The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Every culture receives the imagery of their faith in a particular way; this process is called inculturation and is the means by which a transcendent reality makes sense in their own limited, socio-historical context. The author points out that the imagery of the lynching tree “should have a prominent place in American images of Jesus’ death” but that it is conspicuously absent from “American theological discourse and preaching” (57). This is almost unthinkable, seeing as “the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching” (57). The parallels are almost uncannily similar, but the imagery has not taken root in the consciousness of the American Christian in any meaningful way. Cone examines this lacuna by exploring the work of one of his intellectual heroes, Reinhold Niebuhr, respected (as he points out) as “America’s most influential theologian in the twentieth century” (59) and one of the more progressive thinkers of his day. However, this parallel cannot be found even in Niebuhr's work.

Niebuhr, as Cone continues, is a theologian to be imitated and followed in many respects. He “taught that love is the absolute, transcendent standard that stands in judgment over what human beings can achieve in history” (60). In Cone’s estimation, “Niebuhr has a complex perspective on race—at once honest and ambivalent, radical and moderate” (65). Cone goes on to point out that while Niebuhr criticized American race relations as hardly better than the Nazi regime’s eugenic hatred, he failed to see that the injustices of the era demanded a radical and immediate call to action, speaking instead about needing to take an approach characterized by “gradualism, patience, and prudence” (66). Niebuhr realized that groups are inherently selfish and protective of their own and yet failed to see this reality about his own group of relatively conservative white Christians.

In contrast, Niebuhr holds up the German theologian and political activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer—who was criticized at the time by his peers for being too close to the Black community—and who would go on to be executed by Nazi Germany for a plot to assassinate Hitler. Niebuhr’s philosophy was not so radical nor urgent. While he knew that denying church membership on the basis of race was immoral and contrary to the gospel demands, he also realized that this would be a great obstacle practically. Thus, he allowed the difficulties to dampen his enthusiasm for issues of racial harmony and justice: “Rather than challenging racial prejudice, he believed it must ‘slowly erode’” (76). Cone believes this is because Niebuhr failed to listen to the Black activists, like Malcolm X, who spoke publicly at the time.

How could it be the case that an eminent theologian in America during the lynching era could ignore such an obvious tragedy and scandal to the Christian way of life? Cone outlines Niebuhr's conversation with the “radical black intellectual” James Baldwin in the 1960s and shows the differences in the urgency that the two sides took in the debate. Baldwin takes Niebuhr to task regarding the issue of complicity in the white community, stating that “the bulk of the white...Christian majority in this country has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands” (83), principally criticizing the silence of his fellow Christians in the face of this hate and violence.

The author praises Niebuhr in many ways, explaining that he even teaches a seminary course on his work due to his “profound reflections on human nature, the cross, and creative social theory, focusing on justice, self-interest, and power” (88). The prowess of his thought as a theologian was never the issue, he says; it was merely the fact that he had a very “limited perspective, as a white man, on the race crisis in America” (88). This criticism and exploration of Niebuhr’s failings is the author’s way of criticizing all those academics who failed to see a very obvious moral issue in the racial crisis of the era and the violence that was being committed on the supposedly Christian soil of the American south. In examining how and where someone as eminent as Niebuhr could go wrong and miss the boat, as it were, the author can point out where structural, cultural, and institutional issues arise that create the circumstances in which such an obvious evil can go unchecked and unremarked upon.