The story of Richmond’s “cathedral of the Confederacy”

I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where the legacy of Robert E. Lee loomed large. Well before I learned Civil War history, I was taught that Lee was a good Christian and a southern gentleman. At family gatherings, one story was told regularly: on his way back from battle, Lee stopped at our family home one night; he was such a gentleman that he insisted on camping out in the backyard so as not to track dirt into the house. With pride, I would retell this story to my friends, concluding with the punch line: “And guess what? Robert E. Lee was my great-great-great grandmother’s cousin!” Twenty-five years later, I am ashamed of my childhood pride in Confederate mythology, but I am not surprised by it. Confederate leaders were shrouded in sainthood at home, in school—our high school mascot was a Confederate soldier—and all the way down Richmond’s storied Monument Avenue.

In Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause, Christopher Alan Graham breaks down the enduring mythology behind Richmond’s Confederate sentimentality as he explores how the people of his parish, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, have understood race and racial relations from a Christian perspective over the past 150 years. As he presents his research on the church that was known as the Cathedral of the Confederacy, Graham makes it abundantly clear that the shape of our storytelling matters as we grapple with legacies of White supremacy.

As he cracks open St. Paul’s history of racism, Graham centers the experiences of White Episcopalians, who have exacerbated racial violence by perpetuating paternalistic tropes and narratives. He writes, “I have averred from describing harm from a Black perspective or going inside Black churches or other refuges to extract that information. . . . I have never felt comfortable, or equipped, in describing or articulating the pain that is neither my own, nor that of the people I study here.” I appreciate Graham’s candor about the limits of his project, and I hope that future research on St. Paul’s will do more to elucidate Black perspectives. Nonetheless, the scope of Graham’s research provides an opportunity for readers to confront plainly St. Paul’s connection to race, slavery, segregation, and discrimination as a wealthy White Christian 
institution.