The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice: Lynching as Religious Ritual in the American South

DONALD G.
MATHEWS
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Southem Rite of Human Sacrifice:
Lynching in the American South
HUMAN SACRIFICE TO A VENGEFUL DEITY CONJURES SAVAGE AND EXOTIC
images that distance us from the practice they represent by being
strangely obscene. Just as savage but less exotic are images of lynched
African Americans in the Southem United States. The word "lynched"
rips from reluctant memories shame, guilt and anger at white atrocities.
The stark reahty behind the word is a historical presence that belies
patriotic celebration and challenges professions of national innocence;
its condensation of white people's fury and black people's anguish is as
intensely malevolent as human sacrifice. Although the facts of lynching
are well known among selected scholars and perhaps families descended
from its victims, only in the past few years have they once again seized
the collective memory of Americans. Photographic reports of lynching
that appeared at exhibitions in New York and Atlanta were disturbing
to those who studied them in a mixture of awe, horror, and profound
sadness; the website and book that continue to present such images to a
larger audience leave observers with a range of emotions that are
sometimes incapable of utterance. Leaming of such things, and gazing at
photographs of illegally and communally executed victims, college
students have wondered, "Why haven't we been told of such things?"
From an audience of elders, however^when hearing of such things, has
erupted the query, "Wasn't anything ^ooi/happening at the time?"a
question that shouts in objection: "Do nott us of such things!"' These
two responses are famiHar. American citizens, recently subjected to
other ugly photographic representations of their culture, have objected
to the torture and humiliation of prisoners in American custody at Iraq's
Abu Ghraib prison. Others defiantly protest that no one should ever
have revealed what was "going on" among detainees (Sontag; Sullivan).
'See Allen et al.. Without Sanctuary. Students' questions occurred within an
undergraduate history research seminar in the spring of 2004; the auditor's questions
occurred after a lecture to alumni at the University of North Carolina at Chapel HUl in
May 2005. See also http://www.americanlynching.com. This essay is an edited and
compressed version of an article that appeared first in the Journal of Southem Religion.
28 Donald G. Mathews
Americans want to be told the worst to understand themselves; at the
same time, they do not want to hear the worst because it belies their
plaints of innocence.
Over the past twenty-five years historians have insisted that
well-informed people leam the worst. Before 1979, Fitzhugh Brundage
notes, historians of the American South took httle interest in lynching.
The act was receding into a premodem past, and scholars believed that
mobs who triggered it were made up of "individuals poorly integrated
into the larger society." Because they associated lynching with "rural
culture corrupted by drunkenness, irreligion, illiteracy, poverty, and
excessive license," social scientists thought that as the South became
urban and industrial, mechanisms of social control "would become
strong enough to discourage extra-legal violence and discredit the values
that sustained it." Other explanations focused on "individual
psychopathologies" related to sexuahty and gender and on the
mechanism that projects one's own forbidden thoughts onto black men
(Brundage, "Introduction" 6-7). But social historians emphasized that
lynching was not the result of "failed social control or exceptional social
and psychological states" so much as of "ongoing pohtical and economic
contests present in all societies: violence [was] a by-product of 'normal'
collective action" (Brundage, "Introduction" 7-10). How to understand
the "normal" received an innovative jolt from Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's
Revolt Against ChivaJry in which she moved closer to an understanding
of social dramas than had previous students (Turner; Geertz). Hall rooted
lynching in patriarchal racial and gendered orders to demonstrate how
a complex brutal public ritual could convey a broad range of meanings
and demonstrate where every person fit into the hierarchy of
community life. Sharing Hall's sensitivity to the sexual but not to the
gendered meanings of l)Tiching, Joel WiUiamson teased out the
psychosexual tensions released by economic insecurity and the shame
evoked by fusing sex and failure in the dynamic conflicts of a changing
culture. Bertram Wyatt-Brown and Edward Ayers delved into the
culture of honor to explain collective white violence (Brundage, Under
Sentence 11-13; Ayers).
Perhaps the most impressive sustained analyses of lynching in the
early 1990s were Brundage's Lynching in the New South and Stewart E.
Tolnay and E. M. Beck's A Festival of Violence. The latter was based on
analyses of an impressive county-by-county inventory of data on
Tbe Southern Rite of Human Sacrice 29
lynching in a South that excluded Virginia and Texas but included
Kentucky. The demographics, economics, seasons, and politics of
lynching were patterned and correlated statistically to establish trends.
Tolnay and Beck found that lynching was "an integral element of an
agricultural economy tbat required a large, cheap, and docile labor
force." When African Americans began to leave tbe South in significant
numbers, "violence and terrorism" began to disappear. They agree with
Brundage (as they state his thesis) that lynchings were "crucial
mechanisms" for assuring perpetuation of a plantation economy (Tolnay
and Beck 255-57). But Brundage also emphasized that lynching
happened where tbe political culture bad already made violence a
demonstrably useful tool.^ The essays Brundage brought together in
Under Sentence of Death nicely complemented these two books by
reminding scholars tbat lynching was part of a texture of violence that
included near-lynching and legal-lynching as well. The essays also
pointed out that the social genesis of lynching impUes distance,
hierarchy, polarization and objectification of the othernot altogether
surprising conclusions. Nor is it surprising for scbolars to bave inferred
tbat altbougb events can indeed fall into patterns, analyzing tbe
complexity of eacb case wiU confound easy generalization. Still to be
addressed, Brundage believed, were the nature of contagion, the linkages
of "gender, race, and class," and lynchings that did not happen (Brundage
"Introduction"). Since tbat time, scholars have been trying to do as
Brundage suggested, building upon the innovative works of the early
1980s to study specific, dramatic incidents of violence^ or to probe
patterns witbin geographical areas or to explore associated issues sucb as
gender."* Historians have dissected individual lyncbings sucb as tbose of
Leo Frank, Jesse Washington, Cleo Wright, Emmett Till, and Tom Shipp
^In Lynching in the New South, Brundage contrasts Virginia and Georgia. The latter
was a high lynching state with a peculiar history of political violence that encouraged
mobs to believe they could terrorize blacks with impunity. Virginia's history and the
political will of authorities were less amenable to the terror that characterized white
supremacy in Georgia.
'See, for example, Dinnerstein, EUis, McGovem, MacLean, Smead, Whitfield; see also
Wolf. There are many other articles on specific lynchings; citations may be found in
Brundage, Under Sentence.
*See IngaUs, MacLean; Marshall, Waldrep, and Wright. The lists could fill a book,
and they have: see Moses.
and Abe Smith in Marion, Indiana, and the epidemic of violence in
Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919.^ Some have linked popuhst violence, African
American resistance, and legal innovation as did Mark Curriden and
LeRoy Phillips, Jr., in Contempt of Court, and in 2000, David Margolick
pubhshed Strange Fruit: Biiiie Holiday, Caf Society, andan Early Cry
for Civil Rights. Recently there have been essays on various aspects of
culture and lynching, with an overview of lynching by Phihp Dray
appearing in 2002.*
The achievements have been impressive; but few have been arrested
by Gwendolyn Brooks's insight that "the loveliest lynchee was our Lord"
(87-89). Few have wondered why it made sense to envision a lynched
black man as Christ upon the Cross; that is, to imagine lynching as a
human sacrifice demanded by a vengeful divinity even though it is clear
from reports of observers that participants sensed that somehow
lynching was suffused with a religious mood (Schecter 297; Apel 60,103,
105, 107, 115; Madison; Wellford; Harris). A newspaperman observing
the lynching of Leo Frank, for example, recalled that over the entire
affair there glistened a penumbra that suggested a "religious rite"; there
was a "curiously reverent manner" and a "grave satisfaction" among the
actors (MacLean 940). Nancy MacLean's brilliant analysis of Frank's
murder seizes on the identification of Jews with capitahsm but ignores
the reverence one sensed in the event and did not refiect on the lesson
that adult Christians in Georgia had learned before being plunged into
Christ's death at baptism and raised in His resurrection: Jews had
repudiated "the Lord. "There are other references by observers of the
process of lynching to ritual or the "ritualized manner" in which blacks
were lynched (Dyer 100; Baker 239). There was something quite
transcendent to the experiences of individuals and groups in a public
lynching but that transcendence has been difficult to engage in a
meaningful way except to recount that it was there even if we didn't
know exactly what "it" was in "its" mystery and horror, though to be
sure we can sometimes sense mystery in images. In Patricia Schecter's
compelling discussion of "How Antilynching Got its Gender," for
example, there is a vivid "figure" the presence of which underscores
silence about the meaning of ritual, symbol, rite, "reverent," and
'Capeci, Stockley, Madison, Oney, Till-Mobley and Benson, Bernstein.
'See Apel, Carrigan, Gussow, Markovich, Pfeifer, Rice, Steelwater, and Waldrep.
Tbe Southern Rite of Human Sacrice 3 \
"satisfaction"these words all refer to a religious sensibihty refiected in
the crucifixion of a black man on a modern Golgotha (Schecter 297). The
silence about the rehgious penumbra of lynching is strange because of
the common knowledge that crucifixion, an act of violence, is at the very
core of the Christian paradigm that was so essential a part of Southern
culture. African Americans understood this; they understood that Christ,
too, had been lynched.
Silence on the religious mood is surprising because of the furtive
presence of the sacred in studies of Southern violence. Discussions of
lynching have sometimes referred to the almost "primitive" rehgion of
people firom 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 murders took place.
Although he located the causes of violence against blacks in racial
prejudice, poverty, illiteracy, isolation, and ignorance, Raper seemed to
believe that religion also had something to do with lynching. He knew
that rehgion and community were fused and observed that clergymen all
too easily refiected the values of their community, a fact that nulhfied
Christian compassion for black victims (71). T'he ministers, Raper
thought, had not taught their people "the sacredness and value of human
personality" (53). This phrase refiected an insight of a PersonaHst
Methodism with which he was associated by background and marriage;
but as a social scientist instead of a student of rehgion he could not move
beyond his dismay that the rehgion that enshrouded lynchers was so
primitive and savage.^ Jacquelyn Hall, hke Raper, fiiUy understands that
her story takes place within the Bible Belt and is profoundly sensitive to
the gendered and class meanings of ritual behavior in lynching (180).
She exploits Clifford Geertz's famous analysis of a Balinese cockfight to
define such killing through his description of a drama in which
participants are caught up in "the creative power of an aroused
masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality" (131 and
306; Geertz, Interpretation 420-21). The weight of the citation in the
'Borden Parker Bowne, the Boston and Methodist Personalist philosopher who was
beginning to attract attention from Southern Methodists in the 1890s, could easily have
written the phrase Raper used. Raper's father-in-law was a distinguished Southern
Methodist minister. See Bowne; for an example of the influence of Personalism on
Methodism, see Knudson.
context of Hall's discussion was on "masculinity" and "animality"not
"good and evil."
One who did attempt to address religion and violence was Joel
Williamson in his prize-winning The Crucible of Race ; but he preferred
to think of religion as an alternative activity after a cycle of violence and
radical racism rather than context or catalyst (310-17). He ignored the
gradual waxing of organized religion in the South throughout the period
from 1870 to 1930 and preferred to think of it as an eruption of extreme
"otherworldhness" aer racist violence had failed to bring reUef from
the dissonance between the imperative and the empirical. Moreover,
WiUiamson beheves that what he calls "fundamentalism" and
"otherworldhness" were innovations of the period after 1900, when they
were merely part of a heightened trajectory of religious Ufe begun with
the first evangehcal preaching of the 1740s and 50s (Mathews). These
historical roots were very much on Suzanne Marshall's mind when she
linked religion with violence "in the Black Patch [tobacco-growing]
culture" of Kentucky and Tennessee. Her conclusion was suggested by
a religion that had scourged the area since the Great Revival with a
punitive divine Patriarch, draconian in His ways with men, women,
children, and nature, whose punishments modeled the harsh penalties
His devotees "meted to violators of community standards." The fusion of
violence and religion flowed from family as well as church; violence was
an appropriate way for patriarchs to rear children and train their wives.
It was not always easy, of course, to distinguish divine from human
wrath (43, 89-91, 99-100). Marshall did not argue that religion alone
caused violence, but she did attempt to factor it into a context that
shaped a pervasive understanding of sanction and justice in an
agricultural 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 and books on Southem violence in
2000 yielded few if any other discussions of such a connection; so did a
survey of works on religion in the South.
By 2001, scholars knew that the actual, poetic, graphic, even
photographic images of crucified (sacrificed) black men reflected a range
of meanings. For crucifiers, the twisted, burned, or slashed body signified
elemental justice, a necessary, even moral, act in a drama of punishment
and pain that portrayed good and evil in a way that could sacrahze white
supremacy at least for the moment. For those transfixed by a perceived
Tie Southern Rite of Human Sacrifce 33
outrage against reason and law, the detritus of collective murder
signified a negation of civilization. For those who could see themselves
in the lifeless corpse, whites' bloodletting could signify a
world-shattering threat to self and family so overwhelming in its
nihilism that black people could imagine the "lynchee's" death as a
vicarious sacrifice given (even if taken) in their stead. Their knowledge
of the cross and the suffering and crucified Lord in their own lives of
prayer and collective worship as Ghristians prepared them to think of
lynching not only as an act of white terror, but also as a signifier 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 (in various ways) as "rituahzation," or the
phenomenon which Gatherine Bell calls "a particular cultural strategy
of differentiation hnked to particular social effects and rooted in a
distinctive interplay of a socialized body and the environment it
structures" (8).
Eor those in charge of lynching, the body of the victim was
transformed from a human being into a representation of what was
supposed to be valued by the community. The actions infhcted upon the
body by ritual performers enacted good and evil, ordered social divisions,
debased the abject and elevated the transcendent imagined beyond the
action itself. In 2001, an analysis of lynching photography demonstrated
how "photography simiilated the effects of lynching as a ritual, becoming
a pivotal step [ t hat ] . . . affirmed and made manifest white soHdarity and
supremacy" (Wood 195). Amy Lomse Wood emphasized the ritual
importance of lynching not as a form of fixed social solidarity but as a
pervasive repeatable rituahzation of power relations practiced on black
bodies to assert, confirm, and celebrate white "honor" against threatened
"chaos and discord," the envisioning of which demanded "constant
replenishing" in a performance that arrested the imagination (Wood 198,
199). Lynching was that performance, and photography. Wood writes,
"played a crucial role in this performative ritual and the social roles it
produced," making the rituals widely known and broadly engaged far
beyond the site of the original practice and allowing time for a moment
of refiection (199 and 199-208). For both witnesses and participants the
killing, together with all the accretions of ritual action associated with
it, was a i-eZi^bu practice. The expectations of the crowdparticipant
or curiosity seeker or offended observer^were riveted to the subject as
if what happened to him or her would compensate for the original
breach of communal harmony and the moral economy. The subject's
death was supposed to mean something, solve something, sanctify
something through the infliction of sometimes excruciating pain.
Lynching apologists believed their action to have had far greater
meaning than a simple killing; it was an act through which to teach, they
said, a lesson of profound importance; it was a practice through which
tbe enactors aspired to transcendence!
Segregation as Religion
The overlay of religion and lynching in the New South is a
compelling problem because both were waxing in influence throughout
the region at the same time (1880-1900) and because it seems natural to
beheve that a simultaneous increase in religion and illegal collective
violence throughout the same region is at least a paradox if not a
contradiction (if we ignore medieval Crusades and modem jibadists).
Southerners may have been sloughing off tbe rule of cburcb discipline
by tbe Great War, but they had been joining tbe cburcb in greater
numbers since the 1880s and reaffirming their faith at tbe urging of local
as well as nationally renowned evangelists (Wills; Ownby 194-212;
Waldrep, Night Riders 115). To be sure, Soutbem wbite communities of
faitbful people bad been pbysically and morally devastated by tbe Civil
War; but gradually churchmen and women bad rebuilt local cburches,
colleges, and denominational boards and bougbt new presses (Daniel
44-63). During tbe 1890s, denominational bodies could report tbat new
educational and missionary facilities were producing more members
than ever before; in every Southem state but North Carolina, the
percentage increase in communicants far surpassed tbe population
cbange in the general population (Ayers 498-500; Farish 63-105; Harvey
24-31; Thompson 28-70; Ownby 122-64). Statistics, however, under-
report the percentages and numbers of people who coidd be said to bave
come under tbe sway of religion, wbicb affected a majority of people.
Women were probably sixty percent of cburcb members and it may be
assumed tbey did attempt to live up to cultural expectations by
influencing botb tbeir children wbo were not on tbe roUs and tbe men
witb wbom tbey lived. Moreover, a dramatic increase in support for
legislative probibition also suggests a trajectory of moral influence mixed
Tbe Soutbem Rite of Human Sacrice 35
of course with political calculation and class imperiahsm.* Prohibition
was a victory for Protestant Christianity in the South (Coker). Religion
also suffused the educational facihties of the New South; A. D. Mayo
certainly beheved as much. As Commissioner of Education for the US
govemment. Mayo, a Unitarian minister not infatuated with evangelical
Protestantism, found in the South what he thought was a socially
redemptive process. He saw it in the increasing number of pious young
women in the 1890s who were entering Southern schoolrooms to teach
children the basic tools and values with which to bond communities
together in a "common Christianity" 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 pohtical agenda was often exclusivist and
punitive. But this educational enthusiast was writing at a time when
rehgious idiom and "progress" coincided. His words suggest that it is
sectarian, secular or not, to identify the sacred only with "organized
rehgion," magic, superstition, or "behef in God." All these things are
rehgious, to be sure, but rehgion is something other than behef in a
transcendent being, assent to a creed, participation in church, or a
preternatural compulsion to sing "Amazing Grace" at funerals. Reference
to a "common Christianity" was Mayo's way of saying that human
brother- and sisterhood were beginning to suffuse Southern society in
such a way as to make it "Christian"that is, by his hghts, inclusive and
just. That the trajectory of lynching was upward, that a "common
Christianity" was anti-Semitic, and that he was far too optimistic even
for a liberal are not impediments to understanding him. His insight was
that rehgion can be understood as the pervasive ambience of society, the
sum of its values, perhaps its ruhng ideology, the pattern of ideas that
normal people are supposed to beheve.' Mayo's desire for a "common
*rhe prohibition movements were ways of disciplining and controlling black men
as well as white, and the racist expression of temperance campaigns impUed the tacdc
of enlisting white "church people" in support of white supremacy; see Bode. See also
Ansley, Isaac, Sellers, and WTiitener.
'"Pattern" and "normality" can be contested of course. In the United States over the
past generation, conflict over what is "normal" and which "patterns" are to be preferred
suggests the volatility and dynamism of such issues. But since these conflicts are about
what is to be valued ultimately, and what is to be considered "sacred," they take on the
ambience of religious conflict. See Mathews, "Spiritual Warfiare," and Hunter. Another
word for the phrase "pervasive ambience," of course, is "culture." In discussing culture
Christianity" was a comment about the future of society and reflected a
behef in rehgion as integral to harmonious social relations. He
understood that "religion" was to be found not only in institutions
defined as "religious" but also in the quahty and tone of society. That is,
rehgion is social; it flows from social consciousness and, indeed, may be
understood as the complex symbolic representation of the social order
through which we leam transcendence. The concept of God may indeed
have been birthed from our social consciousness, the experience of
which transcends self to make demands upon us through a sacred sense
of the Other. Historians, at least, should consider this broader and
socially rooted insight of the classic sociologist Emile Durkheim, who
argued, a disciple observes, in an almost egregious simplification, "that
religious feeling is the individual's awareness of the group"
(Hamerton-Kelly 15; Williams, The Bible 16-17). Penalties, such as
lynching, exacted of persons certified as having violated community in
some way, could be said to have been expiation rendered to a power
superior to individuals (Gorringe 54, 53-57). The just kilhngs of those
who have most horribly breached community life thus mean something
transcendent X.O the individual and his/her community; they "set things
aright" by forcing the one responsible for the breach to "pay for" it with
his/her own hfe. The act and the impact must be thought dramatic
enough to reenact the original breach in a death made good by "the
community." Durkheim's insight makes it possible to think of executions
as human sacrifice. The rite, "reverent manner" and "grave satisfaction,"
reported at Leo Frank's lynching were not, therefore, strange; they
flowed naturally from the situation and culture in which they were
observed; ritual was supposed to make the illegal kilhng "perfect" (Smith,
"Capital Punishment" 3-25).
Durkheim's insights have helped generations of students understand
the presence of the rehgious in society apart from specifically "religious"
as a system of symbols, Clifford Geertz says that "sacred symbols fimction to synthesize
a people's ethosthe tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic
style and moodtheir world viewthe picture they have of the way things Ln sheer
actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order." See Geertz, "Religion as a
Cultural System," Interpretations %9.
Tbe Soutbem Site of Human Sacrice 37
institutions and ideas relating to deity.'" CHfford Geertz's classic
statement of religion as a cultural system provides an innovative
advance. A. D. Mayo's phrase, a "common Christianity," used above, was
analytically vague and too enthusiastic about the bonding capacities of
"Christianity," but he used it as a way of referring to that sense of
contextual reaUty that may confront an observer in a moment of
recognition as it did Dorothy when she exclaimed to Toto that the two
were "not in Kansas anymore." A better word is "culture," which Geertz
calls an "historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in
symbols" ("Rehgion as a Cultural System" 89). Inviting scholars to think
of religion as a ciiltural 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 tbat (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 Southem Baptist, Methodist, and
Presbyterian Christianity over the years employed symbols of Crucified
Christ, Baptism, open Bible, communion wine, sanctified bread, and
empty cross fortified by ritual acts to represent the Christian drama of
salvation. Symbols were essential to pohtical speech as well as human
relations at the time and could convey a range of meanings that
patterned imaginative as well as everyday life. Black skin, white skin, the
"New Negro," the "black beast rapist," "pure white women,"
"Reconstruction," "Whites only" placards, "Colored" signsall these
were symbols that established "powerful, pervasive, and long lasting
moods and motivations" that helped fabricate racial segregation in the
late 1880s and early 1890s, by "formulating conceptions of a general
order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of
facticity that the moods and motivations seem[ed] uniquely realistic."
The fact that legislators had written distance and division into law may
'"Students may begin with Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a
Sociological Theory of'Religion and Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The
Problem of Religion in Modem Society. See also Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An
Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo: "We shall not expect to understand
religion if we confine ourselves to considering belief in spiritual beings, however the
formula may be refined" (35).
have been "pohtical" action, but it relied on feelings of purity and danger
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 be understood as a religious
system. An obsession with the "group," the structure and substance of
human relations, commanded Southern white elites and their mimetic
constituencies after the Civil War. The media of this obsession were race
and gender; and the ways in which law and violence worked together to
distance human beings from each other, estabhsh boundaries between
them, and make dangerous the breaching of those boundaries were the
ways of religion. Segregation was, to be sure, a political-economic system
with laws to control workers essential to industriahzation (Cell 134;
Cohen; Woodward, The Strange Career). The system was developed
from the logic of slavery and the separation of free blacks from whites
in antebellum cities. Whereas masters and slaves may have lived in
proximity before the war, class (master-slave) boundaries that reinforced
white supremacy before Appomattox became horizontal (implying
verticality) afterwards to fiilfiU the same functions. Southern public
schools were segregated from their very beginning; and distancing of the
races was to be facilitated, or at least symbohzed further, by banning
marriage between individuals of different "races" before 1884 in nine of
eleven Southern legislatures (Cohen 214-15). Along with the
acceleration of violence against African Americans there was also a
remarkable increase in laws segregating the races during and after the
1890s (Woodward, The Strange Career 67-109; Ayers 67-68, 121-27,
136-46, 429, 433-34). By the end of the century. Southern states were
preparing to separate blacks from the political system, too, through
widespread disfranchisement (Ayers, 52-54,146-49,269,175-78,289-90,
298-99, 304-09, 409-13). The goal of this policy suggests, as Howard
Rabinowitz has pointed out, that the alternative to segregation was
neither equaHty nor integration but exclusion from all public facilities;
that is, whites could have done worse things than what they in fact did
(Rabinowitz, "More than the Woodward Thesis" 342-56; Woodward,
"Strange Career Critics" 861).
They passed laws to perfect their mastery by fabricating an elaborate
system of boundaries, taboos, and etiquette in order to establish purity
(whiteness) and therefore impurity (blackness) by distancing black
people from white and making proximity dangerous. To be sure.
segregation as a complex of widespread practices that varied according
to space, time, and (frequently) whim, was not so much dogma as a mood
tbat could be swiftly transformed into dogma by wbites wben it served
tbeir purposes. Tbe Virginia bistorian and autbor Philip Alexander Bruce
was one of tbe dogmatists; be tbougbt tbe results of the segregation
process bad been "notable acbievements" of "constructive local
statesmanship." Segregation laws, Bruce believed, preserved racial
"integrity," prevented conflict, avoided "moral contamination,"
discouraged "social equality," and relieved wbites of painful "close
pbysical contact" witb blacks (Bruce 70-78). Tbe "moral contamination,"
wbicb Bruce feared, flowed only in one direction, for, like so many otber
wbites, Bruce viewed African Americans in terms of pollution. Wben
they were marginalized by segregation laws, tbey were also made more
dangerous in tbe minds of wbites since tbe margins in culture are always
dangerous (Douglas 140). Whites' perception of tbe danger inherent in
a new generation of black people undisciplined by slavery was reinforced
by tbe actions of wbites tbemselves in legalizing segregation and
sustaining it witb a sacred aura.
Tbese feelings of pollution and danger from proximity to an
anomalous otber were reinforced by tbe tension tbat supported tbe
"sexual alibi" for segregation. Bruce linked distance from the otber in
public education with the banning of miscegenation as part of the same
impulse; in banning intermarriage among different races legislators and
their successors were part of a process of separating the races in cities
throughout tbe South, usually tbrougb local action (Rabinowitz, Race
Relations 128-281). In the 1890s political antipatby between wbites and
blacks erupted into campaigns to disfrancbise African Americans and
separate dissident wbite farmers from tbeir black neigbbors tbrougb
attacks on an aspiring younger generation of better educated black men
as potential rapists of defenseless white women. Together Avith new
increased region-wide segregation laws, electoral politics, racial
suspicion and white-inspired bysteria about danger and pollution from
black men and women, Soutbem white publicists manufactured what
some writers bave called a "rape complex" to justify lynching (Cash
116-20; Hall, Revolt \\2, 129, 145-57; Sommerville, "Tbe Rape Mytb"
481-518; and Sommerville, Rape and Race). To assign tbe mental
patterns behind tbis linkage of black men and wbite women to a
neurotic obsession imsupported by statistics is beside tbe point. In tbe
cases of both lynching and segregation, the bodies of white females
symbohzed the social body, whether as httle girls in grammar school or
as adult women in mascuhne fantasy; the idea was and in many ways
still is commonplace. Symbohcally coupling white females with black
males underscored the danger of crossing boundaries and quashing
distance and stipulated the danger of any breach. A culture that already
made woman a religious surrogate or mediator for men as well as the
fount of purity found it amiable indeed to establish boundaries and
distances that pushed black men to the margin of society to "protect"
her. The pervasive behef that female virginity was sacred, together with
the Christian conviction that sexual intercourse outside marriage was
immoral, and whites' widespread assumption of their "racial" superiority,
combined with aversive custom and pohtical will to fabricate a system
that had the tone, ambience, and imperative of certainty and facticity.
Segregation became consensual among whites. It was right; the order of
the universe confirmed it. It was sacred in that it placed certain issues
beyond dispute; it approached hohness because it estabhshed boundaries
which demanded that individuals "conform to the class to which they
belong Holiness," writes Mary Douglas, "means keeping distinct the
categories of creation" (67).
LiUian Smith certainly remembered segregation as a form of hohness.
In Killers of the Dream, she mused in a compeUing, reflective and
unforgiving manner about the ways in which "sin and sex and
segregation" had suffused the lives of Southerners." She could not
separate the three motifs. Although as an adult she believed that
Christian love impugned segregation, as a child she had been taught
together with other white children "to love God, to love our white skin
and to beheve in the sanctity of both" (Smith, Kiiiers 83). She had
learned sin and guilt within the incubation of a "warm, moist evangelism
and racial segregation" sanctified by a reUgion "too narcissistic to be
concerned with anything but a man's body and a man's soul." The body
"Smith's comment in "A Report from LiUian Smith on Killers ofthe Dreamt An
editorial in the Atlanta Constitution referred to Smith as "the ex-missionary who has
made a profession of writing stuff that purposely sets out to debase the South, with a fury
that continually overleaps itself." "Miss Smith," wrote Ralph McGill ofthe Constitution,
is "a prisoner in the monastery of her own mind." See T.iilian Smith Papers 1283A,
University of Georgia Library, Box 30. Even recent critics find her too absorbed in race
to be a worthy critic of the South. See Hobson. Because Smith focused on segregation,
Hobson writes, she missed "much of what else the South was and had been" (321).
Tbe Soutbem Site of Human Sacrice 41
was the "essence of morality," based as the latter was on the "mysterious
matter of entrances and exits," sin hovering "over all doors." Critics,
favorable or not, commented on her weaving of Freudian insights into
the fabric of her interpretation, but her primary focus was segregation.
It was part of the mental process of pushing "everything dark, dangerous,
and evil" to "the rim of one's hfe" where danger lurked. Evil was thought
to have been purged from the sin-distressed self so that [white]
Southerners had become fascinated with other people's evil rather than
their own and had somehow been compelled to find personal salvation
in the "death of Christ" without carrying the cross (Smith, KillersS8-90,
101, 224-52). Their self-conscious, narcissistic purity had shriven them
of a capacity for understanding rehgion as service to the kingdom.
Although Smith was in what she later recalled as "a kind of amnesia
about God," as she wrote the first edition of Killers, she nonetheless
understood the intense psychic power of values taught by God-hke
parents who fused the spectrum of white-purity-god-aversion into a
powerful compound of hoHness (Loveland 172). She has been classified
as part of a "shame and gmlt" school of Southern writers; she was too
passionate, eloquent, and angry, her critics thought: she was too much
the prophet (Loveland 97-105; Hobson 308-13). Many people thought
she was a heretic. Since she attacked the primary rehgious structure of
the South, indeed she was.
Smith's scrutiny of separation and purity was based on her own
experience and an outraged recognition of the meanings of the spectrum,
sin-sex-and-segregation. The cultural patterns that connected law,
practice, morahty, and meaning were woven and sewn together through
a long creative process and could reflect differing local fabrics and
textures. If locales produced varieties of separation, those who were
separated and those who did the separating never varied. "Moods and
motivation" of distance and boundary suffused the South and if legal
patterns fabricated with regard to transportation after 1890 were new
then, they merely rephcated the sensibihty reflected in educational
segregation and local varieties of distancing that fused identity-class-race
from the very day Emancipation had been enacted and contested. If
slavery had been abohshed, the meanings inferred by whites from
enslavement had not been abohshed; in fact, those meanings were
intensified and transcribed into the canon of difference-purity-and-
danger that compelled a credo of race-and-power as rich in meaning for
the faithful as the esoteric mysteries of the Apostle's Creed. There were
few white protestants in this catholic faith of hierarchy-separation-
and-distance.
If there was a polarity between racial "conservatives" and "radicals,"
the latter representing the pole of racial hatred (WiUiamson 285-323),
both poles existed within the broader consensus of racial holiness. With
the passing of each year after the onslaught of economic depression in
the late 1880s and early nineties, separation-boundary-and-purity
became ever more pervasive in public discourse and action. Prohibition
movements in Southem states provided impetus to the process of
enforcing purity until the South became legally dry before the First
World War. The white ribbons of women's temperance symbolized a
ubiquitous Southem "purity" associated with Hght skin, white
supremacy, self-discipline, and teetotaling clarity. If repressed male
sexuahty, combined with shame at economic weakness and guilt for real
or imagined sexual trespasses, accounted for the rage with which white
men confronted the "threat" from black men, there was a broader surge
in white society that transcended the rage while making it legitimate.'^
That the body was elevated to sacred statusits boundaries secured, its
orifices purified, and its distancing perfectedreflected a society whose
elites were determined to master and to control by violence if necessary.
The fusion of Southem Protestantism with prohibition, repressed
sexuality, and the canonization of white women all combined to blur
distinctions between sacred and secular where race was concemed. If the
logic of market relations and the consumption of commodities by
different races could ironically destabilize segregation, true believers of
all faiths burdened with intemal contradiction could nonetheless model
the holy zeal required of white Southerners for confirming orthodoxy in
the face of dissent (Hale). Lillian Smith remembered that the Christian
rehgion could also have destabilized segregation, but it hadn't; for
Southem whites leamed Christianity and segregation from the catechism
of domestic life that wamed of "everlasting flames" for disobeying God
within the canons of church and segregation {Killers S3, 85-86, 88-90).
"Joel WiUiamson puts the matter this way: "In their frustration white men projected
their own worst thoughts upon black men, imagined them acted out in some specific
incident, and symbolically killed those thoughts by lynching a hapless black man.
Almost any vulnerable black man would do" (308).
Tie Southern Site of Human Saaice 43
Religion as Punishment
In a society where distinctions, boundaries, and margins were so
important, the clergy insisted upon polarity, too. Ultimately, perhaps,
the dread polarity between God's Wrath and human sin was the most
appropriate way of putting the matter; "belief in someone's right to
punish you," wrote Lillian Smith "is the fate of aU children in
Judaic-Christian culture" {Killers 101). If the polarity was softened into
Christian-and-world, or salvation-and-sin, or love-and-hate, binary
opposition nonetheless persisted as it did in segregation. The word that
reflected one side of the dichotomy has traditionally been
"otherworldliness"; but it was otherworldliness plunged deep into this
world. Christian commitment required (ideally) a rigorous life of
self-discipline, self-reproach, and self-denial, which was decidedly
"this-worldly." Equally so were the distinctive ways in which
communities of faithful people expressed their faith and communal
connections, all of which were particular (at least to insiders) and each
of which was authenticated by appeal to Holy Scripture, especially on
contested issues. If "otherworldhness" was belied by the enchantment of
"this" world in segregation, it was also affirmed by the need to
understand and justify pain, moral failure, and death. OfAerworldhness
seemed to be associated with dogma, "narrovimess," bibhcism, and
irrelevance. This perspective, as one son of Dixie remembered,
demanded that preachers speak "of God, of Truth, of Righteousness, of
Judgment, the same yesterday, today and forever" (Williamson 313). The
perspective was authoritative, certain, and clear. The hard and rigorous
fundamentalism that Suzanne Marshall found throughout the violent
culture of the Black Patch, the primitive Calvinism that caught Arthur
Raper's Methodist-lensed eye among vigilantes, and the punitive wrath
that Lillian Smith recalled were all caught up in the Christian tradition
that suffused Southern culture. 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 his
sexism, racism, and superb talent for sacrificing accuracy on the altar of
meaning. His lack of proper respect for white Southerners' intellect, or
at least intellectuals, seems to be perfectly captured in the phrase. Citing
a "primitive frenzy and the blood sacrifice" conveys the image of a
savage South, a "savage ideal" that oversimpHfies the region so cruelly
that we are bereft of the generous ambiguity of a complexity that
includes educated if tedious clergymen, tortured if ineffectual writers,
prophetic if isolated dissenters, and quietly heroic women. But the
phrase lingers because it is true; \ primitive frenzy is translated as the
intense determination to act forcefully heedless of the law driven by a
fusing of repressed sexuality, challenged patriarchy, and reasoned
violence into tbe act of murder, we may be able to understand it in less
emotionally freighted ways. But iJ-enz/remains. The meaning of "blood
sacriflce" is mucb more complex; and yet it is at tbe core of Southem
white fundamental Protestantism. Blood sacrice connects the purpose
of white supremacists, the purity signifled in segregation, the presumed
magniflcence of God's wrath, and the permission granted through the
wrath of "justified" Christians to sacrifice black men on tbe cross of
white supremacy.
To write that Christianity permitted lynching within a segregated
society is not a bomiletic point. Nor is it on tbe otber band a preface to
linking specific acts of violence with specific people in a specific place
wbo did bideous things because God told tbem to do so. To be sure, tbat
some people did believe they were absolutely justified amounts to the
same thing; but that is not the point. The point is that because historians
know that religious mood, ritual action, and moral outrage at black men
were associated witb illegal community acts of violence, students may
want to go beyond mentioning sucb tbings to ask bow we migbt
understand tbis nexus, realizing that the task is not simple and tbat tbe
connections run tbrougb tbe mentality of wbite Soutbemers if not
necessarily their consciousness. At issue is neither the integrity of
Christianity nor the ignorance and credulity of simple folk who believe
mytbs that sophisticated modemists have rejected. At issue is the
cultural reality behind what we have known existed but never bad the
temerity to confront; and tbe place to begin is Lillian Smitb's
understanding of Cbristianity as punishment and W. J. Casb's perception
of tbe "blood sacrifice." Sometimes even "classic" insigbts are true. It is
important to ask: "How could Cash's words have come so easily; did
wbites literally sacrifice blacks? Where could be possibly bave conceived
the fantastic metapbor that birthed such a preposterous idea?" The
question is not rhetorical; there is a specific answer: "In church."
If tbe brilliant if flawed Cash sloughed off loyalty to bis Baptist past
witb tbe belp of Baptist professors at a Baptist college, be could never
Tbe Soutbem Rite of Human Sacrin 45
escape the homiletic images of his youth, especially the most dramatic
ones. And "blood sacrifice" is dramatic; it was an essential part of
Southern culture before the Second World War because it was central
to the Christian narrative of salvationas it stiU is for milhons of
Christians. That narrative was preached throughout the South for over
two hundred years, and its most vivid images, plots, and symbols lay in
"Jesus Christ and Him Crucifed." That phrase was the substance of
preaching throughout the region although themes varied: they covered
the range of Christian doctrines that began with salvation from sin.
Theoretically at least, salvation lay not in abstinence from certain
specific sins or in repression of the sinful self, although abstinence and
repression were among the means of revealing one to be a "child of
God." Instead, salvation lay in Christ's work on the cross; it lay in being
justified by faith, certainly, but also in rehance upon His saving act
through which a "price" had been paid and satisfaction made; it lay in
sanctifying a hfe of obedience in anticipation either of a struggle for
perfection or sanctified perseverance. The Bible, which contained the
story of salvation, was to be read in the same way as sermons were to be
heard, from the perspective of the cross; for if the Bible contained the
Word it was the Word made flesh who dwelt "among us" and Who was
crucified to set the universe aright. This was what the Apostle Paul had
called the scandal of "the Cross." Thomas Jefferson was certainly
scandahzed, for when he edited the Bible into the "Life of Jesus" so as to
focus on what really mattered in Christianity, every Christian who had
been "washed in the blood ofthe Lamb" knew that Jefferson had ripped
salvation out of the Bible and left only an impossible ethic and a
remarkable man; that was aU, and that was not enough (Adams).
If churches and ministers could agree with Jefferson that the
Christian hfe required strict morality, they dissented from the view that
morality was sufficient for salvation as Socinians [Unitarians] and Deists
were said to believe. If Christians who responded to evangehcal
preaching expected to be made forcefully aware of salvation through an
inner conviction, the focus was not on sentiment alone, or the moment
of illumination or on the physical manifestations of sentiment and
illumination, but a "saving knowledge" that Christ had "died for me."
The words, "saving knowledge," meant that "religious experience" went
far beyond a mere inner feehng of being "saved." "Saving knowledge,"
meant knowing that one had been made just, and justified, before God,
but not justified through the experience itself. That experience had
content: an inner knowledge that the crucifbdon was "for me" and that
it had conferred pardon through an objective act by a specific
man[-God]: "Jesus Christ and Him Crucified." Every doctrine of
Christianity that represented the supernatural action of salvation always
retumed the believer to the mystery of the Cross.
It would be naive indeed to assume that every Christian in the South
could have successfully passed an examination in systematic theology on
the meanings of the cross. But no matter how imperfectly understood or
internalized and no matter how much the shppage between private
doubt and pubHc profession, images and feelings of salvation were
expressed throughout the music, songs, and hymns that were the
theological 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," "blessed Savior," "the Lamb,"
the "dying, risen Jesus," the "redeeming Lord" (Walker 26,32,45,46,55)
all referred to 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 this would 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. Southern
Protestant Christians shared with the ancient Church and the Roman
Catholic Church the western inheritance of Jesus of Nazareth
transfigured and revealed as Christ and Savior: He was the Word
through whom creation came in the beginning and through whom after
the fall it was restored through crucifixion. No one had to understand it
precisely ("we see through a glass darkly") for no one could, but
everyone who claimed to be a Christian had to profess that salvation
came through a saving act of God; and that act was referred to in the
language of "price," "cost," "ransom," "penalty," "pardon," and
"satisfaction." And aU these words were held together by the cosmic
requirement that God Himself be held to account by His own Justice.
At the heart of salvation were the metaphors of retributive justice; at
its center was a symbol of torture and death. The word for Christ's
saving action was "atonement." However differently various
communities of faith may have interpreted the implications, influences,
and results of atonement, there was nonetheless significant agreement
among white Southem Christians before 1930 on the signal importance
of Christ's sacrificial death. That agreement reflected a pervasive moral
sensibihty that emphasized divine wrath, vdth cosmic penalty for and
condign punishment of sin. To be sure, the religion also emphasized
vicarious payment of the penalty for sin by the Son of God whose action
made salvation available; but according 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 is the penalty of sin," wrote the definitive Southem
Baptist theologian of the late nineteenth century (Mullins 323,318-35);
it was imposed, virrote a future bishop, by the "viTath of Almighty God"
(Marvin 68, 87-89, 91; Mullins 333) whose nature, wamed a fellow
Methodist, was to "punish the guilty" (Ralston 235). As a Presbyterian
divine insisted, "Vindicatory Justice [is] Essential to God" (Dabney,
"Vindicatory Justice" 466). This insistence on punitive justice reflected
the absolute righteousness of God as opposed to the total depravity of
humanity that had fallen through the disobedient agency of Adam and
Eve whose guilt was imputed to all those who came afterwards. If
imputation was a point of contention between Calvinists and Wesleyans
(Holifield 189-96), it did not preclude agreement until possibly the tum
of the twentieth century that human beings deserved death as the moral
penalty for the sin that thoroughly corrupted them. If they deserved
death, however, how could they be saved from such a penalty? Their
mere repentance, which was after all, their own act, could achieve
nothing; the offense was too great, the resulting stainsome would say
total depravitywas ineradicable (Mullins 325; Ralston 203; Dabney,
Christ A5-51,62-63). Only an infinite act of Infinite Being could bridge
the infinite distance between Divine Righteousness and human
corruption.
Justice demanded blood sacrifice. Because the Old Testament
background of sacrifice revealed that "the orisons of faith and penitence
must be accompanied with the streaming blood of a victim and the
venging fire of the altar," the words associated with sacrifice
propitiation and expiationwere assigned to the Work of Christ
(Dabney, "Vindicatory Justice" 466-67). "God set forth Christ," wrote E.
Y. Mullins, "as a propitiation for our sins"; he reminded people who
already knew it that "Death is the penalty of sin." Christ bore "the penal
consequences of the sin of the race because of his complete identification
with it." He "endured the wrath of God . . . in the sense that he
permitted the sin-death principle to operate in him" (Mullins 318).
Christ died, Thomas Ralston reminded his own readers, in propitiation
for human sins; he referred them, as would any knowledgeable
Methodist preacher, to Paul's Epistle to the Romans (3:25): "Whom God
hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood to declare
his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the
forebearance of God." Propitiation for both the Baptist and the
Methodist as well as their Presbyterian and Episcopal colleagues meant
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 a victim was expiation, in
that it removed the sins of the people, both concepts applied to Christ's
sacrifice (Ralston 201-29,331,335,339ff.). That He acted for humans by
becoming one of them while remaining "very God of very God" meant
a vicarious'^ sacrifice because finite human power could not pay the
infinite price: He acted in humanity's steadatoned, that is, "paid the
price" 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 biblical
scholarship provided, but there were other means to make the essential
point. For people seeking to interpret their salvation in a dialectic
'^For proof texts cited in support of the subsdtutionary atonement, see Dabney,
Chnst87-98; Leviticus 1:4, 14:21, 17:11, passim; John 1:29; Romans 5:6; 1 Corinthians
6:20, 15:3; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 8:3, 9:11-14; 1 Timothy 2:6; 1 Peter 3:13, 2:24
among others.
relationsbip between faith and hope, consciousness and orthodoxy could
be conflicted. When it was time publicly to repeat the Creed or renew
tbe Covenant or sing tbe reception of "amazing grace," tbe sound of
one's own voice uniting witb others in song, prayer or public recitation
confirmed tbe mystery represented by ortbodoxy at least for tbe
moment. Sucb people heard countless familiar and ritualistic sermons,
whether read, exposited or cbanted, tbat described tbe blood flowing
from Redeemer's bead, bands, side, and feet; they felt the terrible jolt
against His searing wounds wben the cross was plunged into the earth.
Tbey could not fail to bave been impressed, as was tbe young Wilbur
Cash, with the "primitive" feelings tbat would later allow bim to
understand tbe "blood sacrifice" as essential to tbe Mind of the South.
Tbe message of sin, guilt, and punisbment, associated witb tbe elemental
and universal symbol of blood, was conveyed furtber by exbortations,
prayers, bymns, recitations, scowls, maternal tears, and patriarcbal
condemnation. All worked to cry "guilt," to teacb gmlt, to instill gvdlt:
to make the offending soul shudder at tbe enormity of his/her guilt. Tbe
feelings that sustained tbe credibility of tbis incredible doctrine bad
afflicted generations of white Southerners by the twentieth century.
Even tepid or rebellious believers leamed that religion was punisbment:
tbey endured or remembered or heard about the connection in cburcb
trials; tbey heard and felt tbe depth of divine wrath from angry
preachers; they leamed, too, from admonishing looks, raised eyebrows,
whispered confidences, and the anguish of awakening sexuality tbe
pervasiveness of sin and tbe necessity of retribution. All tbese things
wben contrasted witb tbe rigbteousness of God taugbt cbildren of
conventional Cbristians tbat Someone bad a Right, as Lillian Smitb
recalled, to punisb tbem; it was God's Obligation to Himself.'* Christ
was the symbol of God's love, to be sure; but first He was tbe Lamb of
God sacrificed for buman sin. Sin demanded punisbment. Punisbment
meant death!
'*One socialized within the alternative vision of liberal Christianity and educated by
the masters of neo-orthodoxy almost instinctively senses the rage and violence of the
orthodox myth; and the recent work of Ren Girard helps one understand the violence
inherent in it. 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.
The source of this penal theory of atonement was presumably the
Bible; everyone who accepted it beheved as much; but they were wrong.
As the great Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulen pointed out long ago, a
thousand years had actually lapsed between the crucifixion and the first
mature statement ofthe theory. During that time various understandings
had circulated within the Church, and some of these played upon the
motif, which Aulen thought best expressed atonement in the phrase,
Christus Victor. Conceding elements of sacrifice but pointing out that
these neither emphasized punishment nor employed legal metaphors,
Aulen argued that the message of Paul, the early Church, and Patriarchs
was of a Christ Who broke human bondage to the Law and the forces of
evil as the victorious and Incarnate Lord (Aulen 22-26,31-35,43,47-60,
66-80). References to sacrifice came out of Old Testament texts from a
cultus that maintained the hohness of community through spiUing blood
(the "containing hfe force") of slain animals that substituted for the
offenses of the people. Evil was channeled into an animal whose
expiatory death became a "saving event" (Gorringe 38-40). The
vicariousness of such rites is clear for the Day of Atonement [Leviticus
16]: in one ritual a goat is sacrificed for the sins ofthe people; in another,
a goat [scapegoat] is laden with the sins of the people through prayer,
driven into the wilderness, and thus charged with banishing violence
and guilt.
Against such references, however, we may cite others that subvert the
importance of sacrifice. I Samuel 15:22, Amos 5:22ff., and Micah 6:7-8,
for example, repudiate sacrifice. Such contradictions in a complexity of
books, laws, and ritual acts suggest why it is tendentious to write of a
"biblical theology of sacrifice" (Gorringe 50-53,57). Yet Jewish discourse
when Saul of Tarsus was a student included the redemptive quahties of
suffering and a sacrificial death. Indeed, some thinkers fused the
scapegoat mechanism and expiatory sacrifice. When he became Paul the
Apostle, Saul labored to explain to a hostile Jewish community how an
executed criminal broken on a Roman "gallows" could be the Messiah.
His was not an easy task. He presented Christ Jesus as a "sacrifice of
atonement by his blood, effective through faith" (Romans 3:25), a claim
which might have appealed to some Jews then engaged in thinking about
sacrificial death, but his major emphasis was on participation in Christ.
Paul was absolutely clear in his critique of the Jewish law and insisted
that by dying under it, Christ had placed human life above it. This act
Tbe Sutbem Rite of Human Sacrice 51
was supposed to bring Jews and Gentiles together into a new community
in which all were reconciled to each other and to God by their becoming
hving sacrifices (Gorringe 71-82). Because the Bibhcal texts were
ambiguous, however, no single theory dominated interpretation of the
Cross for a thousand years.
Then came Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who introduced a
new metaphor to explain the work of Christ: satisfaction. He did so
within the context of a society that was highly stratified and in which
legal metaphors ruled. An elaborate code of "honor" sustained social
solidarity. Offences against those of high rank demanded punishment or,
in its place, satisfaction relative to the nature of the insult and the rank
of the one offended lest the social order be unbalanced. The same could
be said of the relation between sinful humans and God, observed the
Archbishop of Canterbury in answering the question: Cur Deus Homo?
{Why the Cod-man?) Since we already owe God everything it is
impossible for us to pay satisfaction for our sins. Worse, because to
dishonor God is to dishonor Infinite Being, only an infinite satisfaction
is appropriate. Therefore, Deus Homo must pay satisfaction in
humanity's place. Anselm came to this conclusion within the context of
a church system of penance and of a society in which crime denied the
"bonds of mutual trust and concern on which the community depends
for its existence" (Gorringe 99, 85-99). In such a culture, retribution in
the payment of a debt "restores that fair balance of benefits and burdens"
disturbed by crime, writes a student of punishment. The same was true
of sin and divine retribution. Whereas the work of Christ was once
conceived as vjctory over the power of evil [Satan], now it was
conceived as payment to God to satisfy the debt owed by mankind for its
sin. Once the devil had held mankind ransom, but now it was God; the
God who Paul believed had hberated Christians from bondage to the law
had become law itself (Gorringe 99,101-03).
Over the next few hundred years, this theme shaped the medieval
mentality that became "saturated with the concepts of Christ and the
cross." Satisfaction, punishment, and suffering became the dominant
themes of salvation. The focus on law and satisfaction lay not merely in
rehgious sensibihty and theological formulation but also in the rise of
the state with its mechanisms for bringing order out of chaos and law out
of custom through the power to punish (Gorringe 104-25). With the
Reformation, Jean Calvin adapted Anselm's theory and improved upon
it within the continuing context of political and judicial development.
But whereas Anselm developed his theory within the church's system of
penance and thought of satisfaction as the payment of debt, Calvin rehed
on the metaphors and analogies of criminal law; for Anselm, Christ "pays
our debts; in Calvin he bears our punishment" (Gorringe 139). Even
Wesleyans who were not enamored of Calvinist theology spoke the
language of satisfaction and punishment, as we have seen. Thomas
Ralston's abridgement of Richard Watson's Institutes labored to
distinguish Methodism from Calvinism, but if he disagreed with
Calvinists on the constituency of atonement, he agreed with the
Genevan on its punitive model. For Southerners, who, hke medieval
knights, hved in a culture of honor, the clearest statement of the theory
was made by Dabney, whose desire to distinguish clearly between faith
and faithlessness made him an ideal spokesman for Christians in the
region. He basked in the language of punishment. All of life's calamities,
he wrote, are "penal," they have "moral significance" as "God's
displeasure with men's sins" {Christ 32). He wrote easily of God's
"punitive providence," of a justice that demanded punishment, and of a
Christ who "siiffered legally and righteously for the guilt of sin imputed
to him" (38, 64). Furious with soft-hearted "dreamers" who did not
understand that the "guilt of sin must be avenged by the just penalty,"
he condemned the self-indulgent who ignored the axiom that
"punishment of every sin is inevitable." The cosmic reality within which
the Christian life was to be lived, according to Dabney, was the
punishment that Christ had taken upon himself and which "satisfied the
divine perfection outraged by our sins" ("Vindicatory Justice Essential to
God" I: 469-72). Killing solves the intractable problem 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 the horror felt by the
virtuous, like himself, when criminals were not punished and he
reminded Christians of the oft-expressed desire of BibHcal 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, that criminals must suffer "penal retribution"
because it was rational, just, and sacred. The Christian should realize that
having participated "in the judicial triumphs of the Redeemer" through
grace s/he was free to participate in righteous vengeance. To be sure.
The Southern Rite of Human Saciice 53
Dabney warned full retribution would come only at the Final Judgment,
but allowing saints to anticipate participating in that cosmic act granted
permission to enjoy vengeance in the interim. Belief that "righteous
retribution is one of the glories of the divine character" could easily
become a belief that people benefitting from cosmic retribution were
righteous in their own determination to punish. If the "godly man" in
pursuing justice had remitted final "penal settlement to a perfect God"
and arrested "his own forcible agency as soon as the purposes of mere
self-defence are secured," he was nonetheless justified in defending
himself with godly "vengeance." Beheving this, and believing that aU of
his awa hfe after 1865 was a defense against the ungodly, Yankees,
rehgious hberals, African Americans, it is not surprising that Dabney
should have devoted himself to perfecting a theology of vengeance
("Christian's Duty" 706-21). He knew that he would be dismissed as one
of those "stupid old fogies besotted in their bigotry" ("Ghrist" 15); he
knew, too, that his view was condemned as a "brutal theology of ancient
barbarians" ("Vindicatory Justice" 469); but he scorned such prissy
"babbHng." Truth was hard; justice was hard; the cross was hard. His
personality, which demanded order, aloofness, hierarchy, honor,
certainty, and toughness found its justification in a rehgion driven not
by grief at one's own sin but the draconian punishment of others
(Gorringe 140).
In this fashion, punishment was sacrahzed by the dominant rehgion
of the American South. To be sure, as Dabney knew, there were
Ghristians who contested this view. Centuries before, Anselm and Calvin
had not prevented alternative views from Peter Abelard or Martin
Luther, and by the end of the nineteenth century, a few Wesleyans were
beginning to emphasize that the way of the cross revealed more of Love
than of Justice. African Americans' views of Christ's work, too, were
dramatically different; they had perceived that the one broken on the
cross suffered 7them, not rthem. They beheved that He had come
not to justify punishment but to break its power, not to encourage
humans to participate in God's vengeance but to show that God was not
enraged with them (Raboteau 22-39; Early; Thurman). One can imagine
Robert Dabney's infuriated contempt. He would not have been alone;
indeed, as a few white Southerners began to shrink back from the
punitiveness of a God who ruled in terroristic rage, one of their savants
objected to such cowering. Poet John Crowe Ransom's God was the
"stem and inscmtable God of Israel" rather than the "amiable and
understandable God" Whom he believed liberals were then fabricating
from the New Testament, modem science, and sentimental optimism
(1-25, 49-51). Written in response to such sissified idolatry and the
anti-Southern fall-out from the Scopes trial (Larson), Ransom's book,
God Without Thunder, was precisely what the subtitle said it was. An
Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy. The son of a Methodist
missionary-minister and the brother of a woman who wrote Sunday
school lessons. Ransom attacked the new religiosity for embracing the
myths of science and naturalism rather than those of the oriental God
who delighted in bumt offerings and crushed Job into tbe dust (10-11).
Tbe rage of such a God was magnificent. If Ransom eventually left both
church and Soutb, be had indeed captured the religious mood he had
inherited in pleading with believers to "restore to God the
thunder"that is, the wrath and the penalty.
Sacrificing Christ / Sacrificing Black Men
Conceiving of God as Supreme Hangman and tbe Cbrist as Divine
Substitute wbo paid tbe penalty for buman sin in blood sacrifice did not
make white Cbristians lyncb black people. The formula did, bowever,
reflect a state of mind; it reflected the ways in which widely shared
views of moral accountability and penalty could allow, when fused with
whites' racial antipathy, patriarchal prerogative, sexual apprehension,
and economic tenuousness, public violence against a black man
associated with a crime of rieb symbolism. In sucb an event we are
confronted with a mytb as powerful as that of Christian atonementa
myth also of a specific kind of fall, a resulting collective disorder, and a
punishment appropriate to tbe crime. Tbe offense was defined by tbe
mytb of tbe "black beast rapist" intent on ravisbing innocent wbite
women (Hall 112,129,145-57); tbe myth inherent in tbe image became
one of the most pervasive white Southem parables of sin, guilt,
punisbment, and salvation. Both mytbs coincided in tbe sbared belief
tbat pimisbment cbanges tbings in tbe community far beyond tbe mere
effect of tbe act itself upon the "criminal." There is a shared sense that
tbe one upon whom the mytb is centered, the Christ or the "rapist,"
must die to relieve the discord (sin, anguish, conflict) so dangerous to
community. Botb Cbrist and rapist become a sacrifice that, as Ren
Tbe Soutbem Rite of Human Sacrifce 55
Girard points out, produces "the sacred" ( Things Hidden 226). '^ They do
so by plunging all the meaning of community into one act of violence
that resolves potential collective conflict and therefore "saves" the
community; the subjects of sacrificial violence take upon themselves the
sins of community as the scapegoat did in ancient Jewish ritual when
consigned the community's sins. The black man, like the scapegoat in
the Old Testament, does not take on sin voluntarily. But voluntarily or
not, he is sacrahzed by collective transference to him of sin and violence
{ThingsHidden 177). This violent transference is justified by appeal in
both cases to the justice of God. With regard to Christian atonement, the
sacrificial reading of Christ's death lays responsibihty for the victim's
death upon Divine Justice (230-31). KilHng the black victim is also
understood to be the "vvdll of God," that is, just. In both cases
punishment is necessary to sustain sacred order, and in the case of the
black victim, punishment may be a "subhmation of people's self-asserdve
instincts and hostihties" (Gorringe 46).
White Southerners did not think of their executions of black men as
similar to Christ's sacrifice even if black Southerners did so (Schecter
297; Harris 103,126, passim). Walter White, the author and secretary of
the NAACP, did not quite make the connection invoked by hterary
figures and historians, but he did beheve that the rehgion of white
Southerners had created the "particular fanaticism" that led to lynching.
He recounted a hst of atrocities inflicted by white Christians against
people unhke themselves from medieval pogroms through defenses of
slavery to Belgian rule in the Congo; the hst could have been much
longer. He lashed the mentahty that tried heretics and witches, preached
"hell-fire" and racial superiority, and illuminated the night with fiery
crosses. The "insane rage" he saw in posturing white ministers
represented to him the emotional and ignorant people of the [white]
"Christian South" (40-53, 40-44, 48, 52). Angry as he was at whites'
rehgion, he did not probe the internal punitiveness of a religion he
''The power ofthe sacred, writes Girard, "derives from what it has said in real terms
to human beings concerning what must and must not be done in a given cultural
context, in order to preserve tolerable human relations within the community. The
sacred is the sum of human assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused
on a reconciatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis. [A "mimetic crisis" refers
to a moment when violence is about to break out.] Far from being a leap into the
irrational, the sacred constitutes the only hypothesis that makes sense for human beings
as long as these transferences retain their power" (42).
identified with ignorance and fanaticism to think about the sacred
nature of the violence he documented in his work. Given the brutality
of lynching and the contempt with which its victims were treated, one
might be excused some skepticism that in executing a black victim,
whites were actually making him sacred. But such skepticism refiects a
point of view that does not see in the ritual of lynching a communal
transference to the subject of violence all of the violence implicit in
community itself; or, if it sees the transference, does not understand its
religious miheu and meanings. Yet reporters at both the lynching of Sam
Hose in 1899 and of Leo Frank in 1915 wrote that in these ghastly events
they observed that something "sacred" was happening (McLean 175;
Williamson 185-89; [Sam Hose]). As Girard points out, from one point
of view "there is . . . hardly any form of violence that cannot be
described in terms of sacrifice" ( Violence 1). Girard argues that the
violence, which many scholars believe always has its reasons, will
inexorably find its victim within community as long as the reahty of
violence in collective life is hidden from communal consciousness.
It is important to remember that Girard thinks of sacrifice not in
terms of a priest's appeasing of deity, but of the practice in ancient
societies of selecting outsiders, persons of no status, to provide sites of
violence that "solve" problems of collective unrest and implicit conflict
because these persons may be killed without fear of vengeance ( Violence
1). And, as Edward Ayers, among others, has pointed out, black men
seized for lynching were often marginal to the communities in which
they were sacrificed (156-58). Sacrifice is "an act of violence without risk
of vengeance," just as is legal execution within the judicial system; it
exacts judicial punishment as a substitute for private vengeance that
avoids a circle of violence that would otherwise never stop. Sacrificial
rites are "essential" in "societies that lack a firm judicial system," Girard
writes; they take the place of revenge {Violence 14-18). It is also
possible, however, to think of the American public's vengeful
participation through the media in such matters as jury trials, verdicts
and executions as indicative of a sacrificial mentahty. The accused
subject is sacralized in that he (sometimes she) bears the burden of all
imphcit violence (and resentment at acts not punished) within
community when attention is focused upon him or her. The violence of
which one is accused becomes symbolic of all the violence infiicted upon
"the innocent" that becomes in collective perception "the community"
which believes itself to have been victimized.
The scapegoat mechanism that allowed Christ to take on the sins of
the world in a sacrificial reading of atonement also allowed Christians
historically to transform Jews into scapegoats. During plagues in the
fourteenth century, for example, Christians murdered Jews in order to
stop the fatal consequences of the black death. These and other Christian
persecutions of religious minorities were justified by the same
scapegoating mechanism that applies, Girard points out, even if those
accused are actually guilty of what they were charged with having done.
Accusers still seek in the accused "individual the origin and cause of all
that is harmful" {Reader 115, 97-117) in the community and perhaps
even in the society beyond. Stereotyping transforms the accused into a
symbol or representative of the evil deplored in the scapegoating process.
If one is selected from a stereotyped, persecuted class of "others" as a
lynching victim, it may be because he had not sustained in his own
person or actions the differences by which the persecuting authority had
insisted those whom he represented should have been distinguished
{Reader\\6-Y7,211-21). And in fact, we know that black men who had
stepped beyond places assigned African Americans by law and tradition,
and especially if they had been known as renegades or had appeared as
strangers without significant connections to the community, could in
times of economic and social crisis be sacrificed to the communal
expectation of obedience to the rubrics of kind, order, class, race, and
gender. Moving out of place to be Uke white people instead of remaining
"black" could be fatal (Ayers 139-46,156-57; WiUiamson 128-33,183-89,
289-90, 301-13). When such anomalous behavior could be associated
with sexeven if the charge was not strictly speaking linked with any
real "crime"the juxtaposition of gender, sex, power, and disobedience
in the minds of white people could make lynching seem appropriate.
Horrified as many white Southem Christians probably were at the
lynching of black men, they nonetheless blamed the latter for their own
victimization with little guilt.
Even white men who thought of themselves as opposing lynching
could sometimes be understood as justifying the very acts that they
thought they were condemning. Both Methodist Bishop Atticus G.
Haygood (Haygood; Mann; Rubin) and Baptist layman Govemor
William Northen pubUcly denounced lynching^but then surrendered
their moral high ground by observing that lynching would end when
blacks no longer raped white women (Brundage 195-97, 201-02; Luker
91, 100; Williamson 287-91). Their reasoning reflected the common
assumption that in certain universally understood encounters between
blacks and whites, African Americans were always at fault simply by
being black; and this made illegal lynching appear to be as legitimate as
legal punishment. The abstraction, "justice," was mystified by tradition,
power, and gendered myths associated with relations between the races
as interpreted by white men; it was sacrahzed by pious white people
who believed that law demanded satisfaction from all who breached it.
Even Christ had to have been broken upon the demands of the law that
humanity might be saved. Each subject of every lynching, by virtue of
his (her) having been seized by the mob, had both literally and
symbohcally broken the law, and "justice" demanded satisfaction. This
is not to say that men and women went through a conscious process that
linked a traditional white understanding of Christian atonement to the
punishment of black men; but it is to suggest that even those who
moralized their actions through Christian conversation could not move
beyond the scapegoating mechanism inherent in attributing the source
of violence, even violence against themselves, to black people.
They could not understand that lynching resolved violence within
the social system by attributing its source to African Americans and then
punishing a representative ofthat class in order to achieve "peace." They
could not see that they were party to a ritual of 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 the lawor the custom^that demanded and
therefore justified punishment; it was in the very logic of the racialized
universe. When in the 1890s, Ida B. Wells challenged the myth of the
black-beast-rapist as based on the twin illusions of white women's
innocence and white men's gallantry, whites' fury suggested that she had
committed more than lse majest an sacrilege. In her blasphemy, the
outspoken African American journalist had profanely challenged one of
the most cherished expressions of that "religious feehng [that] is the
individual's awareness of the group," if Durkheim's insight is conceded
at even an elementary level (Hall 328-49; Schecter 292-317; Luker
91-114; Hamerton-KeUy 15). Sexuahty, gender, and power were
essential to the white individual's awareness of community as expressed
in the practices and beliefs of a sacralized segregation; mentally fusing
tbese three with tbe moral certainty tbat attributed innocence to some,
assigned guilt to others and tben demanded vivid punisbment in a
dramatic act was a religious process.
African American writers have understood tbis dynamic of
community, guilt, and punishment. Trudier Harris is clear on tbis point
in ber book. Exorcising Blackness, wbicb sbe begins by suggesting tbat
lyncbing is a "Peculiarly American Ritual" and that it is very much like
tbe scapegoating mechanism of ancient ritual tbat Sir James Frazer bad
discussed in The Golden Bough. Referring to the transfer of guilt from
tbe community to tbe "scapegoat" in Frazer's understanding of ancient
sacrificial rites, sbe deftly links it witb tbe "cleansing" process explained
by Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice tbrougb which groups
project "their basest fears and desires onto other groups" and elevate
themselves above tbose thus despised (Harris 1, 12, 17). Reluctant to
concede tbat lyncbing bad tbe cosmic implications suggested in this
essay, Harris nonetheless analyzes the ways in which African American
writers have engaged whites' obsession with black sexuality and the
terrible consequences of that obsession for African Americans. Indeed,
she argues tbat Richard Wrigbt used "tbe lyncbing and burning ritual,
and bistorical and social connotations surrounding it, to sbape tbe basis
of bis aesthetic vision of the world" (95, 95-128). From the history of
white violence, Wrigbt displays tbe ritualistic care with which white
executioners focus tbeir torture and punishment on tbe black victim's
sexuality wbicb tbey carve out of bim according to rubrics they seem
instinctively to know. Eacb movement seems to call attention to tbe
power of white men to punish blacks, the cutting and the burning seem
to purify tbe crowd participating in this ghastly cleansing ritual, and the
trophies taken from tbe body afterwards appear to be sacred relics taken
to remind tbeir beholders of action that is quite unlike the ordinary
actions of common life. The task that black male writers assumed, Harris
believes, was to "exorcise fear from racial memory" (195); but their
function bere is to remind us that if they focused primarily on the ways
in which wbites castrated blacks to remind African Americans of who
tbe enemy was, they also understood tbat tbe violence against them was
ritualized; it reflected wbites' conception of the universe. And tbey did
not understand, as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, tbat "tbe loveliest lyncbee
was our Lord" (Harris 77; Brooks 87-89). Tbey were blind to tbe insigbt
that identified victims of lynching with the Christ whose death (and
resurrection) symbohzed their faith. Unhke black Christians, their white
co-rehgionists seemed to think of themselves as positioned Avith divine
wrath (justice?) against the (even innocent) offender. If divine viTath
demanded punitive death, whites beheved that in imagining justice, they
stood with the judge and not with the crucified.
Certainly Haygood and Northen had not been able hterally to see the
victimization of black men. The self-righteousness that bhnded whites
to the ways in which their own protestations of innocence victimized
black people needed to be challenged; the Christ had to be understood
as suffering with the victims of white violence and the myth of the
black-beast-rapist that incorporated the myth of the immaculate
protection for white womanhood had to be exposed. Such alchemy was
not easy; but by 1905 there were some changes. Then, a strange and
compelling little book appeared, written by the pastor of the First
Presbyterian Church of Nevirport News, Virginia, Edwin TaUiaferro
Wellford. In The Lynching of Jesus, Wellford did not confront either the
ancient or the modem myth directly; he merely told a famihar story
with a radically different emphasis. His first chapter suggested his
purpose. In "The Slaughter of the Innocents" he pointed out that
lynching could not be justified by appeal to the myth of immaculate
protection; he excoriated mob law as the lynching of both the victim and
the 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 those who committed it. He refused to
concede whites' innocence. Then he made an abrupt but sophisticated
transition to an even greater barbarity, as he called it. "The lynching of
Jesus excels in brutahty and in the slaughter of the innocent, all
succeeding offences," he observed to a white Christian audience. "So
long as the twentieth century looks on with unstirred sympathy and
passes by the mobbing of Jesus with unconcern and apathy, so long wiU
similar deeds be repeated, in any land with impunity. If the pubhc
conscience does not resent the greatest it will not take cognizance ofthe
less" (18-19). That is, as a well-educated Presbyterian clergyman,
Wellford knew the connection between white Christians' view of
punishment (atonement) and lynching and he denied that the justice of
God demanded lynching of Christ.
The Soutbem Rite of Human Sacrice 61
By putting the matter as he did, Wellford was not diminishing the
evil of lynching black men; he was doing the exact opposite. He was
subtly attempting to change the focus of his white Christian readers'
attention when they thought of lynching. He wanted them to make a
connection between what Christ's executioners did to Him and what
white people did to the black men they murdered. Robert Lewis Dabney
had written fiercely of "God in his punitive providence having punished
Christ legally and righteously for the guilt of sin imputed to him" {Christ
32); WeUford now attacked this interpretation. God had /2of "punished
Christ legally and righteously" so far as WeUford was concerned. He was
trying to shift responsibihty from the black victim of white violence to
the white perpetrators themselves; lynching was to be seen not as the
understandable illegal punishment of guilty black men, but as the
modem recapitulation of deicide. Christ's death was not to be
understood as just punishment. In challenging one of the principal
interpretations of dogma deriving from "Jesus Christ and Him crucified,"
he was thinking of the atonement in a new light. Rather than
emphasizing the justice of Christ's sacrifice, he emphasized its profound
i/7justice; he also seemed to be trying to transfer empathy for the
murdered Christ to modem lynch victims by insisting that Jesus had
been "lynched." He understood that the doctrine of substitutionary
atonement had allowed white Christians to ignore the meaning of the
crucifixion and of lynching. WeUford did not attack the theology but
instead emphasized the iUegahty, that is, the injustice of each step in the
process that led to Christ's death, and in doing so, he was weakening the
theology received by tradition as he hoped to weaken white people's
inabihty to confront the evil they seemed to approve. Leading the reader
by the hand through proof texts step by step along the maze through
which Jewish and Roman authorities went as they short-circxiited the
judicial system and avoided due process, the author stripped away aU
pretense to justice. And he insisted that aU participantsSanhdrin,
chief priests, Pontius Pilate, and the mobknew that the young rabbi
was innocent. "Law," wrote WeUford, "was never so debauched, nor
'man's inhumanity to man' so apparent" (88). What had murdered the
Crist? Hatred, calumny, secrecy, conspiracy, the "insatiate passion of a
misguided multitude!" "Innocence," WeUbom observed, "has often been
victimized by personal interest, political pull, sordid bribery, or frenzied
passion." But, he insisted, the Nazarene would judge in His time aU those
who have oppressed and murdered, for he knew "the merit of right, and
has felt the oppression of wrong." The clergyman then ended by hnking
the reader with the Christ and the latter, in tum, with victims of
injustice; there was no doubt that lynching was the instrument of
oppression. In 1905 such a conclusion among Southem whites was rare
(89-91).
WeUford's pamphlet was scarcely the first robin before a spring of
racial justice or theological mutation. But his homiletic insight that Jesus,
too, was lynched, when understood within the conservative ethos of
Southern whites' religion, suggests that a change was possible in the
assumptions of white innocence when it came to the myth of lynching.
Eventually that change would be accelerated by white Southem women
as they attacked the myth of immaculate protection. Jacquelyn Hall has
explained how in the 1920s white women from within the Wesleyan
tradition together with African American women began to work for
racial justice as uneasy allies in coalition with men of the Commission on
Inter-racial Cooperation (CIC). All of these constituencies emphasized
that the myth of white innocence and justification for lynching were lies
told to buttress a racial order based on lies. Disciplined by the scheming
arrogance of men who controlled the Methodist Episcopal Church,
South, these white women were part of a vanguard who expanded the
claims of religion beyond the confines of manmade walls with the help
of the new discipline of sociology and the urgency of a new social gospel.
Under the leadership of Jessie Daniel Ames, who enticed them into the
Association of Southem Women for the Prevention of Lynching
(ASWPL), these activists attacked the myth of immaculate protection.
By joining the antilynching movement already begun by Ida Wells-
Bamett (the Anti-Lynching Crusaders), the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, and the CIC, the white women of
ASWPL insisted that they were threatened not by black rapists but by
white lynchers. Their actions impressed indehbly upon the public mind
the meaning of their words. At the local level they worked with and
sometimes against law enforcement officers to prevent lynchings; if they
stiU feared assault by black men, they nonetheless acted in such a way
as to put their faith in law instead of in extemporaneous illegal
community violence (Hall, Revoltpassim; Hall, "The Mind"). In belying
myths based on innocent and helpless white women, activists had not
The Southern Rite of Human Sacrice 63
stopped lynching but they had begun to disenchant one of the South's
most sacred myths.
Rehgion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred
within the context of a sacred order. Holiness demands purity, and
purity was sustained in the segregated South by avoidance, margins,
distances, aloofness, strict classification and racial contempt in law and
custom. To be sure, economic benefits flowed from whites' attempts to
control black people, but these were hidden even from white people
themselves who fabricated sexualized myths of otherness about African
Americans. Essential to these myths by the late 1880s was the image of
the white woman whose innocence justified whatever violence white
men might find "necessary" for her protection against the "black-beast-
rapist." When myth brought violence, deadly rituals that stripped the
black victim of his sexuahty were grisly evidence of a transfer to the
black body of the violence, guilt, and shame in the white community;
the transfer reenacted ancient scapegoating rituals and resonated with
the formal rehgion of Christian Southerners who had centered "sacrifice"
as a means of salvation. The cross symbolized a salvation effected by
Christ's paying just satisfaction for the sins of humanity: focus was on
the justice oipunishment Even God had had to pay the price for human
sin. That African Americans could see lynching as a sacrificial act in
which they identified with the victim meant that existentially at least
they understood an alternative view to the orthodox (white) emphasis
on penal sacrifice. A few whites could begin to see that Christ, too, had
been lynched and to challenge theology impUcitly and white
conceptions of justice explicitly. Because the myth of God's just
vengeance permitted whites' obsession with punishment to rule their
relations with blacks there was no restriction within the core myth of
Christian identity to the racism that clouded their vision. It was possible
for the rare white Christian to sense that atonement demanded empathy
with sacrificial victims so that there might be no more "victims"; but this
insight remained hidden from most Southern whites for the moment.
They could not see, as black Christians did, that in a sacrifice celebrated
in such dramatic and public fashion, the Christ had become black. The
full meaning ofthat insight for understanding religion, punishment, and
justice in America was stiU to be realized; lynching was but one way of
using death to solve problems of violence and justice.
Works Cited
Adams, Dickinson W., ed. Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels: "The
Philosophy of Jesus" and "The Life and Morals of Jesus. " The Papers
of Thomas Jefferson. 2nd Series. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.
AUen, James, et al. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in
America. Santa Fe, NM, 2000.
Ansley, Mrs. J. J. History of the Georgia Women's Christian Temperance
Union from its Organization 1883 to 1907. Columbus, GA.: Gilbert,
1914.
Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the
Mob. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004.
Aulen, Gustaf. Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main
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