It Was Just a Different Time
I remember taking Alabama history in the fourth grade. It was one of the first times history felt personal—like it belonged to me, to my classmates, to the streets we walked every day. It wasn’t just about wars fought in distant lands or leaders whose faces were carved into mountains. It was about our home, our people, our past. Some of the stories were inspiring, full of courage and resilience. Others were deeply troubling, revealing a history that many would rather forget.
Growing up in Alabama, you can’t escape the weight of history. The South has a long and complicated past, marked by beauty and tradition but also by injustice and pain. After the Civil War, Jim Crow laws reinforced segregation and oppression, creating a society where Black Americans were treated as second-class citizens. These laws didn’t just appear overnight—they were the result of a deeply ingrained belief system that said some people were worth less than others simply because of their skin color.
It took the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to begin tearing down those barriers. Brave men and women—many of them my fellow Alabamians—stood up against injustice, often at great personal cost. They faced violence, imprisonment, and even death simply for demanding the basic rights they had been denied for so long. The movement changed America, but it didn’t erase the attitudes that had been shaped over generations.
Even in the 1990s and early 2000s, when I was growing up, racism wasn’t some relic of the past. It existed in quieter ways—in the way people spoke about certain neighborhoods, in the way kids at school talked about interracial dating, in the offhand jokes that were brushed aside as “just the way things are.” I remember hearing older folks say things like, “It was just a different time back then.” It was their way of excusing the racism of their youth, of implying that while they may have once held prejudiced beliefs, they were simply reflecting the culture they grew up in.
And here’s the thing: in some ways, they were right. We are all shaped by our environment, by the people who raise us, by the communities we call home. Many of the people who carried these views weren’t outwardly cruel. They were kind neighbors, faithful churchgoers, hardworking parents. They weren’t villains in their own stories. And so, when confronted with their past, they chalked it up to a different time rather than acknowledging that some things were always wrong, no matter how widely accepted they were.
What I find interesting is how selectively that logic is applied. Many people would never imagine their grandparents facing eternal condemnation for their racism. After all, they were “good people,” just caught up in the cultural norms of their era. And yet, those same people will turn around and insist that others—particularly those struggling with different “sins” like homosexuality—are beyond redemption. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that one group deserves grace while another does not.
But what if the answer isn’t condemnation at all? What if God’s mercy is far greater than we can comprehend? What if Jesus really did come for a broken world—not to sort people into categories of “saved” and “damned,” but to offer healing, restoration, and grace?
It’s easy to look at the past and think, “That’s just how it was back then.” But maybe we should also be willing to look at the present and say, “It just is how it is now.” Maybe the same grace we hope covers our grandparents should be the grace we extend to those around us today. Maybe, instead of drawing hard lines between who is worthy of redemption and who isn’t, we should admit that none of us are deserving—and yet, God still reaches for us anyway.
History has a way of repeating itself. The prejudices of one generation may fade, only to be replaced by new forms of exclusion and judgment. But if we truly believe in a God of mercy, then we have to ask ourselves: is that mercy for the past alone, or is it for here and now, too?
