Janet Mefferd, a Religious Right radio host, spent part of her program today defending the preservation of Confederate monuments against efforts to “change the narrative of the culture” before issuing a broader warning that Christian culture in Europe is being “replaced,” presumably a reference to immigration by Muslims.
This morning, Mefferd was discussing her fear that Christian culture in America is being replaced through the removal of religious monuments from public spaces. As part of her argument, Mefferd cited recent calls to remove Confederate monuments from public squares.
“When you’re taking away the symbols of a culture, you’re taking away the culture, whether you know it or not. Whether you think about it or not,” Mefferd said. “When you talk about Confederate references in monuments in the United States, for example, too many people in modern society—anything that smacks of the Civil War and the South and the Confederacy is linked in a lot of peoples’ minds to racism and to slavery and a terrible dark past that we did have back in the 1800s, which we solved, by the way, through the Civil War through a lot of shed blood.”
She elaborated, “You can’t deny that when you are dealing with symbols of a culture and tearing down symbols of a culture, what you’re really doing is you’re changing the narrative of the culture.”
Mefferd went on to say that she did not mind statues of figures like Confederate General Robert E. Lee because Lee was a historic figure and that she believed that when societies remove symbols from the public sphere, “it matters.”
“That’s why we’ve always been so concerned in this country any time you have a Ten Commandments monument ripped down, you have a cross monument ripped down, it says something. It’s bigger than what it is on the surface. It’s not just about tearing down a cross—one cross. It’s not just about tearing down one Ten Commandments monument. It’s making a cultural statement,” Mefferd said.
Mefferd added, “Well, in Great Britain, when you’re not Christian anymore, what are you? You think you’re going to be a big nothing? You’re going to be secularist? You’re going to be atheists and it’s not going to be anything that is replaced by anything else? Of course it’s going to be replaced. It’s in the process of being replaced.”
