Book Review and Reflection | The Cross and the Lynching Tree
The Cross and the Lynching Tree
by
James H. Cone
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
After finishing Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" last month, I wanted to continue reading along the same lines. Cone's work deals in the same themes of systemic black oppression, but focuses specifically on the era of lynching (extending from the late 19th past the middle of the 20th centuries), and from the perspective of black liberation theology.
This is truly a remarkable work. Most of my margin notes throughout are simple declarations like "ugh," or "wow," or "Lord." Cone holds nothing back in his critique of the white church's (both conservative and liberal) lack of practical and theological response and reflection to the legal (ugh) lynching of more than 5,000 black people, and the failure of the white imagination to see the connection between the cross of Christ and the lynching tree. What was obvious and a daily reality for black people, and what even crept into popular music (see Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"), was not substantially dealt with by even the most ideologically aligned white theologians of the day, such as Reinhold Niebuhr.
I can say that I studied this period of theology a lot in college and seminary. This time period was consumed with the fundamentalist/modernist controversy, a cultural clash that pitted Biblical authority against human reason in a battle royal, with each side seeking to preserve essential thrusts of Christian practice and theology. Not until reading Cone did I even consider that this great controversy allowed both sides of the argument to ignore the absolutely despicable practice of lynching that was going on all around these scholars at the time. I doubt this ignoring of such a grave injustice was in every way intentional, but it is undoubtedly a shameful scar on the white church which has deep implications for today.
As I look at the stories Cone tells, some which made want to avert my gaze from the page, I am overwhelmed with the conviction to repent. Such repentance has surely not been adequately made, and is needed now more than ever: that the white church has no right to question the #BlackLivesMatter movement when we have this scar of active and passive acceptance of lynching on our collective conscience. When public execution with no trial without any legal ramifications for the killers has a long, dark history in this country which looks a lot more like the hideous modern day acts of ISIS than we'd care to admit. To talk about the legacy of lynching today is not "living in the past," but addressing how that broken past continues to live in us! I cannot fault my black brothers and sisters for being utterly ravaged by the modern misuses of power and force that lead to more black deaths even today. In fact, I must join them in grief: How long, O Lord?
But this book is not ultimately about me. It's about the black experience, and the theological imagination of black theologians and poets and artists who lived out the intersections between the cross and the lynching tree. That Jesus Christ proclaims dignity and hope to all who die on the tree. That the good news is good news for the poor and for those who suffer. And that they lynching tree provides an inversion of meaning that challenges dominant theological categories, and adds an important image "from below" to the "community called atonement."
Far from covering all of Cone's insight, I've only touched the surface, but I think it appropriate to conclude with Cone's words:
"What are we to make of the striking similarities between the brutality in Rome and cruelty in America? What is most ironic is that the white lynchers of blacks in America were not regarded as criminals; like Jesus, blacks were the criminals and insurrectionists. The lynchers were the 'good citizens' who often did not even bother to hide their identities. They claimed to be acting as citizens and Christians as they crucified blacks in the same manner as the Romans lynched Jesus. It is even more ironic that black people embraced the Christian cross that whites used to murder them. That was truly a profound inversion of meaning." (pp. 158-159)
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