Book Review: The Cross and Lynching Tree

By J. Kameron Carter

How should suffering, loss, and pain be understood? And I mean here not just personal pain, but societally and religiously inflicted pain, that pain and suffering that’s most within our control. Can the lives broken on the shores and smashed against the rocks of social sin be redeemed? In short, is a just society possible? Which is to ask (and here I allude to ole Jimmy—Jimmy Baldwin, that is), can injustice be checkmated?

Professor James H. Cone in his latest book The Cross and the Lynching (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011) takes up these questions at a double-scene of subjection, which by the time he’s done in this quite readable and well-paced work proves to be really one scene of subjection. This is the scene of the old rugged, Christian Cross, or the doctrinal site of Jesus’ death, on the one hand, and the lynching tree, or at the numerous fields of blood that have marked the history of the United Stated with a crimson stain, on the other. If Professor Cone’s basic concern when he published Black Theology and Black Power a little over 40 years ago in the wake of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was to diagnosis the religious dimensions of the American sickness unto death that lead to King’s assassination and that has afflicted America’s soul since its inception, then with this book Professor Cone provides his latest statement on the contorted Christian imagination that produced America’s societal sickness. The problem lay with the Christian symbol of the Cross of Jesus Christ. More specifically—and this is what Professor Cone in effect calls us to think about in this book—it is with the way social sacrifice has been ideologically deployed right next to, indeed right inside of, talk of a “Christian America,” rhetoric about “a city on a hill,” and language about “saving America,” language that closely echoes language about death in the Christian traditions, the death of Jesus Christ.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree is a book about what the Christian Cross and lynching have had to do with each other in the making of American society. And at the same time, it is a book about how black folks in their diasporic wanderings in America (and I would argue by extension, their wanderings in the wilderness of the Americas and throughout the modern world) have, as it were, bent how we think about the Christian Cross despite its oppressive uses in the direction of social justice and in the direction of hope for a just society.
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