Lent is the forty days before Easter. Start at Easter, back up six Sundays, then back up to the Wednesday before, and you get to Ash Wednesday. That’s actually forty-six days, but you knew that already if you’re any good at math. Back out the six Sundays, which are treated as “free days” and not counted as part of the Lenten season (they are and they aren’t; it’s complicated), and you get to forty days.
Lent is a season of preparation for Easter. We prepare by focusing on Christ and his journey to the Cross, which lies squarely across our path and looms ever larger the deeper we get into the Lenten season. The 40 days of Lent tie in directly with the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness prior to the start of his public ministry, and indirectly with the 40 years Israel spent in the wilderness prior to entering the Promised Land. Not all of us can go out into the wilderness for 40 days, but we can all place ourselves in a posture of humility and choose practices consistent with a lifestyle of repentance.
What we typically do around here during the Lenten season is pick a Lenten-related topic and talk about it for the next five to six weeks. This year we will be looking at The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone. In this book Cone makes a connection which ought to be plain as day but which the vast majority of American Christianity, and especially American evangelicalism, has missed.
Crucifixion was the most violent and degrading form of death imaginable back in its day. Invented by the Greeks, perfected by the Romans, once you’ve seen one in real life you will never unsee it for as long as you live. There is a parallel in American history, and you don’t have to go very far back into the past to find it. About a hundred years ago, from 1880 to 1940, lynching was at its peak in the US.
Just like crucifixion in its day, lynching was an extremely violent and degrading form of death. Just as crucifixion was used by the Romans to graphically remind conquered people of their place in the Roman world, so lynching was used by angry white mobs to remind black people of their place in white supremacist America. Just like crucifixion in its day, lynching was so traumatic that even to this day very few people talk about it, white or black. But we are going to talk about it in these weeks.
Last week we looked at the fourth chapter of The Cross and the Lynching Tree. In this chapter Cone looked at black poets, artists, and writers, for whom the connection between the cross and the lynching tree was plain as day. Their ability to see it and willingness to speak out about it stands in sharp contrast to white theologians who were almost completely silent on it and black preachers who spoke indirectly about it if at all.
This week we will look at chapter 5. In this final chapter, entitled “O Mary Don’t You Weep”, Cone looks at the role of black womanist thought on the issue of lynching. Here, the significance of Christ is not so much his maleness but his humanity. Black womanist theologians see Christ as a black woman, meaning one who is explicitly identified with black women in their plight as “the oppressed of the oppressed” in black America. This suffering created an intense paradox for black women, as it challenged their faith in a God who was present to them and identified with them.
On the one hand, faith spoke to their suffering, making it bearable, while, on the other hand, suffering contradicted their faith, making it unbearable. That is the profound paradox inherent in black faith, the dialectic of doubt and trust in the search for meaning, as blacks “walk[ed] through the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23:4).
Cone takes us on a guided tour of the world of black womanist thought/activism. Our first stop is Ida B. Wells, a freed slave who became the editor of a black newspaper in Memphis in the late 1800’s. She wrote blistering editorials decrying the atrocity of lynching. Her words drew the ire of white supremacist America, to the point where her life was routinely in danger. It was her faith that gave her the strength to endure, a faith grounded in the cross and black resistance to white supremacy. Yet the continued white supremacist violence against blacks constantly challenged her faith.
Faith and doubt were bound together, with each a check against the other–doubt preventing faith from being too sure of itself and faith keeping doubt from going down into the pit of despair. With faith in one hand and doubt in the other she contended against the evil of lynching.
The above quote sums up the essence of life in the post-evangelical wilderness: We live in the tension between faith and doubt, with doubt keeping faith from being too sure of itself and faith keeping doubt from sinking all the way down into the abyss.
Like most blacks of her era, Wells had no time for white Christianity. She was especially critical of Dwight Moody because he segregated his revivals in order to appease Southern white supremacists.
There was no way a community could support or ignore lynching in America, while still representing in word and deed the one who was lynched by Rome. For Ida B. Wells, Christian identity had to be validated by opposing mob violence against a powerless people, and no amount of theological sophistry could convince her otherwise. As far as she was concerned, white Christianity was a counterfeit gospel–“as phony as a two-dollar bill,” as blacks often said in Bearden.
Yet Wells never spoke of the connection between the cross and the lynching tree. That is because she was an investigative journalist and activist, and as such her business was to focus on the facts around lynching and get those facts in front of as many faces as possible. Literary and theological imagination was not her concern. The same could be said of many other black woman activists: They did not need literary or theological imagination to see or show how lynching and the white version of Christianity that justified and supported it contradict Christianity at its most basic levels.
This radical difference between white and black Christianity began during slavery and has persisted throughout American history. “By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight,” theologian Howard Thurman said, “the slave undertook the redemption of the religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”
Our next stop on the tour is Billie Holiday. Her rendition of “Strange Fruit” is the most powerful resistance via music to the atrocity of lynching. Written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish New York City schoolteacher, set to music by Billie Holiday, it says everything that Reinhold Niebuhr and other white theological leaders should have said if they had the heart to say what the cross of Jesus Christ means for black Americans. The song grabs you and forces you to see the striking contrast between the glories of Southern culture/religion in how it perceives itself and the atrocity of lynching which proceeded directly from that very Southern religion. It is impossible for any white listener to hear this song and not feel indicted and exposed by the nasty truth surrounding the atrocity of lynching.
Though Holiday did not develop her craft in a black church, her music is influenced by blues, jazz, gospel, and the spirituals, which all draw from the black religious experience.
Just as the old slave spiritual “Were You There?” placed black Christians at the foot of Jesus’ cross, “Strange Fruit” put them at the foot of the lynching tree. Both songs created a dark and somber mood. One was sung in church and the other in a nightclub, but both addressed the deep-down hurt that blacks felt and gave them a way to deal with it.
Our next stop is the women of churches and clubs. While men were predominantly the leaders of churches and national organizations like the NAACP, it was women who provided grassroots, boots-on-the-ground energy which these organizations desperately needed to function. Women also formed their own organizations within churches, and national organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), in which they were the leaders. Initially these women were less militant than Ida B. Wells, preferring instead to go the route of respectability and uplift suasion. But over time they found that those tactics did not work and came around to the protest tactics advocated by Wells. Like Wells and other black Christians, they repudiated white Christianity as a counterfeit spirituality because it supported segregation and lynching. There was no linkage of the cross and the lynching tree in this world; like Wells these women had no time for literary or theological imagination because they were focused entirely on the task at hand which was to stop lynching.
Like Wells, they focused their concern on fighting lynching and achieving full equality for all black people. While men talked, women walked and got things done. Although the civil rights movement was headed primarily by male leaders (such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andy Young, and others), there never would have been a black freedom movement without the courageous work of women–such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Jo Anne Robinson, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and many more.
Our final stop is Fannie Lou Hamer. A Mississippi sharecropper turned civil rights activist, Hamer used her vision of the cross embellished with her own religious imagination to inspire blacks to join the fight for justice. Hamer lacked formal theological training, yet drew upon a wealth of imagery from hymns and spirituals and her own experience to inspire countless blacks to take up the struggle for civil rights. While she embraced the cross, she questioned the conventional religious wisdom that black people were called to suffer as Christ suffered. She interpreted the cross in light of her civil rights work: just as the cross could not defeat Jesus, so she would keep going in spite of the worst that men might do to her.
It was black women’s faith in the God of Jesus that gave them the courage to face great danger in the black freedom movement. No one was more courageous than Fannie Lou Hamer. She was beaten severely and shot at many times, but she faced it all, confident that God was with her and would bring her through the difficulties she encountered fighting for freedom.
Many black womanist theologians questioned, if not outright rejected, the view that Jesus accomplished human salvation via the cross by dying in our place. If that were so, then the gospel message would encourage black women to follow the example of Jesus by taking on suffering for the sake of others, just like Jesus did on the cross. Cone joins them in this criticism:
The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory about salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair, as revealed in the biblical and black proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection.
Ultimately though, Cone comes down on the side of those who view the cross as central to the Christian faith. Quoting womanist theologian Shawn Copeland:
If the makers of the spirituals gloried in singing of the cross of Jesus, it was not because they were masochistic and enjoyed suffering. Rather, the enslaved Africans sang because they saw on the rugged wooden planks One who had endured what was their daily portion. The cross was treasured because it enthroned the One who went all the way with them and for them. The enslaved Africans sang because they saw the results of the cross–triumph over the principalities and powers of death, triumph over evil in this world.
I share in this criticism of the cross as simply part of someone’s theory of atonement. The cross is not simply a proposition or an element in penal substitutionary atonement or whatever theory of salvation you happen to believe. Evangelicals spend so much time and effort arguing over theories of atonement, as if a failure to believe the correct theory of atonement means that you have believed a false gospel and you will not be saved, while ignoring the elephant in the room with respect to slavery, segregation, lynching, and other atrocities perpetrated by white supremacist America against black Americans, and the God who is against those atrocities, who is identified with black Americans who have suffered those atrocities, and who will one day judge white supremacist America for those atrocities. At the end of the day, Jesus is not going to ask you what your theory of atonement is. But he is going to have a lot to say about the people about whom he is concerned, and whether you share that concern. He is going to have a lot to say on whether your theory of atonement is good news for black Americans and others who are suffering injustice in our world.
At this point, I find these words from Michael Spencer’s final blog post to be especially apt:
There are a lot of different kinds of Good News, but there is little good news in “My argument scored more points than your argument.” But the news that “Christ is risen!” really is Good News for one kind of person: The person who is dying.
If Christianity is not a dying word to dying men, it is not the message of the Bible that gives hope now.
What is your apologetic? Make it the full and complete announcement of the Life Giving news about Jesus.
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