The southern rite of human sacrifice: lynching in the American South.

The southern rite of human sacrifice: lynching in the American South. HUMAN SACRIFICE human sacrificeOffering of the life of a human being to a god. In some ancient cultures, the killing of a human being, or the substitution of an animal for a person, was an attempt to commune with the god and to participate in the divine life. TO A VENGEFUL DEITY CONJURES SAVAGE AND EXOTICimages that distance us from the practice they represent by beingstrangely obscene. Just as savage but less exotic are images of lynchedAfrican Americans in the Southern United States United States,officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. . The word"lynched" rips from reluctant memories shame, guilt and angerat white atrocities. The stark reality behind the word is a historicalpresence that belies patriotic celebration and challenges professions ofnational innocence; its condensation of white people's fury andblack people's anguish is as intensely malevolent as humansacrifice. Although the facts of lynching are well known among selectedscholars and perhaps families descended from its victims, only in thepast few years have they once again seized the collective memory ofAmericans. Photographic reports of lynching that appeared at exhibitionsin New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of and Atlanta were disturbing to those who studied them in amixture of awe, horror, and profound sadness; the website and book thatcontinue to present such images to a larger audience leave observerswith a range of emotions that are sometimes incapable of utterance.Learning of such things, and gazing at photographs of illegally andcommunally executed victims, college students have wondered, "Whyhaven't we been told of such things?" From an audience ofelders, however--when heating of such things, has erupted the query,"Wasn't anything good happening at the time?"--a questionthat shouts in objection: "Do not tell us of such things!" (1)These two responses are familiar. American citizens, recently subjectedto other ugly photographic representations of their culture, haveobjected to the torture and humiliation of prisoners in American custodyat Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison The Abu Ghraib prison (Arabic: سجن أبو غريب; also Abu Ghurayb) is in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi city 32 km (20 mi) west of Baghdad. . Others defiantly protest that no oneshould ever have revealed what was "going on" among detainees(Sontag; Sullivan). Americans want to be told the worst to understandthemselves; at the same time, they do not want to hear the worst becauseit belies their plaints of innocence. Over the past twenty-five years historians have insisted thatwell-informed people learn the worst. Before 1979, Fitzhugh Brundagenotes, historians of the American South took little interest inlynching. The act was receding into a premodern pre��mod��ern?adj.Existing or coming before a modern period or time: the feudal system of premodern Japan.past, and scholarsbelieved that mobs who triggered it were made up of "individualspoorly integrated into the larger society." Because they associatedlynching with "rural culture corrupted by drunkenness, irreligion ir��re��li��gion?n.Hostility or indifference to religion.Noun 1. irreligion - the quality of not being devoutirreligiousnessimpiety, impiousness - unrighteousness by virtue of lacking respect for a god ,illiteracy, poverty, and excessive license," social scientiststhought that as the South became urban and industrial, mechanisms ofsocial control "would become strong enough to discourageextra-legal violence and discredit the values that sustained it."Other explanations focused on "individual psychopathologies"related to sexuality and gender and on the mechanism that projectsone's own forbidden thoughts onto black men (Brundage,"Introduction" 6-7). But social historians emphasized thatlynching was not the result of "failed social control orexceptional social and psychological states" so much as of"ongoing political and economic contests present in all societies:violence [was] a by-product of 'normal' collectiveaction" (Brundage, "Introduction" 7-10). How tounderstand the "normal" received an innovative jolt fromJacquelyn Dowd Hall's Revolt Against Chivalry chivalry(shĭv`əlrē), system of ethical ideals that arose from feudalism and had its highest development in the 12th and 13th cent. in which she movedcloser to an understanding of social dramas than had previous students(Turner; Geertz). Hall rooted lynching in patriarchal racial andgendered orders to demonstrate how a complex brutal public ritual couldconvey a broad range of meanings and demonstrate where every person fitinto the hierarchy of community life. Sharing Hall's sensitivity tothe sexual but not to the gendered meanings of lynching, Joel Williamsonteased out the psychosexual psychosexual/psy��cho��sex��u��al/ (-sek��shoo-al) pertaining to the mental or emotional aspects of sex. psy��cho��sex��u��aladj.Of or relating to the mental and emotional aspects of sexuality. tensions released by economic insecurity andthe shame evoked by fusing sex and failure in the dynamic conflicts of achanging culture. Bertram Wyatt-Brown and Edward Ayers delved into theculture of honor to explain collective white violence (Brundage, UnderSentence 11-13; Ayers). Perhaps the most impressive sustained analyses of lynching in theearly 1990s were Brundage's Lynching in the New South and StewartE. Tolnay and E. M. Beck's A Festival of Violence. The latter wasbased on analyses of an impressive county-by-county inventory of data onlynching in a South that excluded Virginia and Texas but includedKentucky. The demographics, economics, seasons, and politics of lynchingwere patterned and correlated statistically to establish trends. Tolnayand Beck found that lynching was "an integral element of anagricultural economy that required a large, cheap, and docile laborforce." When African Americans began to leave the South insignificant numbers, "violence and terrorism" began todisappear. They agree with Brundage (as they state his thesis) thatlynchings were "crucial mechanisms" for assuring perpetuationof a plantation economy This article or section may deal primarily with the U.S. and may not present a worldwide view. (Tolnay and Beck 255-57). But Brundage alsoemphasized that lynching happened where the political culture hadalready made violence a demonstrably useful tool. (2) The essaysBrundage brought together in Under Sentence of Death nicely complementedthese two books by reminding scholars that lynching was part of atexture of violence that included near-lynching and legal-lynching aswell. The essays also pointed out that the social genesis of lynchingimplies distance, hierarchy, polarization and objectification of theother--not altogether surprising conclusions. Nor is it surprising forscholars to have inferred that although events can indeed fall intopatterns, analyzing the complexity of each case will confound easygeneralization. Still to be addressed, Brundage believed, were thenature of contagion ContagionThe likelihood of significant economic changes in one country spreading to other countries. This can refer to either economic booms or economic crises.Notes:An infamous example is the "Asian Contagion" that occurred in 1997 and started in Thailand. , the linkages of "gender, race, andclass," and lynchings that did not happen (Brundage"Introduction"). Since that time, scholars have been trying todo as Brundage suggested, building upon the innovative works of theearly 1980s to study specific, dramatic incidents of violence (3) or toprobe patterns within geographical areas or to explore associated issuessuch as gender. (4) Historians have dissected individual lynchings suchas those of Leo Frank For other persons named Leo Frank, see Leo Frank (disambiguation).Leo Max Frank (April 17, 1884 – August 17, 1915) was an American Jew, whose lynching by a mob of prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915 turned the spotlight on anti-Semitism in the United States , Jesse Washington Jesse Washington was an African American farmhand from Waco, Texas. On May 15, 1916, after being convicted of the murder of a local woman, he was lynched by a White American mob, an incident known as the Waco Horror. , Cleo Wright, Emmett Till Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25 1941 – August 28 1955) was a fourteen year old African-American boy from Chicago, Illinois brutally murdered [1] in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the state's Delta region. , andTom Shipp and Abe Smith in Marion, Indiana, and the epidemic of violencein Elaine, Arkansas Elaine is a city in Phillips County, Arkansas, United States. The population was 865 at the 2000 census. GeographyElaine is located at (34.308595, -90.854201)GR1. , in 1919. (5) Some have linked populist violence,African American African AmericanMulticulture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.See Race. resistance, and legal innovation as did Mark Curridenand LeRoy Phillips, Jr., in Contempt of Court, and in 2000, DavidMargolick published Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), born Eleanora Fagan and later nicknamed Lady Day (see "Jazz royalty" regarding similar nicknames), was an American jazz singer, a seminal influence on jazz and pop singers, and generally regarded as one of the , Card Society, and anEarly Cry for Civil Rights. Recently there have been essays on variousaspects of culture and lynching, with an overview of lynching by PhilipDray appearing in 2002. (6) The achievements have been impressive; but few have been arrestedby Gwendolyn Brooks's insight that "the loveliest lynchee wasour Lord" (87-89). Few have wondered why it made sense to envisiona lynched black man as Christ upon the Cross; that is, to imaginelynching as a human sacrifice demanded by a vengeful divinity eventhough it is clear from reports of observers that participants sensedthat somehow lynching was suffused with a religious mood (Schecter 297;Apel 60, 103, 105, 107, 115; Madison; Wellford; Harris). A newspapermanobserving the lynching of Leo Frank, for example, recalled that over theentire affair there glistened a penumbra penumbra(pĭnŭm`brə): see eclipse; sunspots. that suggested a"religious rite"; there was a "curiously reverent rev��er��ent?adj.Marked by, feeling, or expressing reverence.[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin rever manner" and a "grave satisfaction" among the actors(MacLean 940). Nancy MacLean's brilliant analysis of Frank'smurder seizes on the identification of Jews with capitalism but ignoresthe reverence one sensed in the event and did not reflect on the lessonthat adult Christians in Georgia had learned before being plunged intoChrist's death at baptism and raised in His resurrection: Jews hadrepudiated "the Lord. "There are other references by observersof the process of lynching to ritual or the "ritualizedmanner" in which blacks were lynched (Dyer 100; Baker 239). Therewas something quite transcendent to the experiences of individuals andgroups in a public lynching but that transcendence has been difficult toengage in a meaningful way except to recount that it was there even ifwe didn't know exactly what "it" was in "its"mystery and horror, though to be sure we can sometimes sense mystery inimages. In Patricia Schecter's compelling discussion of "HowAntilynching Got its Gender," for example, there is a vivid"figure" the presence of which underscores silence about themeaning of ritual, symbol, rite, "reverent," and"satisfaction"--these words all refer to a religioussensibility reflected in the crucifixion of a black man on a modernGolgotha Golgotha(gŏl`gəthə), the same as Calvary. Golgothaplace of martyrdom or of torment; after site of Christ’s crucifixion. (Schecter 297). The silence about the religious penumbra oflynching is strange because of the common knowledge that crucifixion, anact of violence, is at the very core of the Christian paradigm that wasso essential a part of Southern culture. African Americans understoodthis; they understood that Christ, too, had been lynched. Silence on the religious mood is surprising because of the furtive fur��tive?adj.1. Characterized by stealth; surreptitious.2. Expressive of hidden motives or purposes; shifty. See Synonyms at secret. presence of the sacred in studies of Southern violence. Discussions oflynching have sometimes referred to the almost "primitive"religion of people from whom perpetrators were presumed to have come.Thus, Arthur Raper, in his classic survey The Tragedy of Lynching,included a religious profile of counties in which collective murderstook place. Although he located the causes of violence against blacks inracial prejudice, poverty, illiteracy, isolation, and ignorance, Raperseemed to believe that religion also had something to do with lynching.He knew that religion and community were fused and observed thatclergymen all too easily reflected the values of their community, a factthat nullified nul��li��fy?tr.v. nul��li��fied, nul��li��fy��ing, nul��li��fies1. To make null; invalidate.2. To counteract the force or effectiveness of. Christian compassion for black victims (71). Theministers, Raper thought, had not taught their people "thesacredness and value of human personality" (53). This phrasereflected an insight of a Personalist Methodism with which he wasassociated by background and marriage; but as a social scientist insteadof a student of religion he could not move beyond his dismay that thereligion that enshrouded lynchers was so primitive and savage. (7)Jacquelyn Hall, like Raper, fully understands that her story takes placewithin the Bible Bek and is profoundly sensitive to the gendered andclass meanings of ritual behavior in lynching (180). She exploitsClifford Geertz's famous analysis of a Balinese cockfight to definesuch killing through his description of a drama in which participantsare caught up in "the creative power of an aroused masculinity andthe destructive power of loosened animality" (131 and 306; Geertz,Interpretation 420-21). The weight of the citation in the context ofHall's discussion was on "masculinity" and"animality"--not "good and evil." One who did attempt to address religion and violence was JoelWilliamson in his prize-winning The Crucible of Race; but he preferredto think of religion as an alternative activity after a cycle ofviolence and radical racism rather than context or catalyst (310-17). Heignored the gradual waxing of organized religion in the South throughoutthe period from 1870 to 1930 and preferred to think of it as an eruptionof extreme "otherworldliness" after racist violence had failedto bring relief from the dissonance between the imperative and theempirical. Moreover, Williamson believes that what he calls"fundamentalism" and "otherworldliness" wereinnovations of the period after 1900, when they were merely part of aheightened trajectory of religious life begun with the first evangelicalpreaching of the 1740s and 50s (Mathews). These historical roots werevery much on Suzanne Marshall's mind when she linked religion withviolence "in the Black Patch [tobacco-growing] culture" ofKentucky and Tennessee. Her conclusion was suggested by a religion thathad scourged the area since the Great Revival with a punitive divinePatriarch, draconian in His ways with men, women, children, and nature,whose punishments modeled the harsh penalties His devotees "metedto violators of community standards Community standards are local norms bounding acceptable conduct. Sometimes these standards can itemized in a list that states the community's values and sets guidelines for participation in the community. ." The fusion of violence andreligion flowed from family as well as church; violence was anappropriate way for patriarchs to rear children and train their wives.It was not always easy, of course, to distinguish divine from humanwrath (43, 89-91, 99-100). Marshall did not argue that religion alonecaused violence, but she did attempt to factor it into a context thatshaped a pervasive understanding of sanction and justice in anagricultural region under strain (See Waldrep, Night Riders 15-17,50-51, and 67). Except for Williamson's ruminations,Marshall's analysis was virtually unique. A survey of articles andbooks on Southern violence in 2000 yielded few if any other discussionsof such a connection; so did a survey of works on religion in the South. By 2001, scholars knew that the actual, poetic, graphic, evenphotographic images of crucified (sacrificed) black men reflected arange of meanings. For crucifiers, the twisted, burned, or slashed bodysignified elemental justice, a necessary, even moral, act in a drama ofpunishment and pain that portrayed good and evil in a way that couldsacralize sa��cral��ize?tr.v. sa��cra��lized, sa��cra��liz��ing, sa��cra��liz��esTo make sacred.sa white supremacy white supremacistn.One who believes that white people are racially superior to others and should therefore dominate society.white supremacy n. at least for the moment. For those transfixedby a perceived outrage against reason and law, the detritus detritus/de��tri��tus/ (de-tri��tus) particulate matter produced by or remaining after the wearing away or disintegration of a substance or tissue. de��tri��tusn. pl. ofcollective murder signified a negation of civilization. For those whocould see themselves in the lifeless corpse, whites' bloodletting bloodletting,also called bleeding, practice of drawing blood from the body in the treatment of disease. General bloodletting consists of the abstraction of blood by incision into an artery (arteriotomy) or vein (venesection, or phlebotomy). could signify a world-shattering threat to self and family sooverwhelming in its nihilism nihilism(nī`əlĭzəm), theory of revolution popular among Russian extremists until the fall of the czarist government (1917); the theory was given its name by Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons (1861). that black people could imagine the"lynchee's" death as a vicarious vicarious/vi��car��i��ous/ (vi-kar��e-us)1. acting in the place of another or of something else.2. occurring at an abnormal site.vi��car��i��ousadj.1. sacrifice given (even iftaken) in their stead. Their knowledge of the cross and the sufferingand crucified Lord in their own lives of prayer and collective worshipas Christians prepared them to think of lynching not only as an act ofwhite terror This article or section is written like a personal reflection or and may require .Please [ improve this article] by rewriting this article or section in an . , but also as a signifier sig��ni��fi��er?n.1. One that signifies.2. Linguistics A linguistic unit or pattern, such as a succession of speech sounds, written symbols, or gestures, that conveys meaning; a linguistic sign. of the burdens, that is the cross,they carried which they hoped would be but a prelude to resurrection.Each of these perspectives suggests what anthropologists understand (invarious ways) as "ritualization Ritualization is a behavior that occurs typically in the member of a given species in a highly stereotyped fashion and independent of any direct physiological significance.Ritualization is also associated with the work of the religious studies scholar Catherine Bell. ," or the phenomenon whichCatherine Bell This article is about the actress. For the politician, see Catherine J. Bell. Catherine Lisa Bell (born August 14, 1968 in London, England) is a Scottish-Iranian British-American actress best known as being David James Elliott's co-star, as fiancee and calls "a particular cultural strategy ofdifferentiation linked to particular social effects and rooted in adistinctive interplay of a socialized body and the environment itstructures" (8). For those in charge of lynching, the body of the victim wastransformed from a human being into a representation of what wassupposed to be valued by the community. The actions inflicted upon thebody by ritual performers enacted good and evil, ordered socialdivisions, debased the abject and elevated the transcendent imaginedbeyond the action itself. In 2001, an analysis of lynching photographydemonstrated how "photography simulated the effects of lynching asa ritual, becoming a pivotal step [that] ... affirmed and made manifestwhite solidarity and supremacy" (Wood 195). Amy Louise Woodemphasized the ritual importance of lynching not as a form of fixedsocial solidarity Social Solidarity is the degree or type (see below) of integration of a society. This use of the term is generally employed in sociology and the other social sciences.According to ��mile Durkheim, the types of social solidarity correlate with types of society. but as a pervasive repeatable ritualization of powerrelations practiced on black bodies to assert, confirm, and celebratewhite "honor" against threatened "chaos anddiscord," the envisioning of which demanded "constantreplenishing" in a performance that arrested the imagination (Wood198, 199). Lynching was that performance, and photography, Wood writes,"played a crucial role in this performative per��for��ma��tive?adj.Relating to or being an utterance that peforms an act or creates a state of affairs by the fact of its being uttered under appropriate or conventional circumstances, as a justice of the peace uttering ritual and the socialroles it produced," making the rituals widely known and broadlyengaged far beyond the site of the original practice and allowing timefor a moment of reflection (199 and 199-208). For both witnesses andparticipants the killing, together with all the accretions of ritualaction associated with it, was a religious practice. The expectations ofthe crowd--participant or curiosity seeker or offended observer--wereriveted to the subject as if what happened to him or her wouldcompensate for the original breach of communal harmony and the moraleconomy. The subject's death was supposed to mean something, solvesomething, sanctify sanc��ti��fy?tr.v. sanc��ti��fied, sanc��ti��fy��ing, sanc��ti��fies1. To set apart for sacred use; consecrate.2. To make holy; purify.3. something through the infliction in��flic��tion?n.1. The act or process of imposing or meting out something unpleasant.2. Something, such as punishment, that is inflicted.Noun 1. of sometimesexcruciating pain. Lynching apologists believed their action to have hadfar greater meaning than a simple killing; it was an act through whichto teach, they said, a lesson of profound importance; it was a practicethrough which the enactors aspired to transcendence! Segregation as Religion The overlay of religion and lynching in the New South is acompelling problem because both were waxing in influence throughout theregion at the same time (1880-1900) and because it seems natural tobelieve that a simultaneous increase in religion and illegal collectiveviolence throughout the same region is at least a paradox if not acontradiction (if we ignore medieval Crusades and modern jihadists).Southerners may have been sloughing off the rule of church discipline bythe Great War, but they had been joining the church in greater numberssince the 1880s and reaffirming their faith at the urging of local aswell as nationally renowned evangelists (Wills; Ownby 194-212; Waldrep,Night Riders 115). To be sure, Southern white communities of faithfulpeople had been physically and morally devastated by the Civil War; butgradually churchmen and women had rebuik local churches, colleges, anddenominational boards and bought new presses (Daniel 44-63). During the1890s, denominational bodies could report that new educational andmissionary facilities were producing more members than ever before; inevery Southern state but North Carolina North Carolina,state in the SE United States. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean (E), South Carolina and Georgia (S), Tennessee (W), and Virginia (N).Facts and FiguresArea, 52,586 sq mi (136,198 sq km). Pop. , the percentage increase incommunicants far surpassed the population change in the generalpopulation (Ayers 498-500; Farish 63-105; Harvey 24-31; Thompson 28-70;Ownby 122-64). Statistics, however, underreport un��der��re��port?tr.v. un��der��re��port��ed, un��der��re��port��ing, un��der��re��portsTo report (income or crime statistics, for example) as being less than actually is the case. the percentages andnumbers of people who could be said to have come under the sway ofreligion, which affected a majority of people. Women were probably sixtypercent of church members and it may be assumed they did attempt to liveup to cultural expectations by influencing both their children who werenot on the rolls and the men with whom they lived. Moreover, a dramaticincrease in support for legislative prohibition also suggests atrajectory of moral influence mixed of course with political calculationand class imperialism. (8) Prohibition was a victory for ProtestantChristianity in the South (Coker). Religion also suffused theeducational facilities of the New South; A. D. Mayo certainly believedas much. As Commissioner of Education for the US government, Mayo, aUnitarian minister not infatuated with evangelical Protestantism, foundin the South what he thought was a socially redemptive process. He sawit in the increasing number of pious young women in the 1890s who wereentering Southern schoolrooms to teach children the basic tools andvalues with which to bond communities together in a "commonChristianity" much as missionaries were invading foreign lands(Mayo 59-70, 129-29, 150, 160). Mayo's words are quaint; few people talk as he did anymore,and when they do so their political agenda was often exclusivist ex��clu��siv��ism?n.The practice of excluding or of being exclusive.ex��clusiv��ist adj. & n. andpunitive. But this educational enthusiast was writing at a time whenreligious idiom and "progress" coincided. His words suggestthat it is sectarian, secular or not, to identify the sacred only with"organized religion," magic, superstition, or "belief inGod." All these things are religious, to be sure, but religion issomething other than belief in a transcendent being, assent to a creed,participation in church, or a preternatural compulsion to sing"Amazing Grace "Amazing Grace" is a well-known Christian hymn. The words were written late in 1772 by Englishman John Newton. They first appeared in print in Newton's Olney Hymns, 1779 that he worked on with William Cowper. " at funerals. Reference to a "commonChristianity" was Mayo's way of saying that human brother- andsisterhood were beginning to suffuse suf��fuse?tr.v. suf��fused, suf��fus��ing, suf��fus��esTo spread through or over, as with liquid, color, or light: "The sky above the roof is suffused with deep colors" Southern society in such a way asto make it "Christian"--that is, by his lights, inclusive andjust. That the trajectory of lynching was upward, that a "commonChristianity" was anti-Semitic, and that he was far too optimisticeven for a liberal are not impediments to understanding him. His insightwas that religion can be understood as the pervasive ambience ofsociety, the sum of its values, perhaps its ruling ideology, the patternof ideas that normal people are supposed to believe. (9) Mayo'sdesire for a "common Christianity" was a comment about thefuture of society and reflected a belief in religion as integral toharmonious social relations. He understood that "religion" wasto be found not only in institutions defined as "religious"but also in the quality and tone of society. That is, religion issocial; it flows from social consciousness and, indeed, may beunderstood as the complex symbolic representation of the social orderthrough which we learn transcendence. The concept of God may indeed havebeen birthed from our social consciousness, the experience of whichtranscends self to make demands upon us through a sacred sense of theOther. Historians, at least, should consider this broader and sociallyrooted insight of the classic sociologist Emile Durkheim Noun 1. Emile Durkheim - French sociologist and first professor of sociology at the Sorbonne (1858-1917)Durkheim , who argued, adisciple observes, in an almost egregious simplification, "thatreligious feeling is the individual's awareness of the group"(Hamerton-Kelly 15; Williams, The Bible 16-17). Penalties, such aslynching, exacted of persons certified as having violated community insome way, could be said to have been expiation ex��pi��a��tion?n.1. The act of expiating; atonement.2. A means of expiating.ex rendered to a powersuperior to individuals (Gorringe 54, 53-57). The just killings of thosewho have most horribly breached community life thus mean somethingtranscendent to the individual and his/her community; they "setthings aright a��right?adv.In a proper manner; correctly.[Middle English, from Old English ariht : a-, on; see a-2 + riht, right; see right. " by forcing the one responsible for the breach to"pay for" it with his/her own life. The act and the impactmust be thought dramatic enough to reenact the original breach in adeath made good by "the community." Durkheim's insightmakes it possible to think of executions as human sacrifice. The rite,"reverent manner" and "grave satisfaction," reportedat Leo Leo, in astronomyLeo[Lat.,=the lion], northern constellation lying S of Ursa Major and on the ecliptic (apparent path of the sun through the heavens) between Cancer and Virgo; it is one of the constellations of the zodiac. Frank's lynching were not, therefore, strange; they flowednaturally from the situation and culture in which they were observed;ritual was supposed to make the illegal killing "perfect"(Smith, "Capital Punishment capital punishment,imposition of a penalty of death by the state.HistoryCapital punishment was widely applied in ancient times; it can be found (c.1750 B.C.) in the Code of Hammurabi. " 3-25). Durkheim's insights have helped generations of studentsunderstand the presence of the religious in society apart fromspecifically "religious" institutions and ideas relating to relating torelate prep → concernantrelating torelate prep → bez��glich +gen, mit Bezug auf +accdeity. (10) Clifford Geertz's classic statement of religion as acultural system provides an innovative advance. A. D. Mayo'sphrase, a "common Christianity," used above, was analyticallyvague and too enthusiastic about the bonding capacities of"Christianity," but he used it as a way of referring to thatsense of contextual reality that may confront an observer in a moment ofrecognition as it did Dorothy when she exclaimed to Toto that the twowere "not in Kansas anymore." A better word is"culture," which Geertz calls an "historicallytransmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols"("Religion as a Cultural System" 89). Inviting scholars tothink of religion as a cultural system, he defines a religion as (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in [humans] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of facticity that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (90) Symbols are representations of as well as prescriptions for"reality" (94) and even a symbolically stark Southern Baptist,Methodist, and Presbyterian Christianity over the years employed symbolsof Crucified Christ, Baptism, open Bible, communion wine, sanctified sanc��ti��fy?tr.v. sanc��ti��fied, sanc��ti��fy��ing, sanc��ti��fies1. To set apart for sacred use; consecrate.2. To make holy; purify.3. bread, and empty cross fortified fortified (fôrt´fīd),adj containing additives more potent than the principal ingredient. by ritual acts to represent theChristian drama Christian drama is drama which positively reflects Christian themes. Mystery playThrough the medieval period churches in Europe frequently performed mystery plays, retelling the stories of the Bible. of salvation. Symbols were essential to political speechas well as human relations human relationsnpl → relaciones fpl humanasat the time and could convey a range ofmeanings that patterned imaginative as well as everyday life. Blackskin, white skin, the "New Negro This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone and/or spelling.You can assist by [ editing it] now. ," the "black beast See Bête noire.See also: Black rapist," "pure white women," "Reconstruction,""Whites only" placards, "Colored" signs--all thesewere symbols that established "powerful, pervasive, and longlasting moods and motivations" that helped fabricate racialsegregation in the late 1880s and early 1890s, by "formulatingconceptions of a general order of existence and clothing thoseconceptions with such an aura of facticity fac��tic��i��ty?n.The quality or condition of being a fact: historical facticity.that the moods andmotivations seem[ed] uniquely realistic." The fact that legislatorshad written distance and division into law may have been"political" action, but it relied on feelings of purity anddanger that were not legislated even though they had been fabricated. If "religious feeling," from wherever else it evolves,flows from "an awareness of the group," segregation must beunderstood as a religious system. An obsession with the"group," the structure and substance of human relations,commanded Southern white elites and their mimetic mimetic/mi��met��ic/ (mi-met��ik) pertaining to or exhibiting imitation or simulation, as of one disease for another. mi��met��icadj.1. Of or exhibiting mimicry.2. constituencies afterthe Civil War. The media of this obsession were race and gender; and theways in which law and violence worked together to distance human beingsfrom each other, establish boundaries between them, and make dangerousthe breaching of those boundaries were the ways of religion. Segregationwas, to be sure, a political-economic system with laws to controlworkers essential to industrialization industrializationProcess of converting to a socioeconomic order in which industry is dominant. The changes that took place in Britain during the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century led the way for the early industrializing nations of western Europe and (Cell 134; Cohen cohenor kohen(Hebrew: “priest”) Jewish priest descended from Zadok (a descendant of Aaron), priest at the First Temple of Jerusalem. The biblical priesthood was hereditary and male. ; Woodward, TheStrange Career). The system was developed from the logic of slavery andthe separation of free blacks from whites in antebellum cities. Whereasmasters and slaves may have lived in proximity before the war, class(master-slave) boundaries that reinforced white supremacy beforeAppomattox became horizontal (implying verticality) afterwards tofulfill the same functions. Southern public schools were segregated fromtheir very beginning; and distancing of the races was to be facilitated,or at least symbolized further, by banning marriage between individualsof different "races" before 1884 in nine of eleven Southernlegislatures (Cohen 214-15). Along with the acceleration of violenceagainst African Americans there was also a remarkable increase in lawssegregating the races during and after the 1890s (Woodward, The StrangeCareer 67-109; Ayers 67-68, 121-27, 136-46, 429, 433-34). By the end ofthe century, Southern states were preparing to separate blacks from thepolitical system, too, through widespread disfranchisement The removal of the rights and privileges inherent in an association with a group; the taking away of the rights of a free citizen, especially the right to vote. Sometimes called disenfranchisement. (Ayers,52-54, 146-49, 269, 175-78, 289-90, 298-99, 304-09, 409-13). The goal ofthis policy suggests, as Howard Rabinowitz has pointed out, that thealternative to segregation was neither equality nor integration butexclusion from all public facilities; that is, whites could have doneworse things than what they in fact did (Rabinowitz, "More than theWoodward Thesis" 342-56; Woodward, "Strange CareerCritics" 861). They passed laws to perfect their mastery by fabricating anelaborate system of boundaries, taboos, and etiquette in order toestablish purity (whiteness) and therefore impurity im��pu��ri��ty?n. pl. im��pu��ri��ties1. The quality or condition of being impure, especially:a. Contamination or pollution.b. Lack of consistency or homogeneity; adulteration.c. (blackness) bydistancing black people from white and making proximity dangerous. To besure, segregation as a complex of widespread practices that variedaccording to space, time, and (frequently) whim, was not so much dogmaas a mood that could be swiftly transformed into dogma by whites when itserved their purposes. The Virginia historian and author PhilipAlexander Bruce was one of the dogmatists; he thought the results of thesegregation process had been "notable achievements" of"constructive local statesmanship." Segregation laws, Brucebelieved, preserved racial "integrity," prevented conflict,avoided "moral contamination," discouraged "socialequality," and relieved whites of painful "close physicalcontact" with blacks (Bruce 70-78). The "moralcontamination," which Bruce feared, flowed only in one direction,for, like so many other whites, Bruce viewed African Americans in termsof pollution. When they were marginalized by segregation laws, they werealso made more dangerous in the minds of whites since the margins inculture are always dangerous (Douglas 140). Whites' perception ofthe danger inherent in a new generation of black people undisciplined byslavery was reinforced by the actions of whites themselves in legalizingsegregation and sustaining it with a sacred aura. These feelings of pollution and danger from proximity to ananomalous other were reinforced by the tension that supported the"sexual alibi" for segregation. Bruce linked distance from theother in public education with the banning of miscegenation Mixture of races. A term formerly applied to marriage between persons of different races. Statutes prohibiting marriage between persons of different races have been held to be invalid as contrary to the equal protection clause as part ofthe same impulse; in banning intermarriage in��ter��mar��ry?intr.v. in��ter��mar��ried, in��ter��mar��ry��ing, in��ter��mar��ries1. To marry a member of another group.2. To be bound together by the marriages of members.3. among different raceslegislators and their successors were part of a process of separatingthe races in cities throughout the South, usually through local action(Rabinowitz, Race Relations 128-281). In the 1890s political antipathybetween whites and blacks erupted into campaigns to disfranchise dis��fran��chise?tr.v. dis��fran��chised, dis��fran��chis��ing, dis��fran��chis��es1. To deprive of a privilege, an immunity, or a right of citizenship, especially the right to vote; disenfranchise.2. AfricanAmericans and separate dissident white farmers from their blackneighbors through attacks on an aspiring younger generation of bettereducated black men as potential rapists of defenseless white women.Together with new increased region-wide segregation laws, electoralpolitics, racial suspicion and white-inspired hysteria about danger andpollution from black men and women, Southern white publicistsmanufactured what some writers have called a "rape complex" tojustify lynching (Cash 116-20; Hall, Revolt 112, 129, 145-57;Sommerville, "The Rape Myth" 481-518; and Sommerville, Rapeand Race). To assign the mental patterns behind this linkage of blackmen and white women to a neurotic obsession unsupported by statistics isbeside the point. In the cases of both lynching and segregation, thebodies of white females symbolized the social body, whether as littlegirls in grammar school or as adult women in masculine fantasy; the ideawas and in many ways still is commonplace. Symbolically coupling whitefemales with black males underscored the danger of crossing boundariesand quashing distance and stipulated the danger of any breach. A culturethat already made woman a religious surrogate or mediator for men aswell as the fount of purity found it amiable indeed to establishboundaries and distances that pushed black men to the margin of societyto "protect" her. The pervasive belief that female virginitywas sacred, together with the Christian conviction that sexualintercourse sexual intercourseor coitus or copulationAct in which the male reproductive organ enters the female reproductive tract (see reproductive system). outside marriage was immoral, and whites' widespreadassumption of their "racial" superiority, combined withaversive aversive/aver��sive/ (ah-ver��siv) characterized by or giving rise to avoidance; noxious. a��ver��siveadj. custom and political will to fabricate a system that had thetone, ambience, and imperative of certainty and facticity. Segregationbecame consensual among whites. It was right; the order of the universeconfirmed it. It was sacred in that it placed certain issues beyonddispute; it approached holiness because it established boundaries whichdemanded that individuals "conform to the class to which theybelong.... Holiness," writes Mary Douglas, "means keepingdistinct the categories of creation" (67). Lillian Smith certainly remembered segregation as a form ofholiness. In Killers of the Dream, she mused in a compelling, reflectiveand unforgiving manner about the ways in which "sin and sex andsegregation" had suffused the lives of Southerners. (11) She couldnot separate the three motifs. Although as an adult she believed thatChristian love impugned segregation, as a child she had been taughttogether with other white children "to love God, to love our whiteskin and to believe in the sanctity of both" (Smith, Killers 83).She had learned sin and guilt within the incubation of a "warm,moist evangelism and racial segregation" sanctified by a religion"too narcissistic nar��cis��sism? also nar��cismn.1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See Synonyms at conceit.2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in to be concerned with anything but a man'sbody and a man's soul." The body was the "essence ofmorality," based as the latter was on the "mysterious matterof entrances and exits," sin hovering "over all doors."Critics, favorable or not, commented on her weaving of Freudian insightsinto the fabric of her interpretation, but her primary focus wassegregation. It was part of the mental process of pushing"everything dark, dangerous, and evil" to "the rim ofone's life" where danger lurked. Evil was thought to have beenpurged from the sin-distressed self so that [white] Southerners hadbecome fascinated with other people's evil rather than their ownand had somehow been compelled to find personal salvation in the"death of Christ" without carrying the cross (Smith, Killers88-90, 101, 224-52). Their serf-conscious, narcissistic purity hadshriven shriv��en?v.A past participle of shrive. them of a capacity for understanding religion as service to thekingdom. Although Smith was in what she later recalled as "a kindof amnesia about God," as she wrote the first edition of Killers,she nonetheless understood the intense psychic power of values taught byGod-like parents who fused the spectrum of white-purity-god-aversioninto a powerful compound of holiness (Loveland 172). She has beenclassified as part of a "shame and guilt" school of Southernwriters; she was too passionate, eloquent, and angry, her criticsthought: she was too much the prophet (Loveland 97-105; Hobson 308-13).Many people thought she was a heretic. Since she attacked the primaryreligious structure of the South, indeed she was. Smith's scrutiny of separation and purity was based on her ownexperience and an outraged recognition of the meanings of the spectrum,sin-sex-and-segregation. The cultural patterns that connected law,practice, morality, and meaning were woven and sewn together through along creative process and could reflect differing local fabrics andtextures. If locales produced varieties of separation, those who wereseparated and those who did the separating never varied. "Moods andmotivation" of distance and boundary suffused the South and iflegal patterns fabricated with regard to transportation after 1890 werenew then, they merely replicated the sensibility reflected ineducational segregation and local varieties of distancing that fusedidentity-class-race from the very day Emancipation had been enacted andcontested. If slavery had been abolished, the meanings inferred bywhites from enslavement en��slave?tr.v. en��slaved, en��slav��ing, en��slavesTo make into or as if into a slave.en��slavement n. had not been abolished; in fact, those meaningswere intensified and transcribed into the canon ofdifference-purity-and-danger that compelled a credo of race-and-power asrich in meaning for the faithful as the esoteric mysteries of theApostle's Creed. There were few white protestants in this catholicfaith of hierarchy-separation-and-distance. If there was a polarity between racial "conservatives"and "radicals," the latter representing the pole of racialhatred (Williamson 285-323), both poles existed within the broaderconsensus of racial holiness. With the passing of each year after theonslaught of economic depression in the late 1880s and early nineties,separation-boundary-and-purity became ever more pervasive in publicdiscourse and action. Prohibition movements in Southern states providedimpetus to the process of enforcing purity until the South becamelegally dry before the First World War. The white ribbons ofwomen's temperance symbolized a ubiquitous Southern"purity" associated with light skin, white supremacy,self-discipline, and teetotaling clarity. If repressed male sexuality,combined with shame at economic weakness and guilt for real or imaginedsexual trespasses, accounted for the rage with which white menconfronted the "threat" from black men, there was a broadersurge in white society that transcended the rage while making itlegitimate. (12) That the body was elevated to sacred status--itsboundaries secured, its orifices purified, and its distancingperfected--reflected a society whose elites were determined to masterand to control by violence if necessary. The fusion of SouthernProtestantism with prohibition, repressed sexuality, and thecanonization canonization(kăn'ənĭzā`shən), in the Roman Catholic Church, process by which a person is classified as a saint. It is now performed at Rome alone, although in the Middle Ages and earlier bishops elsewhere used to canonize. of white women all combined to blur distinctions betweensacred and secular where race was concerned. If the logic of marketrelations and the consumption of commodities by different races couldironically destabilize de��sta��bi��lize?tr.v. de��sta��bi��lized, de��sta��bi��liz��ing, de��sta��bi��liz��es1. To upset the stability or smooth functioning of: segregation, true believers of all faithsburdened with internal contradiction could nonetheless model the holyzeal required of white Southerners for confirming orthodoxy in the faceof dissent (Hale). Lillian Smith remembered that the Christian religioncould also have destabilized segregation, but it hadn't; forSouthern whites learned Christianity and segregation from the catechismof domestic life that warned of "everlasting flames" fordisobeying God within the canons of church and segregation (Killers 83,85-86, 88-90). Religion as Punishment In a society where distinctions, boundaries, and margins were soimportant, the clergy insisted upon polarity, too. Ultimately, perhaps,the dread polarity between God's Wrath and human sin was the mostappropriate way of putting the matter; "belief in someone'sright to punish you," wrote Lillian Smith "is the fate of allchildren in Judaic-Christian culture" (Killers 101). If thepolarity was softened into Christian-and-world, or salvation-and-sin, orlove-and-hate, binary opposition nonetheless persisted as it did insegregation. The word that reflected one side of the dichotomy hastraditionally been "otherworldliness"; but it wasotherworldliness plunged deep into this world. Christian commitmentrequired (ideally) a rigorous life of self-discipline, self-reproach,and self-denial, which was decidedly "this-worldly." Equallyso were the distinctive ways in which communities of faithful peopleexpressed their faith and communal connections, all of which wereparticular (at least to insiders) and each of which was authenticated byappeal to Holy Scripture, especially on contested issues. If"otherworldliness" was belied by the enchantment of"this" world in segregation, it was also affirmed by the needto understand and justify pain, moral failure, and death.Otherworldliness seemed to be associated with dogma,"narrowness," biblicism, and irrelevance. This perspective, asone son of Dixie remembered, demanded that preachers speak "of God,of Truth, of Righteousness, of Judgment, the same yesterday, today andforever" (Williamson 313). The perspective was authoritative,certain, and dear. The hard and rigorous fundamentalism that SuzanneMarshall found throughout the violent culture of the Black Patch, theprimitive Calvinism that caught Arthur Raper's Methodist-lensed eyeamong vigilantes, and the punitive wrath that Lillian Smith recalledwere all caught up in the Christian tradition that suffused Southernculture. Wilbur J. Cash captured the meaning of this"otherworldly" religion that so affected this world as"primitive frenzy and the blood sacrifice" (58). It is correct now of course to distance oneself from Cash for hissexism, racism, and superb talent for sacrificing accuracy on the altarof meaning. His lack of proper respect for white Southerners'intellect, or at least intellectuals, seems to be perfectly captured inthe phrase. Citing a "primitive frenzy and the bloodsacrifice" conveys the image of a savage South, a "savageideal" that oversimplifies the region so cruelly that we are bereftof the generous ambiguity of a complexity that includes educated iftedious clergymen, tortured if ineffectual writers, prophetic ifisolated dissenters dissenters:see nonconformists. , and quietly heroic women. But the phrase lingersbecause it is true; if primitive frenzy is translated as the intensedetermination to act forcefully heedless of the law driven by a fusingof repressed sexuality, challenged patriarchy, and reasoned violenceinto the act of murder, we may be able to understand it in lessemotionally freighted ways. But frenzy remains. The meaning of"blood sacrifice" is much more complex; and yet it is at thecore of Southern white fundamental Protestantism. Blood sacrificeconnects the purpose of white supremacists, the purity signified insegregation, the presumed magnificence of God's wrath, and thepermission granted through the wrath of "justified" Christiansto sacrifice black men on the cross of white supremacy. To write that Christianity permitted lynching within a segregatedsociety is not a homiletic hom��i��let��ic? also hom��i��let��i��caladj.1. Relating to or of the nature of a homily.2. Relating to homiletics.[Late Latin hom point. Nor is it on the other hand a prefaceto linking specific acts of violence with specific people in a specificplace who did hideous things because God told them to do so. To be sure,that some people did believe they were absolutely justified amounts tothe same thing; but that is not the point. The point is that becausehistorians know that religious mood, ritual action, and moral outrage atblack men were associated with illegal community acts of violence,students may want to go beyond mentioning such things to ask how wemight understand this nexus, realizing that the task is not simple andthat the connections run through the mentality of white Southerners ifnot necessarily their consciousness. At issue is neither the integrityof Christianity nor the ignorance and credulity cre��du��li��ty?n.A disposition to believe too readily.[Middle English credulite, from Old French, from Latin cr of simple folk whobelieve myths that sophisticated modernists have rejected. At issue isthe cultural reality behind what we have known existed but never had thetemerity te��mer��i��ty?n.Foolhardy disregard of danger; recklessness.[Middle English temerite, from Old French, from Latin temerit to confront; and the place to begin is Lillian Smith'sunderstanding of Christianity as punishment and W. J. Cash'sperception of the "blood sacrifice." Sometimes even"classic" insights are true. It is important to ask: "Howcould Cash's words have come so easily; did whites literallysacrifice blacks? Where could he possibly have conceived the fantasticmetaphor that birthed such a preposterous idea?" The question isnot rhetorical; there is a specific answer: "In church." If the brilliant if flawed Cash sloughed off sloughed offMedtalk adjectice Desquamated loyalty to his Baptistpast with the help of Baptist professors at a Baptist college, he couldnever escape the homiletic images of his youth, especially the mostdramatic ones. And "blood sacrifice" is dramatic; it was anessential part of Southern culture before the Second World War becauseit was central to the Christian narrative of salvation--as it still isfor millions of Christians. That narrative was preached throughout theSouth for over two hundred years, and its most vivid images, plots, andsymbols lay in "Jesus Christ and Him Crucified." That phrasewas the substance of preaching throughout the region although themesvaried: they covered the range of Christian doctrines that began withsalvation from sin. Theoretically at least, salvation lay not inabstinence from certain specific sins or in repression of the sinfulself, although abstinence and repression were among the means ofrevealing one to be a "child of God." Instead, salvation layin Christ's work on the cross; it lay in being justified by faith,certainly, but also in reliance upon His saving act through which a"price" had been paid and satisfaction made; it lay insanctifying a life of obedience in anticipation either of a struggle forperfection or sanctified perseverance. The Bible, which contained thestory of salvation, was to be read in the same way as sermons were to beheard, from the perspective of the cross; for if the Bible contained theWord it was the Word made flesh Word Made Flesh was started in 1991, as a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization that exists to serve and advocate for the poorest of the poor in urban centers of the majority world. The organization focuses most of its work on the most vulnerable of the poor – women and children. who dwelt dwelt?v.A past tense and a past participle of dwell. "among us" and Whowas crucified to set the universe aright. This was what the Apostle Paulhad called the scandal of "the Cross." Thomas Jefferson wascertainly scandalized, for when he edited the Bible into the "Lifeof Jesus" so as to focus on what really mattered in Christianity,every Christian who had been "washed in the blood of the Lamb blood of the lambused to mark houses of the Israelites so they could be passed over. [O.T.: Exodus 12:3–13]See : Protection "knew that Jefferson had ripped salvation out of the Bible and left onlyan impossible ethic and a remarkable man; that was all, and that was notenough (Adams). If churches and ministers could agree with Jefferson that theChristian life required strict morality, they dissented from the viewthat morality was sufficient for salvation as Socinians [Unitarians] andDeists were said to believe. If Christians who responded to evangelicalpreaching expected to be made forcefully aware of salvation through aninner conviction, the focus was not on sentiment alone, or the moment ofillumination or on the physical manifestations of sentiment andillumination, but a "saving knowledge" that Christ had"died for me." The words, "saving knowledge," meantthat "religious experience" went far beyond a mere innerfeeling of being "saved." "Saving knowledge," meantknowing that one had been made just, and justified, before God, but notjustified through the experience itself. That experience had content: aninner knowledge that the crucifixion was "for me" and that ithad conferred pardon through an objective act by a specific man[-God]:"Jesus Christ and Him Crucified." Every doctrine ofChristianity that represented the supernatural action of salvationalways returned the believer to the mystery of the Gross. It would be naive indeed to assume that every Christian in theSouth could have successfully passed an examination in systematictheology on the meanings of the cross. But no matter how imperfectlyunderstood or internalized and no matter how much the slippage betweenprivate doubt and public profession, images and feelings of salvationwere expressed throughout the music, songs, and hymns that were thetheological tracts of folk who sang of ... my Savior and God! O he died on Calvary, To atone for you and me And to purchase our pardon with blood. (Walker 25) Familiar references to Christ as "Savior," "blessedSavior," "the Lamb," the "dying, risen Jesus,"the "redeeming Lord" (Walker 26, 32, 45, 46, 55) all referredto a supernatural, vicarious and sacrificial act upon the cross: Christ, the Lamb of God was slain He tasted death for me. (Walker 102) Christ did so, "Appeasing the wrath of God" and shedding"forth his blood as the cost" of doing so. The mystery of thiswould be made clear in the end-time when Christians should at last ... see the Savior With shining ranks of angels come, To execute his vengeance, And take his ransom'd people home. (Walker 85, 63) References were not to a teacher, but to Lord and Savior. SouthernProtestant Christians shared with the ancient Church and the RomanCatholic Church Roman Catholic Church,Christian church headed by the pope, the bishop of Rome (see papacy and Peter, Saint). Its commonest title in official use is Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. the western inheritance of Jesus of Nazarethtransfigured and revealed as Christ and Savior: He was the Word throughwhom creation came in the beginning and through whom after the fall itwas restored through crucifixion. No one had to understand it precisely("we see through a glass darkly Through A Glass Darkly is an abbreviated form of a much-quoted phrase from the Christian New Testament in 1 Corinthians 13. The phrase is interpreted to mean that humans have an imperfect perception of reality[1]. ") for no one could, buteveryone who claimed to be a Christian had to profess that salvationcame through a saving act of God; and that act was referred to in thelanguage of "price," "cost," "ransom,""penalty," "pardon," and "satisfaction."And all these words were held together by the cosmic requirement thatGod Himself be held to account by His own Justice. At the heart of salvation were the metaphors of retributivejustice; at its center was a symbol of torture and death. The word forChrist's saving action was "atonement." Howeverdifferently various communities of faith may have interpreted theimplications, influences, and results of atonement, there wasnonetheless significant agreement among white Southern Christians before1930 on the signal importance of Christ's sacrificial death. Thatagreement reflected a pervasive moral sensibility that emphasized divinewrath, with cosmic penalty for and condign con��dign?adj.Deserved; adequate: "On sober reflection, such worries over a man's condign punishment seemed senseless"Henry Louis Gates, Jr. punishment of sin. To besure, the religion also emphasized vicarious payment of the penalty forsin by the Son of God whose action made salvation available; butaccording to tradition that action was a sacrifice, an act of violence.To be clear: the Christianity of the white South was a religion of sin,punishment, and sacrifice. It was a religion of violence. "Death isthe penalty of sin," wrote the definitive Southern Baptisttheologian of the late nineteenth century (Mullins 323, 318-35); it wasimposed, wrote a future bishop, by the "wrath of Almighty God"(Marvin 68, 87-89, 91; Mullins 333) whose nature, warned a fellowMethodist, was to "punish the guilty" (Ralston 235). As aPresbyterian divine insisted, "Vindicatory vin��di��ca��to��ry?adj.1. Affording vindication; justifying.2. Exacting retribution; punitive.Adj. 1. Justice [is] Essentialto God" (Dabney, "Vindicatory Justice" 466). Thisinsistence on punitive justice reflected the absolute righteousness ofGod as opposed to the total depravity of humanity that had fallenthrough the disobedient agency of Adam and Eve Adam and EveIn the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, the parents of the human race. Genesis gives two versions of their creation. In the first, God creates “male and female in his own image” on the sixth day. whose guilt was imputedto all those who came afterwards. If imputation IMPUTATION. The judgment by which we declare that an agent is the cause of his free action, or of the result of it, whether good or ill. Wolff, Sec. 3. was a point ofcontention between Calvinists and Wesleyans (Holifield 189-96), it didnot preclude agreement until possibly the turn of the twentieth centurythat human beings deserved death as the moral penalty for the sin thatthoroughly corrupted them. If they deserved death, however, how couldthey be saved from such a penalty? Their mere repentance, which wasafter all, their own act, could achieve nothing; the offense was toogreat, the resulting stain--some would say total depravity--wasineradicable in��e��rad��i��ca��ble?adj.Incapable of being eradicated.ine��rad (Mullins 325; Ralston 203; Dabney, Christ 45-57, 62-63).Only an infinite act of Infinite Being could bridge the infinitedistance in��fi��nite distancen.A distance of 20 feet or more, at which light rays entering the eyes are practically parallel. between Divine Righteousness and human corruption. Justice demanded blood sacrifice. Because the Old Testamentbackground of sacrifice revealed that "the orisons of faith andpenitence PenitenceAct of Contritionprayer of atonement said after making one’s confession. [Christianity: Misc.]Agnes, Sisterformer Lady Laurentini; a penitent nun. [Br. Lit. must be accompanied with the streaming blood of a victim andthe venging fire of the altar," the words associated withsacrifice--propitiation and expiation--were assigned to the Work ofChrist (Dabney, "Vindicatory Justice" 466-67). "God setforth Christ," wrote E. Y. Mullins, "as a propitiation pro��pi��ti��a��tion?n.1. The act of propitiating.2. Something that propitiates, especially a conciliatory offering to a god.Noun 1. for oursins"; he reminded people who already knew it that "Death isthe penalty of sin." Christ bore "the penal consequences ofthe sin of the race because of his complete identification withit." He "endured the wrath of God ... in the sense that hepermitted the sin-death principle to operate in him" (Mullins 318).Christ died, Thomas Ralston reminded his own readers, in propitiationfor human sins; he referred them, as would any knowledgeable Methodistpreacher, to Paul's Epistle to the Romans (3:25): "Whom Godhath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood todeclare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past,through the forebearance of God." Propitiation for both the Baptistand the Methodist as well as their Presbyterian and Episcopal colleaguesmeant that the punitive justice of ultimate reality had been meted out,the penalty for sin paid (Dabney, "Vindicatory Justice"466-81). Moreover, because in the Old Testament the sacrifice of avictim was expiation, in that it removed the sins of the people, bothconcepts applied to Christ's sacrifice (Ralston 201-29, 331, 335,339ff.). That He acted for humans by becoming one of them whileremaining "very God of very God" meant a vicarious (13)sacrifice because finite human power could not pay the infinite price:He acted in humanity's stead--atoned, that is, "paid theprice" demanded by God's justice, and "washed"humans in His blood. Ministers knew that not all of their laity (or their colleagues)thoroughly understood or believed the complex connections that biblicalscholarship provided, but there were other means to make the essentialpoint. For people seeking to interpret their salvation in a dialecticrelationship between faith and hope, consciousness and orthodoxy couldbe conflicted. When it was time publicly to repeat the Creed or renewthe Covenant or sing the reception of "amazing grace," thesound of one's own voice uniting with others in song, prayer orpublic recitation rec��i��ta��tion?n.1. a. The act of reciting memorized materials in a public performance.b. The material so presented.2. a. Oral delivery of prepared lessons by a pupil.b. confirmed the mystery represented by orthodoxy atleast for the moment. Such people heard countless familiar andritualistic rit��u��al��is��tic?adj.1. Relating to ritual or ritualism.2. Advocating or practicing ritual.rit sermons, whether read, exposited or chanted, that describedthe blood flowing from Redeemer's head, hands, side, and feet; theyfelt the terrible jolt against His searing wounds when the cross wasplunged into the earth. They could not fail to have been impressed, aswas the young Wilbur Cash, with the "primitive" feelings thatwould later allow him to understand the "blood sacrifice" asessential to the Mind of the South. The message of sin, guilt, andpunishment, associated with the elemental and universal symbol of blood,was conveyed further by exhortations, prayers, hymns, recitations,scowls, maternal tears, and patriarchal condemnation. All worked to cry"guilt," to teach guilt, to instill in��stillv.To pour in drop by drop.instil��lation n. guilt: to make theoffending soul shudder at the enormity of his/her guilt. The feelingsthat sustained the credibility of this incredible doctrine had afflictedgenerations of white Southerners by the twentieth century. Even tepid orrebellious believers learned that religion was punishment: they enduredor remembered or heard about the connection in church trials; they heardand felt the depth of divine wrath from angry preachers; they learned,too, from admonishing ad��mon��ish?tr.v. ad��mon��ished, ad��mon��ish��ing, ad��mon��ish��es1. To reprove gently but earnestly.2. To counsel (another) against something to be avoided; caution.3. looks, raised eyebrows, whispered confidences, andthe anguish of awakening sexuality the pervasiveness of sin and thenecessity of retribution. All these things when contrasted with therighteousness of God taught children of conventional Christians thatSomeone had a Right, as Lillian Smith recalled, to punish them; it wasGod's Obligation to Himself. (14) Christ was the symbol ofGod's love, to be sure; but first He was the Lamb of God Lamb of God:see Agnus Dei. sacrificedfor human sin. Sin demanded punishment. Punishment meant death! The source of this penal theory of atonement was presumably pre��sum��a��ble?adj.That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. theBible; everyone who accepted it believed as much; but they were wrong.As the great Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulen pointed out long ago, athousand years had actually lapsed between the crucifixion and the firstmature statement of the theory. During that time various understandingshad circulated within the Ghurch, and some of these played upon themotif, which Aulen thought best expressed atonement in the phrase,Chrisms Victor. Gonceding elements of sacrifice but pointing out thatthese neither emphasized punishment nor employed legal metaphors, Aulenargued that the message of Paul, the early Ghurch, and Patriarchs was ofa Ghrist Who broke human bondage to the Law and the forces of evil asthe victorious and Incarnate in��car��nate?adj.1. a. Invested with bodily nature and form: an incarnate spirit.b. Embodied in human form; personified: a villain who is evil incarnate. Lord (Aulen 22-26, 31-35,43, 47-60, 66-80).References to sacrifice came out of Old Testament texts from a cultus cul��tus?n. pl. cul��tus��es or cul��tiA cult, especially a religious one.[Latin, veneration; see cult.]Noun 1. that maintained the holiness of community through spilling blood (the"containing life force") of slain animals that substituted forthe offenses of the people. Evil was channeled into an animal whoseexpiatory ex��pi��a��tion?n.1. The act of expiating; atonement.2. A means of expiating.ex death became a "saving event" (Gorringe 38-40). Thevicariousness of such rites is clear for the Day of Atonement Day of Atonementn.See Yom Kippur.[Translation of Hebrew y?m kipp?r.]Day of AtonementNounsame as Yom KippurNoun 1. [Leviticus16]: in one ritual a goat is sacrificed for the sins of the people; inanother, a goat [scapegoat] is laden with the sins of the people throughprayer, driven into the wilderness, and thus charged with banishingviolence and guilt. Against such references, however, we may cite others that subvertthe importance of sacrifice. I Samuel 15:22, Amos 5:22ff., and Micah6:7-8, for example, repudiate TO REPUDIATE. To repudiate a right is to express in a sufficient manner, a determination not to accept it, when it is offered. 2. He who repudiates a right cannot by that act transfer it to another. sacrifice. Such contradictions in acomplexity of books, laws, and ritual acts suggest why it is tendentious ten��den��tiousalso ten��den��cious ?adj.Marked by a strong implicit point of view; partisan: a tendentious account of the recent elections. to write of a "biblical theology of sacrifice" (Gorringe50-53, 57). Yet Jewish discourse when Saul of Tarsus Saul of Tarsus:see Paul, Saint. was a studentincluded the redemptive qualities of suffering and a sacrificial death.Indeed, some thinkers fused the scapegoat mechanism and expiatorysacrifice. When he became Paul the Apostle, Saul labored to explain to ahostile Jewish community how an executed criminal broken on a Roman"gallows" could be the Messiah. His was not an easy task. Hepresented Ghrist Jesus as a "sacrifice of atonement by his blood,effective through faith" (Romans 3:25), a claim which might haveappealed to some Jews then engaged in thinking about sacrificial death,but his major emphasis was on participation in Ghrist. Paul wasabsolutely clear in his critique of the Jewish law and insisted that bydying under it, Christ had placed human life above it. This act wassupposed to bring Jews and Gentiles together into a new community inwhich all were reconciled to each other and to God by their becomingliving sacrifices (Gorringe 71-82). Because the Biblical texts wereambiguous, however, no single theory dominated interpretation of theCross for a thousand years. Then came Anselm of Canterbury For entities named after Saint Anselm, see . (1033-1109), who introduced a newmetaphor to explain the work of Christ: satisfaction. He did so withinthe context of a society that was highly stratified stratified/strat��i��fied/ (strat��i-fid) formed or arranged in layers. strat��i��fiedadj.Arranged in the form of layers or strata. and in which legalmetaphors ruled. An elaborate code of "honor" sustained socialsolidarity. Offences against those of high rank demanded punishment or,in its place, satisfaction relative to the nature of the insult and therank of the one offended lest the social order be unbalanced. The samecould be said of the relation between sinful humans and God, observedthe Archbishop of Canterbury in answering the question: Cur Deus Homo?(Why the God-man?) Since we already owe God everything it is impossiblefor us to pay satisfaction for our sins. Worse, because to dishonor To refuse to accept or pay a draft or to pay a promissory note when duly presented. An instrument is dishonored when a necessary or optional presentment is made and due acceptance or payment is refused, or cannot be obtained within the prescribed time, or in case of bank collections, Godis to dishonor Infinite Being, only an infinite satisfaction isappropriate. Therefore, Deus Homo must pay satisfaction inhumanity's place. Anselm came to this conclusion within the contextof a church system of penance and of a society in which crime denied the"bonds of mutual trust and concern on which the community dependsfor its existence" (Gorringe 99, 85-99). In such a culture,retribution in the payment of a debt "restores that fair balance ofbenefits and burdens" disturbed by crime, writes a student ofpunishment. The same was true of sin and divine retribution. Whereas thework of Christ was once conceived as victory over the power of evil[Satan], now it was conceived as payment to God to satisfy the debt owedby mankind for its sin. Once the devil had held mankind ransom, but nowit was God; the God who Paul believed had liberated Christians frombondage to the law had become law itself (Gorringe 99, 101-03). Over the next few hundred years, this theme shaped the medievalmentality that became "saturated with the concepts of Christ andthe cross." Satisfaction, punishment, and suffering became thedominant themes of salvation. The focus on law and satisfaction lay notmerely in religious sensibility and theological formulation but also inthe rise of the state with its mechanisms for bringing order out ofchaos and law out of custom through the power to punish (Gorringe104-25). With the Reformation, Jean Calvin adapted Anselm's theoryand improved upon it within the continuing context of political andjudicial development. But whereas Anselm developed his theory within thechurch's system of penance and thought of satisfaction as thepayment of debt, Calvin relied on the metaphors and analogies ofcriminal law; for Anselm, Christ "pays our debts; in Calvin hebears our punishment" (Gorringe 139). Even Wesleyans who were notenamored en��am��or?tr.v. en��am��ored, en��am��or��ing, en��am��orsTo inspire with love; captivate: was enamored of the beautiful dancer; were enamored with the charming island. of Calvinist theology spoke the language of satisfaction andpunishment, as we have seen. Thomas Ralston's abridgement ofRichard Watson's Institutes labored to distinguish Methodism fromCalvinism, but if he disagreed with Calvinists on the constituency ofatonement, he agreed with the Genevan on its punitive model. ForSoutherners, who, like medieval knights, lived in a culture of honor,the clearest statement of the theory was made by Dabney, whose desire todistinguish clearly between faith and faithlessness FaithlessnessSee also Adultery, Cuckoldry.Angelicabetrays Orlando by eloping with young soldier. [Ital. Lit.: Orlando Furioso]Camillafalls to temptations of husband’s friend. [Span. Lit. made him an idealspokesman for Christians in the region. He basked in the language ofpunishment. All of life's calamities, he wrote, are"penal," they have "moral significance" as"God's displeasure with men's sins" (Christ 32). Hewrote easily of God's "punitive providence," of a justicethat demanded punishment, and of a Christ who "suffered legally andrighteously for the guilt of sin imputed to him" (38, 64). Furiouswith soft-hearted "dreamers" who did not understand that the"guilt of sin must be avenged by the just penalty," hecondemned the self-indulgent who ignored the axiom that "punishmentof every sin is inevitable." The cosmic reality within which theChristian life was to be lived, according to Dabney, was the punishmentthat Christ had taken upon himself and which "satisfied the divineperfection outraged by our sins" ("Vindicatory JusticeEssential to God" I: 469-72). Killing solves the intractableproblem of evil. Such theology could not remain in "otherworldly"abstractions but effected the Christian's view of self and world.Dabney had defended his punitive theory of atonement by appealing to thehorror felt by the virtuous, like himself, when criminals were notpunished and he reminded Christians of the oft-expressed desire ofBiblical writers for "proper retribution at the hand of God."The Christian, he insisted, should find pleasure in others'"suffering for sin"; Christians know, Dabney thundered, thatcriminals must suffer "penal retribution" because it wasrational, just, and sacred. The Christian should realize that havingparticipated "in the judicial triumphs of the Redeemer"through grace s/he was free to participate in righteous vengeance. To besure, Dabney warned full retribution would come only at the FinalJudgment, but allowing saints to anticipate participating in that cosmicact granted permission to enjoy vengeance in the interim. Belief that"righteous retribution is one of the glories of the divinecharacter" could easily become a belief that people benefittingfrom cosmic retribution were righteous in their own determination topunish. If the "godly god��ly?adj. god��li��er, god��li��est1. Having great reverence for God; pious.2. Divine.god man" in pursuing justice had remittedfinal "penal settlement to a perfect God" and arrested"his own forcible agency as soon as the purposes of mereself-defence are secured," he was nonetheless justified indefending himself with godly "vengeance." Believing this, andbelieving that all of his own life after 1865 was a defense against theungodly, Yankees, religious liberals, African Americans, it is notsurprising that Dabney should have devoted himself to perfecting atheology of vengeance ("Christian's Duty" 706-21). Heknew that he would be dismissed as one of those "stupid old fogiesbesotted in their bigotry" ("Christ" 15); he knew, too,that his view was condemned as a "brutal theology of ancientbarbarians" ("Vindicatory Justice" 469); but he scornedsuch prissy "babbling babblingNeurology Quasi-random vocalizations in infants that precede language acquisition. See Lalling stage. ." Truth was hard; justice was hard; thecross was hard. His personality, which demanded order, aloofness,hierarchy, honor, certainty, and toughness found its justification in areligion driven not by grief at one's own sin but the draconianpunishment of others (Gorringe 140). In this fashion, punishment was sacralized by the dominant religionof the American South. To be sure, as Dabney knew, there were Christianswho contested this view. Centuries before, Anselm and Calvin had notprevented alternative views from Peter Abelard or Martin Luther, and bythe end of the nineteenth century, a few Wesleyans were beginning toemphasize that the way of the cross revealed more of Love than ofJustice. African Americans' views of Christ's work, too, weredramatically different; they had perceived that the one broken on thecross suffered with them, not for them. They believed that He had comenot to justify punishment but to break its power, not to encouragehumans to participate in God's vengeance but to show that God wasnot enraged with them (Raboteau 22-39; Early; Thurman). One can imagineRobert Dabney's infuriated in��fu��ri��ate?tr.v. in��fu��ri��at��ed, in��fu��ri��at��ing, in��fu��ri��atesTo make furious; enrage.adj. ArchaicFurious. contempt. He would not have been alone;indeed, as a few white Southerners began to shrink back from thepunitiveness of a God who ruled in terroristic rage, one of theirsavants objected to such cowering. Poet John Crowe Ransom's God wasthe "stern and inscrutable God of Israel" rather than the"amiable and understandable God" Whom he believed liberalswere then fabricating from the New Testament, modern science, andsentimental optimism (1-25, 49-51). Written in response to suchsissified sis��si��fied?adj.Of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a sissy; timid, cowardly, or effeminate.Adj. 1. sissified - having unsuitable feminine qualities idolatry IdolatryAaronresponsible for the golden calf. [O.T.: Exodus 32]AshtarothCanaanite deities worshiped profanely by Israelites. [O.T. and the anti-Southern fall-out from the Scopes trial(Larson), Ransom's book, God Without Thunder, was precisely whatthe subtitle said it was, An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy. The son ofa Methodist missionary-minister and the brother of a woman who wroteSunday school lessons, Ransom attacked the new religiosity re��li��gi��os��i��ty?n.1. The quality of being religious.2. Excessive or affected piety.Noun 1. religiosity - exaggerated or affected piety and religious zealreligiousism, pietism, religionism for embracingthe myths of science and naturalism rather than those of the orientalGod who delighted in burnt offerings and crushed Job into the dust(10-11). The rage of such a God was magnificent. If Ransom eventuallyleft both church and South, he had indeed captured the religious mood hehad inherited in pleading with believers to "restore to God thethunder"--that is, the wrath and the penalty. Sacrificing Christ / Sacrificing Black Men Conceiving of God as Supreme Hangman HANGMAN. The name usually given to a man employed by the sheriff to put a man to death, according to law, in pursuance of a judgment of a competent court, and lawful warrant. The same as executioner. (q.v.) and the Christ as DivineSubstitute who paid the penalty for human sin in blood sacrifice did notmake white Christians lynch black people. The formula did, however,reflect a state of mind; it reflected the ways in which widely sharedviews of moral accountability and penalty could allow, when fused withwhites' racial antipathy, patriarchal prerogative, sexualapprehension, and economic tenuousness, public violence against a blackman associated with a crime of rich symbolism. In such an event we areconfronted with a myth as powerful as that of Christian atonement--amyth also of a specific kind of fall, a resulting collective disorder,and a punishment appropriate to the crime. The offense was defined bythe myth of the "black beast rapist" intent on ravishing rav��ish��ing?adj.Extremely attractive; entrancing.ravish��ing��ly adv. innocent white women (Hall 112, 129, 145-57); the myth inherent in theimage became one of the most pervasive white Southern parables of sin,guilt, punishment, and salvation. Both myths coincided in the sharedbelief that punishment changes things in the community far beyond themere effect of the act itself upon the "criminal." There is ashared sense that the one upon whom the myth is centered, the Christ orthe "rapist," must die to relieve the discord (sin, anguish,conflict) so dangerous to community. Both Christ and rapist become asacrifice that, as Rene Girard points out, produces "thesacred" (Things Hidden 226). (15) They do so by plunging all themeaning of community into one act of violence that resolves potentialcollective conffict and therefore "saves" the community; thesubjects of sacrificial violence take upon themselves the sins ofcommunity as the scapegoat did in ancient Jewish ritual when consignedthe community's sins. The black man, like the scapegoat in the OldTestament, does not take on sin voluntarily. But voluntarily or not, heis sacralized by collective transference to him of sin and violence(Things Hidden 177). This violent transference is justified by appeal inboth cases to the justice of God. With regard to Christian atonement,the sacrificial reading of Christ's death lays responsibility forthe victim's death upon Divine Justice (230-31). Killing the blackvictim is also understood to be the "will of God," that is,just. In both cases punishment is necessary to sustain sacred order, andin the case of the black victim, punishment may be a "sublimation sublimation, in chemistrysublimation(sŭblĭmā`shən), change of a solid substance directly to a vapor without first passing through the liquid state. of people's self-assertive instincts and hostilities"(Gorringe 46). White Southerners did not think of their executions of black men assimilar to Christ's sacrifice even if black Southerners did so(Schecter 297; Harris 103, 126, passim PASSIM - A simulation language based on Pascal.["PASSIM: A Discrete-Event Simulation Package for Pascal", D.H Uyeno et al, Simulation 35(6):183-190 (Dec 1980)]. ). Walter White, the author andsecretary of the NAACP NAACPin full National Association for the Advancement of Colored PeopleOldest and largest U.S. civil rights organization. It was founded in 1909 to secure political, educational, social, and economic equality for African Americans; W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. , did not quite make the connection invoked byliterary figures and historians, but he did believe that the religion ofwhite Southerners had created the "particular fanaticism" thatled to lynching. He recounted a list of atrocities inflicted by whiteChristians against people unlike themselves from medieval pogromsthrough defenses of slavery to Belgian rule in the Congo; the list couldhave been much longer. He lashed the mentality that tried heretics andwitches, preached "hell-fire" and racial superiority, andilluminated the night with fiery crosses. The "insane rage" hesaw in posturing white ministers represented to him the emotional andignorant people of the [white] "Christian South" (40-53,40-44, 48, 52). Angry as he was at whites' religion, he did notprobe the internal punitiveness of a religion he identified withignorance and fanaticism to think about the sacred nature of theviolence he documented in his work. Given the brutality of lynching andthe contempt with which its victims were treated, one might be excusedsome skepticism that in executing a black victim, whites were actuallymaking him sacred. But such skepticism reflects a point of view thatdoes not see in the ritual of lynching a communal transference to thesubject of violence all of the violence implicit in community itself;or, if it sees the transference, does not understand its religiousmilieu and meanings. Yet reporters at both the lynching of Sam Hose in1899 and of Leo Frank in 1915 wrote that in these ghastly events theyobserved that something "sacred" was happening (McLean 175;Williamson 185-89; [Sam Hose]). As Girard points out, from one point ofview "there is ... hardly any form of violence that cannot bedescribed in terms of sacrifice" (Violence 1). Girard argues thatthe violence, which many scholars believe always has its reasons, willinexorably find its victim within community as long as the reality ofviolence in collective life is hidden from communal consciousness. It is important to remember that Girard thinks of sacrifice not interms of a priest's appeasing of deity, but of the practice inancient societies of selecting outsiders, persons of no status, toprovide sites of violence that "solve" problems of collectiveunrest and implicit conflict because these persons may be killed withoutfear of vengeance (Violence 1). And, as Edward Ayers, among others, haspointed out, black men seized for lynching were often marginal to thecommunities in which they were sacrificed (156-58). Sacrifice is"an act of violence without risk of vengeance," just as islegal execution within the judicial system; it exacts judicialpunishment as a substitute for private vengeance that avoids a circle ofviolence that would otherwise never stop. Sacrificial rites are"essential" in "societies that lack a firm judicialsystem," Girard writes; they take the place of revenge (Violence14-18). It is also possible, however, to think of the Americanpublic's vengeful participation through the media in such mattersas jury trials, verdicts and executions as indicative of a sacrificialmentality. The accused subject is sacralized in that he (sometimes she)bears the burden of all implicit violence (and resentment at acts notpunished) within community when attention is focused upon him or her.The violence of which one is accused becomes symbolic of all theviolence inflicted upon "the innocent" that becomes incollective perception "the community" which believes itself tohave been victimized. The scapegoat mechanism that allowed Christ to take on the sins ofthe world in a sacrificial reading of atonement also allowed Christianshistorically to transform Jews into scapegoats. During plagues in thefourteenth century, for example, Christians murdered Jews in order tostop the fatal consequences of the black death. These and otherChristian persecutions of religious minorities were justified by thesame scapegoating mechanism that applies, Girard points out, even ifthose accused are actually guilty of what they were charged with havingdone. Accusers still seek in the accused "individual the origin andcause of all that is harmful" (Reader 115, 97-117) in the communityand perhaps even in the society beyond. Stereotyping transforms theaccused into a symbol or representative of the evil deplored in thescapegoating process. If one is selected from a stereotyped, persecutedclass of "others" as a lynching victim, it may be because hehad not sustained in his own person or actions the differences by whichthe persecuting authority had insisted those whom he represented shouldhave been distinguished (Reader 116-17, 211-21). And in fact, we knowthat black men who had stepped beyond places assigned African Americansby law and tradition, and especially if they had been known as renegadesor had appeared as strangers without significant connections to thecommunity, could in times of economic and social crisis be sacrificed tothe communal expectation of obedience to the rubrics of kind, order,class, race, and gender. Moving out of place to be like white peopleinstead of remaining "black" could be fatal (Ayers 139-46,156-57; Williamson 128-33, 183-89, 289-90, 301-13). When such anomalousbehavior could be associated with sex--even if the charge was notstrictly speaking linked with any real "crime"--thejuxtaposition of gender, sex, power, and disobedience in the minds ofwhite people could make lynching seem appropriate. Horrified hor��ri��fy?tr.v. hor��ri��fied, hor��ri��fy��ing, hor��ri��fies1. To cause to feel horror. See Synonyms at dismay.2. To cause unpleasant surprise to; shock. as manywhite Southern Christians probably were at the lynching of black men,they nonetheless blamed the latter for their own victimization victimizationSocial medicine The abuse of the disenfranchised–eg, those underage, elderly, ♀, mentally retarded, illegal aliens, or other, by coercing them into illegal activities–eg, drug trade, pornography, prostitution. withlittle guilt. Even white men who thought of themselves as opposing lynching couldsometimes be understood as justifying the very acts that they thoughtthey were condemning. Both Methodist Bishop Atticus G. Haygood (Haygood;Mann; Rubin) and Baptist layman Governor William Northen publiclydenounced lynching--but then surrendered their moral high ground byobserving that lynching would end when blacks no longer raped whitewomen (Brundage 195-97, 201-02; Luker 91, 100; Williamson 287-91). Theirreasoning reflected the common assumption that in certain universallyunderstood encounters between blacks and whites, African Americans werealways at fauk simply by being black; and this made illegal lynchingappear to be as legitimate as legal punishment. The abstraction,"justice," was mystified mys��ti��fy?tr.v. mys��ti��fied, mys��ti��fy��ing, mys��ti��fies1. To confuse or puzzle mentally. See Synonyms at puzzle.2. To make obscure or mysterious. by tradition, power, and genderedmyths associated with relations between the races as interpreted bywhite men; it was sacralized by pious white people who believed that lawdemanded satisfaction from all who breached it. Even Christ had to havebeen broken upon the demands of the law that humanity might be saved.Each subject of every lynching, by virtue of his (her) having beenseized by the mob, had both literally and symbolically broken the law,and "justice" demanded satisfaction. This is not to say thatmen and women went through a conscious process that linked a traditionalwhite understanding of Christian atonement to the punishment of blackmen; but it is to suggest that even those who moralized their actionsthrough Christian conversation could not move beyond the scapegoatingmechanism inherent in attributing the source of violence, even violenceagainst themselves, to black people. They could not understand that lynching resolved violence withinthe social system by attributing its source to African Americans andthen punishing a representative of that class in order to achieve"peace." They could not see that they were party to a ritualof human sacrifice in which the shedding of blood restores order,resolves violence, and fulfills the requirements of "justice."They identified not with the victim of their violence but with thelaw--or the custom--that demanded and therefore justified punishment; itwas in the very logic of the racialized universe. When in the 1890s, IdaB. Wells challenged the myth of the black-beast-rapist as based on thetwin illusions of white women's innocence and white men'sgallantry, whites' fury suggested that she had committed more thanlese majeste and sacrilege SacrilegeSadness (See MELANCHOLY.)abomination of desolationepithet describing pagan idol in Jerusalem Temple. [O.T.: Daniel 9, 11, 12; N.T. . In her blasphemy blasphemy,in religion, words or actions that display irreverence toward or contempt for God or that which is held sacred. Blasphemy is regarded as an offense against the community to varying degrees, depending on the extent of the identification of a religion with , the outspoken AfricanAmerican journalist had profanely challenged one of the most cherishedexpressions of that "religious feeling [that] is theindividual's awareness of the group," if Durkheim'sinsight is conceded at even an elementary level (Hall 328-49; Schecter292-317; Luker 91-114; Hamerton-Kelly 15). Sexuality, gender, and powerwere essential to the white individual's awareness of community asexpressed in the practices and beliefs of a sacralized segregation;mentally fusing these three with the moral certainty moral certaintyn. in a criminal trial, the reasonable belief (but falling short of absolute certainty) of the trier of the fact (jury or judge sitting without a jury) that the evidence shows the defendant is guilty. that attributedinnocence to some, assigned guilt to others and then demanded vividpunishment in a dramatic act was a religious process. African American writers have understood this dynamic of community,guilt, and punishment. Trudier Harris is clear on this point in herbook, Exorcising Blackness, which she begins by suggesting that lynchingis a "Peculiarly American Ritual" and that it is very muchlike the scapegoating mechanism of ancient ritual that Sir James Frazerhad discussed in The Golden Bough. Referring to the transfer of guiltfrom the community to the "scapegoat" in Frazer'sunderstanding of ancient sacrificial rites, she deftly links it with the"cleansing" process explained by Gordon Allport in The Natureof Prejudice through which groups project "their basest fears anddesires onto other groups" and elevate themselves above those thusdespised (Harris 1, 12, 17). Reluctant to concede that lynching had thecosmic implications suggested in this essay, Harris nonetheless analyzesthe ways in which African American writers have engaged whites'obsession with black sexuality and the terrible consequences of thatobsession for African Americans. Indeed, she argues that Richard Wrightused "the lynching and burning ritual, and historical and socialconnotations surrounding it, to shape the basis of his aesthetic visionof the world" (95, 95-128). From the history of white violence,Wright displays the ritualistic care with which white executioners focustheir torture and punishment on the black victim's sexuality whichthey carve out of him according to rubrics they seem instinctively toknow. Each movement seems to call attention to the power of white men topunish blacks, the cutting and the burning seem to purify the crowdparticipating in this ghastly cleansing ritual, and the trophies takenfrom the body afterwards appear to be sacred relics taken to remindtheir beholders of action that is quite unlike the ordinary actions ofcommon life. The task that black male writers assumed, Harris believes,was to "exorcise fear from racial memory" (195); but theirfunction here is to remind us that if they focused primarily on the waysin which whites castrated blacks to remind African Americans of who theenemy was, they also understood that the violence against them wasritualized; it reflected whites' conception of the universe. Andthey did not understand, as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, that "theloveliest lynchee was our Lord" (Harris 77; Brooks 87-89). Theywere blind to the insight that identified victims of lynching with theChrist whose death (and resurrection) symbolized their faith. Unlikeblack Christians, their white co-religionists seemed to think ofthemselves as positioned with divine wrath (justice?) against the (eveninnocent) offender. If divine wrath demanded punitive death, whitesbelieved that in imagining justice, they stood with the judge and notwith the crucified. Certainly Haygood and Northen had not been able literally to seethe victimization of black men. The self-righteousness that blindedwhites to the ways in which their own protestations of innocencevictimized black people needed to be challenged; the Christ had to beunderstood as suffering with the victims of white violence and the mythof the black-beast-rapist that incorporated the myth of the immaculateprotection for white womanhood had to be exposed. Such alchemy was noteasy; but by 1905 there were some changes. Then, a strange andcompelling little book appeared, written by the pastor of the FirstPresbyterian Church First Presbyterian Church is a generic church name, and can refer to hundreds of churches within the English speaking world. If you followed a link here, please consider making it more specific by including the city or town in which the church resides. of Newport News, Virginia Newport News is an independent city in Virginia. It is on the southwestern end of the Virginia Peninsula, on the north shore of the James River extending to its mouth at Hampton Roads.The origin of the unusual name of "Newport News" is unclear. , Edwin TalliaferroWellford. In The Lynching of Jesus, Wellford did not confront either theancient or the modern myth directly; he merely told a familiar storywith a radically different emphasis. His first chapter suggested hispurpose. In "The Slaughter of the Innocents" he pointed outthat lynching could not be justified by appeal to the myth of immaculateprotection; he excoriated mob law as the lynching of both the victim andthe law. He thought that the "savage spirit of barbarity"aroused with every lynching constituted a "Reign of Terror"and he pleaded for a "full exposure of the crime" and thosewho committed it. He refused to concede whites' innocence. Then hemade an abrupt but sophisticated transition to an even greaterbarbarity, as he called it. "The lynching of Jesus excels inbrutality and in the slaughter of the innocent, all succeedingoffences," he observed to a white Christian audience. "So longas the twentieth century looks on with unstirred sympathy and passes bythe mobbing of Jesus with unconcern and apathy, so long will similardeeds be repeated, in any land with impunity. If the public consciencedoes not resent the greatest it will not take cognizance The power, authority, and ability of a judge to determine a particular legal matter. A judge's decision to take note of or deal with a cause.That which is cognizable to a judge is within the scope of his or her jurisdiction. of theless" (18-19). That is, as a well-educated Presbyterian clergyman,Wellford knew the connection between white Christians' view ofpunishment (atonement) and lynching and he denied that the justice ofGod demanded lynching of Christ. By putting the matter as he did, Wellford was not diminishing theevil of lynching black men; he was doing the exact opposite. He wassubtly attempting to change the focus of his white Christianreaders' attention when they thought of lynching. He wanted them tomake a connection between what Christ's executioners did to Him andwhat white people did to the black men they murdered. Robert LewisDabney Robert Lewis Dabney (March 5, 1820 – January 3, 1898) was an American Christian theologian, a Southern Presbyterian pastor, and Confederate Army chaplain. He was also chief of staff and biographer to Stonewall Jackson. His biography of Jackson remains in print today. had written fiercely of "God in his punitive providencehaving punished Christ legally and righteously for the guilt of sinimputed to him" (Christ 32); Wellford now attacked thisinterpretation. God had riot "punished Christ legally andrighteously" so far as Wellford was concerned. He was trying toshift responsibility from the black victim of white violence to thewhite perpetrators themselves; lynching was to be seen not as theunderstandable illegal punishment of guilty black men, but as the modernrecapitulation recapitulation,theory, stated as the biogenetic law by E. H. Haeckel, that the embryological development of the individual repeats the stages in the evolutionary development of the species. of deicide De´i`ciden. 1. The act of killing a being of a divine nature; particularly, the putting to death of Jesus Christ.Earth profaned, yet blessed, with deicide.- Prior.2. . Christ's death was not to be understoodas just punishment. In challenging one of the principal interpretationsof dogma deriving from "Jesus Christ and Him crucified," hewas thinking of the atonement in a new light. Rather than emphasizingthe justice of Christ's sacrifice, he emphasized its profoundinjustice; he also seemed to be trying to transfer empathy for themurdered Christ to modern lynch victims by insisting that Jesus had been"lynched." He understood that the doctrine of substitutionaryatonement had allowed white Christians to ignore the meaning of thecrucifixion and of lynching. Wellford did not attack the theology butinstead emphasized the illegality, that is, the injustice of each stepin the process that led to Christ's death, and in doing so, he wasweakening the theology received by tradition as he hoped to weaken whitepeople's inability to confront the evil they seemed to approve.Leading the reader by the hand through proof texts step by step alongthe maze through which Jewish and Roman authorities went as theyshort-circuited the judicial system and avoided due process, the authorstripped away all pretense to justice. And he insisted that allparticipants--Sanhedrin, chief priests, Pontius Pilate, and themob--knew that the young rabbi was innocent. "Law," wroteWellford, "was never so debauched, nor 'man's inhumanity in��hu��man��i��ty?n. pl. in��hu��man��i��ties1. Lack of pity or compassion.2. An inhuman or cruel act.inhumanityNounpl -ties1. to man' so apparent" (88). What had murdered the Christ?Hatred, calumny calumnyn. the intentional and generally vicious false accusation of a crime or other offense designed to damage one's reputation. (See: defamation) , secrecy, conspiracy, the "insatiate passion of amisguided multitude!" "Innocence," Wellborn observed,"has often been victimized by personal interest, political pull,sordid bribery, or frenzied passion." But, he insisted, theNazarene would judge in His time all those who have oppressed andmurdered, for he knew "the merit of right, and has felt theoppression of wrong." The clergyman then ended by linking thereader with the Christ and the latter, in turn, with victims ofinjustice; there was no doubt that lynching was the instrument ofoppression. In 1905 such a conclusion among Southern whites was rare(89-91). Wellford's pamphlet was scarcely the first robin before aspring of racial justice or theological mutation. But his homileticinsight that Jesus, too, was lynched, when understood within theconservative ethos of Southern whites' religion, suggests that achange was possible in the assumptions of white innocence when it cameto the myth of lynching. Eventually that change would be accelerated bywhite Southern women as they attacked the myth of immaculate protection.Jacquelyn Hall has explained how in the 1920s white women from withinthe Wesleyan tradition together with African American women began towork for racial justice as uneasy allies in coalition with men of theCommission on Inter-racial Cooperation (CIC CICcirculating immune complexes.CICCirculating immune complexes. See Immune complexes. ). All of theseconstituencies emphasized that the myth of white innocence andjustification for lynching were lies told to buttress a racial orderbased on lies. Disciplined by the scheming arrogance of men whocontrolled the Methodist Episcopal Church, South The Methodist Episcopal Church, South was the so-called "Southern Methodist Church" resulting from the split over the issue of slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church which had been brewing over several years until it came out into the open at a conference held in Louisville, , these white women werepart of a vanguard who expanded the claims of religion beyond theconfines of manmade walls with the help of the new discipline ofsociology and the urgency of a new social gospel. Under the leadershipof Jessie Daniel Ames, who enticed them into the Association of SouthernWomen for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL ASWPL Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching ), these activists attackedthe myth of immaculate protection. By joining the antilynching movementalready begun by Ida Wells-Barnett (the Anti-Lynching Crusaders), theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the CIC,the white women of ASWPL insisted that they were threatened not by blackrapists but by white lynchers. Their actions impressed indelibly uponthe public mind the meaning of their words. At the local level theyworked with and sometimes against law enforcement officers to preventlynchings; if they still feared assault by black men, they nonethelessacted in such a way as to put their faith in law instead of inextemporaneous ex��tem��po��ra��ne��ous?adj.1. Carried out or performed with little or no preparation; impromptu: an extemporaneous piano recital.2. illegal community violence (Hall, Revolt passim; Hall,"The Mind"). In belying myths based on innocent and helplesswhite women, activists had not stopped lynching but they had begun todisenchant dis��en��chant?tr.v. dis��en��chant��ed, dis��en��chant��ing, dis��en��chantsTo free from illusion or false belief; undeceive.[Obsolete French desenchanter, from Old French, one of the South's most sacred myths. Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurredwithin the context of a sacred order. Holiness demands purity, andpurity was sustained in the segregated South by avoidance, margins,distances, aloofness, strict classification and racial contempt in lawand custom. To be sure, economic benefits flowed from whites'attempts to control black people, but these were hidden even from whitepeople themselves who fabricated sexualized myths of otherness aboutAfrican Americans. Essential to these myths by the late 1880s was theimage of the white woman whose innocence justified whatever violencewhite men might find "necessary" for her protection againstthe "black-beast-rapist." When myth brought violence, deadlyrituals that stripped the black victim of his sexuality were grislyevidence of a transfer to the black body of the violence, guilt, andshame in the white community; the transfer reenacted ancientscapegoating rituals and resonated with the formal religion of ChristianSoutherners who had centered "sacrifice" as a means ofsalvation. The cross symbolized a salvation effected by Christ'spaying just satisfaction for the sins of humanity: focus was on thejustice of punishment. Even God had had to pay the price for human sin.That African Americans could see lynching as a sacrificial act in whichthey identified with the victim meant that existentially at least theyunderstood an alternative view to the orthodox (white) emphasis on penalsacrifice. A few whites could begin to see that Christ, too, had beenlynched and to challenge theology implicitly and white conceptions ofjustice explicitly. Because the myth of God's just vengeancepermitted whites' obsession with punishment to rule their relationswith blacks there was no restriction within the core myth of Christianidentity to the racism that clouded their vision. It was possible forthe rare white Christian to sense that atonement demanded empathy withsacrificial victims so that there might be no more "victims";but this insight remained hidden from most Southern whites for themoment. They could not see, as black Christians did, that in a sacrificecelebrated in such dramatic and public fashion, the Christ had becomeblack. The full meaning of that insight for understanding religion,punishment, and justice in America was still to be realized; lynchingwas but one way of using death to solve problems of violence andjustice. Works Cited Adams, Dickinson W., ed. 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Students' questionsoccurred within an undergraduate history research seminar in the springof 2004; the auditor's questions occurred after a lecture to alumniat the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2005. See alsohttp://www.americanlynching.com. This essay is an edited and compressedversion of an article that appeared first in the Journal of SouthernReligion. (2) In Lynching in the New South, Brundage contrasts Virginia andGeorgia. The latter was a high lynching state with a peculiar history ofpolitical violence that encouraged mobs to believe they could terrorize ter��ror��ize?tr.v. ter��ror��ized, ter��ror��iz��ing, ter��ror��iz��es1. To fill or overpower with terror; terrify.2. To coerce by intimidation or fear. See Synonyms at frighten. blacks with impunity. Virginia's history and the political will ofauthorities were less amenable to the terror that characterized whitesupremacy in Georgia. (3) See, for example, Dinnerstein, Ellis, McGovern, MacLean, Smead,Whitfield; see also Wolf. There are many other articles on specificlynchings; citations may be found in Brundage, Under Sentence. (4) See Ingalls, MacLean; Marshall, Waldrep, and Wright. The listscould fill a book, and they have: see Moses. (5) Capeci, Stockley, Madison, Oney, Till-Mobley and Benson,Bernstein. (6) See Apel, Carrigan, Gussow, Markovich, Pfeifer, Rice,Steelwater, and Waldrep. (7) Borden Parker Bowne, the Boston and Methodist Personalistphilosopher who was beginning to attract attention from SouthernMethodists in the 1890s, could easily have written the phrase Raperused. Raper's father-in-law was a distinguished Southern Methodistminister. See Bowne; for an example of the influence of Personalism onMethodism, see Knudson. (8) The prohibition movements were ways of disciplining andcontrolling black men as well as white, and the racist expression oftemperance campaigns implied the tactic of enlisting white "churchpeople" in support of white supremacy; see Bode. See also Ansley,Isaac, Sellers, and Whitener. (9) "Pattern" and "normality" can be contestedof course. In the United States over the past generation, conflict overwhat is "normal" and which "patterns" are to bepreferred suggests the volatility and dynamism of such issues. But sincethese conflicts are about what is to be valued ultimately, and what isto be considered "sacred," they take on the ambience ofreligious conflict. See Mathews, "Spiritual Warfare," andHunter. Another word for the phrase "pervasive ambience," ofcourse, is "culture." In discussing culture as a system ofsymbols, Clifford Geertz says that "sacred symbols function tosynthesize a people's ethos--the tone, character, and quality oftheir life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood--their worldview--the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are,their most comprehensive ideas of order." See Geertz,"Religion as a Cultural System," Interpretations 89. (10) Students may begin with Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy:Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion and Thomas Luckmann, TheInvisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. See alsoMary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollutionand Taboo: "We shall not expect to understand religion if weconfine ourselves to considering belief in spiritual beings, however theformula may be refined" (35). (11) Smith's comment in "A Report from Lillian Smith onKillers of the Dream." An editorial in the Atlanta Constitutionreferred to Smith as "the ex-missionary who has made a professionof writing stuff that purposely sets out to debase de��base?tr.v. de��based, de��bas��ing, de��bas��esTo lower in character, quality, or value; degrade. See Synonyms at adulterate, corrupt, degrade.[de- + base2. the South, with afury that continually overleaps itself." "Miss Smith,"wrote Ralph McGill of the Constitution, is "a prisoner in themonastery of her own mind." See Lillian Smith Papers 1283A,University of Georgia OrganizationThe President of the University of Georgia (as of 2007, Michael F. Adams) is the head administrator and is appointed and overseen by the Georgia Board of Regents. Library, Box 30. Even recent critics find her tooabsorbed in race to be a worthy critic of the South. See Hobson. BecauseSmith focused on segregation, Hobson writes, she missed "much ofwhat else the South was and had been" (321). (12) Joel Williamson puts the matter this way: "In theirfrustration white men projected their own worst thoughts upon black men,imagined them acted out in some specific incident, and symbolicallykilled those thoughts by lynching a hapless black man. Almost anyvulnerable black man would do" (308). (13) For proof texts cited in support of the substitutionaryatonement, see Dabney, Christ 87-98; Leviticus 1:4, 14:21, 17:11,passim; John 1:29; Romans 5:6; 1 Corinthians 6:20, 15:3; 2 Corinthians5:21; Hebrews 8:3, 9:11-14; 1 Timothy 2:6; 1 Peter 3:13, 2:24 amongothers. (14) One socialized within the alternative vision of liberalChristianity and educated by the masters of neo-orthodoxy almostinstinctively senses the rage and violence of the orthodox myth; and therecent work of Rene Girard helps one understand the violence inherent init. See especially The Girard Reader 9-29. See also Job 10-13, 34,122-23, 140. For further interpretation, see Williams, Bible, Violence,and the Sacred, vii-lx, 1-20, 25-31. (15) The power of the sacred, writes Girard, "derives fromwhat it has said in real terms to human beings concerning what must andmust not be done in a given cultural context, in order to preservetolerable human relations within the community. The sacred is the sum ofhuman assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on areconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis. [A"mimetic crisis" refers to a moment when violence is about tobreak out.] Far from being a leap into the irrational, the sacredconstitutes the only hypothesis that makes sense for human beings aslong as these transferences retain their power" (42).