34 pages • 1 hour read
James H. ConeThe Cross and the Lynching Tree
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: James Cone as a 21st-Century Author
When The Cross and the Lynching Tree was published in 2011, the United States of America had recently elected its first Black president, Barack Obama. As the last in a long line of books that James Cone had published on the subject, The Cross and the Lynching Tree addresses major issues of race, religion, and cultural assumptions that had been the focus of his academic career for almost half a century, starting in the 1960s.
On the one hand, the election of a Black man as President of the United States represented a new frontier for race relations in the country, proving that this was a new possibility in a country that had never achieved that before. In general, cultural expectations had become generally positive and optimistic about the future of race relations and new social harmony in a country haunted by its violent past. On the other hand, it would be false to say that such a significant symbolic achievement had somehow healed the wounds caused by the country’s white supremacist past that saw men and women of African descent as subhuman and unworthy of being treated with basic dignity and respect.
Dr. Cone’s work as one of the founding fathers of Black liberation theology centered on the place of Black Christians in a country dominated by white Christian communities. The Cross and the Lynching Tree was a work that gathered together his mature thinking and reflections on what was, to him, the primary analog of the Black Christian experience: the relationship between the Cross of Jesus Christ that violently stole the life of the innocent Nazarene and the lynching tree that had violently stolen the life of thousands of innocent Black men and women. Cone’s position was one of baffled confusion since it appeared to him that the parallel between the two had never really been highlighted, even though it was such an obvious comparison.
Ideological Context: The Genealogy of Liberation Theology
Liberation theology is an approach to religious ethics and political theology in the Christian tradition that champions involvement in political and economic matters, usually among Catholics. Liberation theology (hereafter referred to as LT) rose to prominence in the middle of the 20th century among Latin American theologians, especially those specifically drawn to various forms of communism and socialism. The principal tenets of LT hold that the church’s primary mission is the liberation of oppressed peoples and communities, usually with special reference to marginalized classes based on economic, racial, and political demographics.
LT quickly became a controversial movement within the Christian tradition because most Christian denominations considered it a heretical inversion of the gospel message of salvation and concern for the soul rather than the body. Those who saw LT as a perversion of traditional Christianity criticized it as abandoning the Church’s spiritual mission of spiritual healing, the forgiveness of sin, and eternal salvation for the worldly and material goods of political harmony, economic stability, and social goods. The practitioners of LT, however, saw it as a way to bring the gospel message of liberation from sin to a real-world context, usually focusing on communal and institutional sin that resulted in oppression and violence.
In the work of James Cone, LT became a uniquely Black liberation theology, in which the specific context was the oppression of African American people in the United States in the era of slavery and in the era of emancipation that followed it. Black liberation theology, as expressed by the author, is concerned with highlighting the social and institutional injustice still present in America, especially as present in the white Christian churches that should have known better and should have been different but were largely the perpetrators of violence against Black men and women (mainly in the American south).
