Just three miles off the interstate was a town that time forgot. It looked like a place I might have walked in my childhood. I was returning from the NAPARC meeting in Atlanta and was ready for lunch. The sign for the exit had told me there was McDonald’s, Arby’s, and, appropriately, the Yesterday Cafe.

My wife and I have grown fond of shirking fast food places at exits and instead looking for diners and restaurants where the locals go for signature dishes at a good price. We’ve discovered many gems this way, including a cafe in LaGrange, Ky., where freight trains regularly run down main street, splitting the town in two.

Yesterday Cafe is in Greensboro, Ga., and offers, as I found out for myself, a sumptious buttermilk pie that is on some national top-10 pie lists. The people in town talked to me like a friend they hadn’t yet met, though I looked and sounded out of place.

Nearly ready to add this to my informal list of favorite spots, I passed the town hall and noticed a large gray obelisk. My heart went cold. A Confederate soldier stood watch atop the statue, as he had since 1898. Below was the inscription, “In Honor of the Brave who Fell Defending the Right of Local Self-Government.”

That sentence has the All-American ring of the moral high ground. I respect that there were many reasons that individuals fought in the Civil War, including protecting their loved ones. But something didn’t pass the smell test for this monument, set up during the Jim Crow era when “local self-government” included aggressive legislation to deny God-given rights to Southern blacks.

Despite its high-sounding rhetoric, wasn’t local self-government the cause that tipped the scale for Adam and Eve, the motivation of Cain, and the war cry of the 10 northern tribes of Israel? Hasn’t that conviction moved my own heart when I know the good I ought to do and simply don’t want to do it?

The deception of the Confederate soldier endures to this day. The virtues of local self-government cannot put a wool cloak over the evils of slavery and the denial of image-bearing persons. The right of a woman to care for her own body does not allow the redefinition of the human being inside her: Keep your laws off my body; I have the right to self-government.

All governmental rights find their source in the Lord Jesus Christ. The role we are given falls within that sphere, not outside it, despite the cries of the ages—including of our own hearts—to do otherwise. That’s a monument in our own hearts that must be taken down.