings where the overseer lived.
00:02:07.240 | And one or two places are actually
00:02:10.040 | preserved, the little cottages where the slaves lived
00:02:12.760 | are preserved, and you can see the way they lived.
00:02:16.120 | Jackson was, in addition, the main force
00:02:19.800 | behind the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
00:02:22.800 | And that meant the forcible removal
00:02:25.360 | of the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Creek,
00:02:29.200 | the Seminole Indians from southeastern states
00:02:31.840 | like North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama.
00:02:35.440 | All of them pressed across the Mississippi over to Oklahoma
00:02:39.160 | in what became known as the Trail of Tears.
00:02:42.160 | And it's pretty bleak to read about how much disease there
00:02:45.440 | was, how much death there was, how much displacement there
00:02:47.860 | was of people who didn't want to leave their homelands
00:02:50.960 | but were forced to.
00:02:52.720 | And what that did was open the land
00:02:54.640 | to be settled by white settlers so they could be prosperous.
00:02:59.000 | That's where I grew up.
00:03:00.040 | I grew up on the back of that prosperity in South Carolina.
00:03:04.800 | So I've been pondering, what effect should that
00:03:07.880 | have on me, a 21st century, prosperous, happy, well-to-do,
00:03:14.160 | comfortable American?
00:03:16.480 | It raises huge questions.
00:03:18.680 | It forces me to think about how the sins the fathers are
00:03:22.880 | visited on the later generations and how that relates
00:03:25.600 | to the doctrine of original sin.
00:03:28.320 | Deuteronomy 24, 16 says, "Fathers shall not
00:03:31.000 | be put to death because of their children,
00:03:33.520 | and children put to death not because of their fathers.
00:03:38.080 | Each one shall be put to death for his own sin."
00:03:41.320 | So there's a difference in the biblical mind
00:03:44.920 | between the way Adam was the head of the human race
00:03:48.480 | so that we fell in Adam, we sinned in Adam,
00:03:51.160 | we died in Adam, and the way we relate
00:03:53.960 | to the sins of our fathers and our grandfathers.
00:03:56.600 | Seems like God has established, in the beginning,
00:03:59.360 | a kind of union with Adam and all humans,
00:04:02.680 | but not in such a way that all sons fall in all fathers.
00:04:06.960 | We fell in Adam, but I didn't feel
00:04:08.960 | and fall in Bill Piper in the same way.
00:04:12.280 | There was a covenantal constitutional union
00:04:15.080 | God established there.
00:04:17.560 | And when Exodus 25 speaks of visiting
00:04:19.760 | the sins of the fathers on the sons,
00:04:21.520 | it says, "Visiting the iniquity of the fathers
00:04:23.960 | on the children to the third and fourth generation of those
00:04:26.680 | who hate me."
00:04:28.920 | In other words, the father's sins
00:04:31.280 | are not visited on innocent children, children who--
00:04:35.800 | they share the same rebellion that the fathers had,
00:04:39.560 | and therein consists some of the visitation.
00:04:43.640 | So how should I feel?
00:04:45.760 | Those are some of the reflections
00:04:47.800 | on how Andrew Jackson's sins relate to my life today.
00:04:52.280 | And here's my conclusion, Tony, and I really
00:04:56.320 | feel very much in process in this,
00:04:58.960 | trying to discern what the appropriate attitude should be
00:05:03.280 | and action should be.
00:05:04.520 | So I've got two ways that I think we should respond.
00:05:08.080 | Number one, I think we should feel a chastened gratitude
00:05:14.640 | for our prosperity in America.
00:05:16.560 | That is, I was born here.
00:05:18.520 | I had nothing to do with being born here.
00:05:21.120 | I enjoy hundreds of benefits for being an American just
00:05:24.920 | because I was born here in the skin I have.
00:05:28.640 | At the time I was born, in the place I was born,
00:05:31.400 | to the parents I was born, I had nothing
00:05:33.560 | to do with any of that, and yet I benefit from it.
00:05:36.760 | And so I must feel gratitude.
00:05:38.920 | It's a gift.
00:05:39.680 | And yet it should be, I think, a chastened gratitude.
00:05:44.880 | And what I mean by that is I should realize and be humbled
00:05:49.720 | by the fact that I am prospering from the sins
00:05:54.840 | of national forefathers.
00:05:56.960 | I may not be guilty of their guilt,
00:06:00.440 | but I do benefit from the country
00:06:02.480 | they built on their guilt. I am sobered and chastened
00:06:07.160 | and humbled by that.
00:06:09.160 | That's my first response.
00:06:11.200 | My second one is I think we should feel shame.
00:06:15.840 | I've been thinking about shame.
00:06:17.800 | Why does a person feel shame for somebody else's behavior?
00:06:22.600 | And the answer is, well, we only do
00:06:25.600 | if there's some kind of attachment to us,
00:06:27.920 | like if they're our kids.
00:06:30.680 | If they're our kids who are misbehaving,
00:06:33.480 | we feel more shame than if they're
00:06:35.640 | your kids who are misbehaving.
00:06:38.360 | But there are other kinds of attachments besides family.
00:06:42.000 | There's school attachments, like if a high school had a brawl
00:06:46.360 | and beat up on some minority at a ball game,
00:06:51.960 | I'd feel ashamed of my school, right?
00:06:54.200 | Or there's religious attachments.
00:06:56.240 | When Christians act ugly towards Muslims or something,
00:06:59.880 | we feel ashamed because I'm a Christian,
00:07:01.960 | and Christians shouldn't act like that.
00:07:04.760 | And there are racial and all kinds of attachments
00:07:08.120 | that we can feel shame because the people that we're like
00:07:12.520 | have behaved in a certain way, or the people
00:07:15.040 | that we're attached to.
00:07:16.600 | And so I think that's fitting.
00:07:18.320 | I think that's a godly, proper thing
00:07:22.040 | to feel some measure of shame.
00:07:24.480 | And I think what we do with that shame,
00:07:26.920 | then, is we remedy it, we lay it down,
00:07:29.280 | we overcome it in an appropriate way
00:07:31.400 | by expressing sorrow for the act that we're ashamed of.
00:07:35.360 | I'm sorry that that happened to the Indian people.
00:07:39.360 | Number two, that we renounce it as something we disapprove of.
00:07:43.000 | And thirdly, we resolve to do whatever
00:07:46.320 | is appropriate to make right what we can.
00:07:50.000 | So those are my two things, Tony, two efforts
00:07:54.080 | to figure out how John Piper's heart and his behavior
00:07:58.160 | should respond in view of my brief visit
00:08:01.360 | to the hermitage in Nashville a few days ago.
00:08:05.400 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you
00:08:06.920 | for listening to this podcast.
00:08:09.160 | As many of you know, Billy Graham
00:08:10.680 | has been in the news of late.
00:08:12.080 | And you, Pastor John, have some interesting stories
00:08:14.240 | to share about Graham, which we'll dive into next week.
00:08:17.600 | And stay tuned for that.
00:08:19.240 | Until then, please continue to flood the email inbox
00:08:22.040 | with your questions, your concise questions,
00:08:24.520 | to askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:08:27.560 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:08:28.400 | Thanks for listening.
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00:08:36.080 | you