The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

Preface to the Second Edition

Police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty—the structural triad of the U.S. penal state I term Lockdown America—are not just challenges for Christians today, they demand re-thinking and re-creating what Christianity is. The challenges demand not simply sensitizing and mobilizing Christians, but more importantly re-envisioning and redefining just what constitutes Jesus-followers today.

By themselves, Christian communities will not achieve this reconstituting of Christian faith. Assemblies of Jesus-followers that effectively challenge the political repression and existential anguish of today will be those which work alongside interfaith and inter-religious communities and also with secular peoples of conscience. If Christians work in this way, they will confront the tortured restlessness that Lockdown America sears into the bodies, hearts, and minds of U.S. peoples today. A still white supremacist system in the United States disseminates a domestic terror that reinforces corporate power and threatens us all, but predominantly and most brutally those in black, brown and other communities of color.

There is a tortured restlessness and resistance among U.S. peoples because the structures of Lockdown America are themselves forms of torture and terror.

United States police have repeatedly been found to use torture in their apprehending and detaining practices, and specific techniques designed by U.S. city police forces have shaped the reigning forms of torture used by U.S. CIA and other government security forces.[1] The U.S. Senate’s own investigations of 2014 have confirmed the CIA’s continued involvement in torture.[2] The police are often the frontline for surveillance, control, and dissemination of terror in poor communities.

The very concept of long-term confinement, a constitutive element of mass incarceration in the U.S., is made worse by overcrowded and inhumane conditions, and has been analyzed and criticized as torture.[3] The eighty thousand or more prisoners who endure solitary confinement in U.S. prisons are adjudged victims of a slow assault on the dignity of the person, a disintegration of body and psyche—clearly, sufferers of torture.[4]

It is not just solitary confinement, however, that has exposed mass incarceration as generative of torture. Prison overcrowding and unwillingness of the U.S. prison system to commit resources for its burgeoning elderly, who are aging behind bars, also create conditions of torture. Law professor Jonathan Simon in fact uses the phrase torture on the installment plan precisely for this systemic exposure of increasingly ill and elderly to medical neglect and mistreatment.[5] Correctional officers, who lack resources for caring for the elderly, are also systematically hostile to providing medical treatment of prisoners, even though the graying of the prison population has become a national epidemic afflicting states around the country—from California to Missouri to Florida.[6]

U.S. death rows, still displaying over 3,000 persons, are similarly sites of torture. After a person is sentenced to death, he or she is held in situations approximating solitary confinement, sometimes for decades, under prolonged and anguishing anticipation of the state’s calculation of an execution date. Judges’ rulings on particular cases of such death row confinement have declared it cruel and unusual, a form of torture, as have international jurists.[7]

Indeed, U.S. global sovereignty abroad, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, is widely recognized as buttressed by practices of torture by U.S. officials and their proxies, if not by outright war (covert and overt) that terrorizes a people. The U.S. Senate confirmed and reported in 2014, in details that shock the conscience, that the U.S. has and does torture—and torture is the right word, not enhanced interrogation techniques.[8] U.S. agents have themselves been torturers and have trained torturers of other nations’ security forces. This has often meant the presence of U.S. military personnel during acts of torture and also supporting operations of forced removal that involve torture and massacre in displaced communities that are deemed in the way of development or engaged in dissent to such development and U.S. geopolitical interests.[9]

The cover art of this book signals one site of U.S. power’s violent legacy. Yet the cover is also testimony to the power of people’s vision and resistance to that legacy. The art is a key image from a mural in Pacux, Guatemala, a model village to which survivors of the massacre of some six hundred Maya Achi peoples were forcibly relocated. The 600 dead—107 children and 70 women—and their dislocation was the gruesome price they were forced to pay for construction of the Chixoy megadam in North-Central Guatemala of the late 1980s. Its construction by the U.S.-supported World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank required and then rationalized the destruction of the Maya community of Rio Negro. The mural wall, designed and painted by the grandchildren and children of the Chixoy Dam/Rio Negro massacre victims with the help of the extraordinary justice art collective H.I.J.O.S.[10] in Guatemala City, is emblazoned with the words, La voz de los nietos e hijos nunca se olvida el terror (Our children’s and grandchildren’s voices will never forget the terror).[11]

Violated peoples do not forget. They dream alternatives and organize against overwhelming power. In the U.S., organized and creative resistance has an equally long history. In fact, this book is indebted to their long struggle. My thinking here would be impossible without their struggle and the many who have written to bear witness to their long-term efforts.

More recently, the efforts against police violence that rippled through U.S. communities in 2014 as in the #blacklivesmatter movements are one manifestation of popular resistance against a U.S. state terror’s long history. Churches have at times been part of that resistance. In spite of the appalling silence of the churches, and their at times outright complicity with Lockdown America today, some churches and their members organize and step forward.

Young people Kenisha and Randall, for example, led scores of their large congregation and visitors out into the intersections of Southside Chicago in 2014 to occupy the streets in a Die-In with their family. They walked-out their anguish in response to growing numbers of black youth shot by police, while police remained immune from accountability. The names of many of these youth were heavy on their hearts: Ferguson, Missouri’s Michael Brown, but also others across the country such as Yvette Smith, Tarika Wilson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Renisha McBride, Michael Cho, Anthony Baez, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, and more. The Chicago church’s youth were followed into the streets that day en masse by their congregation’s parents and older members who, in lament and rage, chanted, We’ve got your back! The youth progressed out onto the street carrying a make-shift wooden cross with a placard nailed to its center, its words proclaiming: Black Lives Matter.

These youth, with the support of their community, provide one example in U.S. city streets of what this book terms the way of the cross through Lockdown America. The book will explain the senses in which this can be viewed as the way of an executed God that includes belief, protesting, but also an intrepid local organizing of people’s movements.

When I wrote the first edition of this book in 1999-2001, Lockdown America’s triad of forces had long been servicing the U.S. corporate and militarized state. Lockdown America was already well consolidated and virulent. By 2001, United States police violence and brutality had been roundly denounced, decried, and documented by Amnesty International and others as out of compliance with international law. United States prison populations had then surpassed the 2 million mark, with retribution and neglect becoming the watchwords of jailors and wardens. Rehabilitation?, asked one warden in the 1990s. They come here to die, he said. Concerning the death penalty, the nation then was in the throes of two years that featured the highest number of annual executions since the temporary abolition of the U.S. death penalty between 1972 and 1976 (98 executions in 1999, 85 in 2000).

In spite of this strong presence of Lockdown America in 2001, the book’s concerns often evoked evasive responses. You have to understand, said one pastor after a lecture I gave in his church in 2001, What you are talking about is so beneath the radar of most churches and citizens. People were disturbed. A few listened. Many were in denial.

As if interpreting this pastor’s comment, political scientist Marie Gottschalk writes in her 2015 book on the carceral state, Fifteen years ago, mass imprisonment was largely an invisible issue in the United States.[12] Invisible to whom? we might ask—certainly not to the imprisoned and their families and friends of those years. But yes, fifteen years ago it could seem invisible, given the neglect of the issues by major media and publishing houses. That is starting to change, but not quickly enough. One major reason for greater public attention to the issue has been the publication of law professor Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness.[13] It has been widely read, and is a veritable organizers’ bible throughout the country, in secular and religious communities. One association of Christian faith leaders and congregations prepared a study guide on Alexander’s book, integrating its themes with biblical readings and questions.[14] Jewish working groups, the American Friends Service Organization, and Unitarian Universalists have also developed study guides for organizing based on this book.

Many of the groups and writers who now decry mass incarceration and other structural abuses of Lockdown America stem from outside the church, and these are often leading the way. It is still time, though—in some ways long past time—for the churches to align with these groups and make their own distinctive contributions. What, though, might churches’ contributions be? Again, more importantly, what must Christian belief and practice become in order to respond to the crisis of our time? This book is my response to such questions.[15]

We face today an especially sinister emergence, not just more police violence, mass incarceration, and a death penalty, but the rise of the U.S. carceral or penal state. Here the powers of our state themselves become penal, not so much to punish violations or crimes, but more to enforce corporate-led economic exploitation of those deemed surplus populations, these being usually from black and brown communities. Draconian law enforcement at home usually means exploiting police powers’ access to the military industrial complex, yielding an ever more militarized police force of the state. These were strong themes of my 2001 book, and I have foregrounded them even more forcefully in this revised version. Many church groups have their prison ministries and Christians participate in numerous education and assistance programs to the incarcerated. But do they challenge the carceral state? This is the broader and deeper problematic the churches must confront. Numerous studies keep this larger problem in view. The carceral state, or Prison Nation, as others term it, is a legacy deeply entrenched in the nation’s history of white supremacist genocidal practices against indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. These practices were also at work in the transport and enslaving of Africans who through terror, dispossession, and lynching were kept in a state of terror, as often were U.S. Latinos, particularly Mexicans, and also Chinese Americans. The white supremacist genocidal legacy also includes the U.S. wars in lands of the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, whose bombed peoples made their way to this country where they carry the scars of those wars still today. In addition to Alexander’s work, which views mass incarceration as anchoring the more recent of several racialized caste systems in U.S. history,[16] there are other key texts that also place today’s Lockdown America in the history of U.S. state violence. These include Dylan Rodriguez’s Forced Passages (2006), Angela Y. Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2006), Eddy Zheng’s Other: An Asian and Pacific Islander Prisoners’ Anthology (2007), and Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor (2004).

It is U.S. political prisoners in the bowels of the system who have made precisely these severe indictments of the U.S. prison nation. They have pointed out its racist, imperial, and exploiting capitalist dynamics. Therefore, I retain the emphases that my first edition gave to political prisoners. Alexander’s book is largely silent on the matter of U.S. political prisoners. The churches must do better, since U.S. mass incarceration and police violence are intricately linked to a political state violence meted out to those who oppose the state and now are political prisoners in the U.S. In this second edition, therefore, I make solidarity with political prisoners even more constitutive of Jesus-followers’ participation in what I term a liberating material spirituality. Although my book was dismissed by some precisely because it began its 2001 Preface with a quote from an un-American political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, I find it more necessary than ever to retain Abu-Jamal’s opening words. This book’s political theology, then, can be viewed as a call to Christians to strike a more radical solidarity with U.S. political prisoners.

On a personal level, I have been committed to visiting inside various prisons and jails since I spent a year-long internship investigating prisoner complaints in the Virginia State Penitentiary in the 1970s, when I also conducted extensive interviewing with officials about U.S. criminal justice in the Virginia Office of the Attorney General. But one does not resist the U.S. carceral state only by visiting inside prisons and with state officials. For me, then, years of resistance with organizations working against U.S. domination across Latin America and the Caribbean also have been crucial (groups in Guatemala and Mexico, especially). Similarly important for what readers find here have been the years I have sought to create support for political prisoner movements in the U.S. So, for me, major activism for Abu-Jamal has been enabling, whether as founding Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal or working to support other movements in solidarity with him too, in my own classroom and school as well as at other social sites. This revised edition’s dedication to Abu-Jamal is one way to acknowledge his courage, perseverance, and invaluable revolutionary writings for humanity, creation, and justice for all.[17]

This second edition of The Executed God, appearing fifteen years after the first, still displays the basic structure of the 2001 edition, the core of which remains its two Parts. I have added a few new, introductory pages at the start of each Part in order to clarify the book’s overall logic.

Part One, slightly renamed The Theatrics of State Terror, has the most numerous revisions, since there the passage of fifteen years mandates an update on trends and statistics. Lockdown America has morphed in some distinctively new ways, as I have had to note in this new edition. I now give greater treatment to phenomena like the intensification of the U.S. surveillance state in the wake of 9/11, the growth of the private prison industry, the increasing confinement of immigrants in detention centers intersecting U.S. prisons, the increasing use of prisons and jails for the mentally ill (big jails like Rikers Island in NYC and Cook County Jail in Chicago are the largest holding centers for our mentally ill), the ever greater intensification of militarized policing (which I had emphasized in 2001), and the destruction of U.S. neighborhoods by criminal justice systems that parallels what U.S.-led economic policy does against poorer nations across the globe.

Part Two, which I have slightly renamed A Counter-Theatrics to State Terror, still presents the main substantial vision: a reconstruction of Christian practice for Jesus-followers amid Lockdown America today. That practice, what I term the way of the cross, has three always intersecting dimensions: adversarial politics, dramatic action, and the building of people’s movements. Of particular note, for this revised and expanded edition, I have added a new Chapter 6. Titled Building Peoples’ Movements – 2: Abolishing Capital Punishment(s), this chapter now serves as a summation of much of the book’s core concerns. In it I describe further the importance of the political prisoner Abu-Jamal, drawing from Walter Benjamin’s notion of the great criminal, a term used for those figures known not so much by their deeds as by the ways their cases expose state violence.

I must add a final point, one that signals for me the affective weight of this task. I have returned to re-think nearly every phrase and approach of this book, because I don’t know how one can be anything but sleepless—with lament, rage, and consternation—by the enormity of the devastation wrought by the building, maintenance, and toleration of Lockdown America today, with its triad of police violence, mass incarceration, and the death penalty. Columbia law professor Robert Ferguson, in his book Inferno, writes of the sense of shame and outrage that break upon observers if and when they face the systemic degradation deployed by U.S. prisons today. Agreeing with this, I also would confess to a certain vertigo when gazing into the abyss of our prisons and Lockdown America. I find myself recalling the words of Nietzsche, who issued the following warning: when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you (aphorism 146).[18] This book is one attempt to steady myself in critical reflection and for action, maybe to help steady others too, as that abyss gazes into all of us. The crisis upon us requires a coalition of our many movements, more than I can write about in any one book, to transpose our anguish and sleeplessness into energizing action for restoring human and planetary justice and peace. But in addressing Christians who may want to participate in such a coalition, we must let die some of our most cherished beliefs. We may feel that even our usual concepts of God get lost in this book, are executed, as it were. And yet, amid the state’s own executing of the living, its multiple death-dealing powers that create more death and consign many to the status of the living dead, this book discerns an executed god of another sort, as a greater, deeper, and wider power—a power in and of the people. This second edition of The Executed God seeks to make that power ever clearer, more effective, a greater catalyst of a liberating material spirituality, one that calls out from the earth and its peoples to us all.

Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1-3, 239-42. ↵

U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein, Senate Intelligence Study Committee Study on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program, Released: December 8, 2014, http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=senate-intelligence-committee-study-on-cia-detention-and-interrogation-program, accessed June 20, 2015. ↵

Stephen C. Richards, ed., The Marion Experiment: Long-Term Solitary Confinement and the Supermax Movement (Carbondale: Southern University Illinois Press, 2015), 3. ↵

Mark Bowers, Patricia Fernandez, Megha Shah, and Kathleen Slager, Solitary Confinement as Torture (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University School of Law, 2014), http:// http://www.law.unc.edu/documents/academics/humanrights/solitaryconfinement/fullreport.pdf, accessed June 20, 2015. ↵

Jonathan Simon, Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 89. ↵

At America’s Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the Elderly (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2012), https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/elderlyprisonreport_20120613_1.pdf, accessed June 20, 2015.↵

Juan E. Méndez, The Death Penalty and the Absolute Prohibition of Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Human Rights Brief 20, no. 1 (2012): 2-6. ↵

Alfred W. McCoy, How To Read the Senate Report on Torture, History News Network, George Mason University, December 21, 2014, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/157950, accessed June 20, 2015. The language of enhanced interrogation techniques is almost too perfect an example of Orwell’s critique of political euphemisms. Political language, wrote Orwell, is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind (George Orwell, The Politics of the English Language and Other Essays [London: Oxford City Press, 2009], 22). It needs to be emphasized here, however, that this is not only euphemism. There are many accounts of torture I reference here that could not easily be obscured by the euphemism of enhanced interrogation techniques, such that one might intellectually agonize about whether a certain practice is torture or not (e.g., Is water-boarding torture? Would it be torture if a practice could save another life?). In our time the problem is not just one of Orwellian interpretations with an abundance of obscuring euphemisms. The larger problem is a public refusal to face up to practices of torture, which, if told or narrated, would remove all doubt that torture was being applied—and often by U.S. military and paramilitary forces. For records of these, see notes 1 and 2 above, and also the testimonies of the tortured in Central America by U.S. or U.S.-backed officials documented in Jennifer K. Harbury, Torture, Truth and the American Way: The History and Consequences of the US Involvment in Torture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 56-104. On the limits of George Orwell’s politics of language, see Steven Poole, My Problem with George Orwell, The Guardian January 17, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/17/my-problem-with-george-orwell, accessed June 20, 2015. ↵

Kate Doyle, The Guatemalan Military: What the U.S. Files Reveal, National Security Archive. George Washington University, June 1, 2000, and Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 91-118. Jean-Marie Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 79. ↵

H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio, Children for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence), http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/1980—from-memory-to-resistance-children-bear-witness-hijos-celebrates-10-years-in-guatemala-, accessed June 30, 2015. ↵

See film by Lazar Konforti, Chixoy Dam: No Justice, No Reparations, No Peace, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF3YI7XMNEE (accessed June 30, 2015). For more on this book’s cover image and this Guatemalan community, see below, chapter 2 and the acknowledgments. ↵

Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 1. ↵

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). ↵

Colleen Birchett, Tiauna Boyd, Iva E. Carruthers, and Alison Guise Johnson, The New Jim Crow Study Guide, updated ed. (Chicago: Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc., 2014). ↵

Among other Christian thinkers who have sought to address the rising problem, see Amy Levad, Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014); James Samuel Logan, Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); and T. Richard Snyder, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). ↵

Alexander, New Jim Crow, 20-58. ↵

Mumia Abu-Jamal, Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, edited by Johanna Fernández, foreword by Cornel West (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2015). ↵

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 68. ↵

Preface

Isn’t it odd that Christendom—that huge body of humankind that claims spiritual descent from the Jewish carpenter of Nazareth—claims to pray to and adore a being who was prisoner of Roman power, an inmate of the empire’s death row? That the one it considers the personification of the Creator of the Universe was tortured, humiliated, beaten and crucified on a barren scrap of land on the imperial periphery, at Golgotha, the place of the skull? That the majority of its adherents strenuously support the state’s execution of thousands of imprisoned citizens? That the overwhelming majority of its judges, prosecutors, and lawyers – those who condemn, prosecute, and sell out the condemned – claim to be followers of the fettered, spat-upon, naked God?

Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience[1]

This query about Christianity’s contradiction—Isn’t it Odd?—can be read as acerbic rhetoric, a deftly-crafted sarcasm, which exposes a key dynamic operating among Christians’ views of Jesus’ death. Taking the query as acerbic or sarcastic prompts a response: Well, no, it isn’t odd at all. It is not odd for Christians to have downplayed the political meanings of his death, to have strayed from revering a figure who, in fact, is best understood from the point of view of having suffered a politically motivated death in the Roman Empire, one that was more than a religious event. This is not odd, we might continue, if we recall that Christians often have regularly abstracted their preaching and teaching into a divine-plan rhetoric of forgiveness and salvation that strips the cross of the politics of terror that were essential to crucifixion’s historical meaning. The oddity that Abu-Jamal observes does not arise simply because Christians today often fail to be politically resistant in ways the narratives of Jesus show him to have been in his own imperial setting. That is a failing by Christians today, indeed a hypocrisy. It is rightly exposed here by Abu-Jamal. But the deeper problem is that many, if not most, Christians work out of core beliefs about the meaning of Jesus’ death that are abstracted from history. By abstracted, I mean Christians often pull the meanings of Jesus’ crucifixion up and away from crucifixion’s historical embeddedness in the state politics of terror in Jesus’ time.

This book, therefore, will weave together throughout its presentation both a constructive and a critical task. As the constructive task there emerges a reinterpretation of Jesus’ life as one that moved toward torture and death on the cross, being what I term his way of the cross. With this task I seek a positive and also feasible political theology for life in struggle and hope amid today’s Lockdown America. Then there is the critical task that runs concurrent to the first one, throughout the book. This second task challenges Christians’ frequent abstraction of their faith and practice into concerns with divine-plan scenarios that occur above, or outside, history’s politics of state terror. The abstraction of Jesus’ death from its historico-political context, from its being what John Dominic Crossan termed an imperial execution,[2] goes hand in glove with similar abstractions by Christians today, failing to make the connections between their Christian faith and a political challenge to current imperial state terror.

The overall argument of the book will be that remembering the torture-death—the imperial execution—of Jesus, and enacting contemporary interpretations of Jesus’ way of the cross, catalyzes Christian action as a key contributor to society-wide mobilizing of resistance and hope amid Lockdown America today. This enables Christians to join others in resisting Lockdown America and in resisting those forms of Christendom that are complicit with it. I am using Christendom to refer to those institutionalized and all-too-prevalent Christian beliefs and assumptions that rationalize and reinforce the logics of statecraft at work in Lockdown America. In these ways, Christianity often functions as ideology, making an exploitative and deadly Lockdown America appear normal, necessary, and incapable of being challenged.

The book has a (perhaps) startling culmination. By its end, I call on Christians to work with all faiths and people of conscience to demilitarize the police function as we know it, to terminate U.S. dependency on mass incarceration, and to end the practice of capital punishment, which means ending various modes of the U.S. killing state. Many of the organizations I point to also prefigure a new socialist future as alternative to the capitalist-carceral state today. This is a mode of socialism I too embrace, and I explore it as abolition-democracy, a notion that Angela Y. Davis and Mumia Abu-Jamal develop with the aid of W. E. B. Du Bois, George Lipsitz, and others.[3]

I am not proposing that Christianity, or discourse about Jesus, has a premium on the thinking and practice necessary for transformation amid Lockdown America. Quite to the contrary, Christians will need to work interdependently with communities of conscience that are interfaith and secular. If this book gives nearly exclusive attention to reinterpreting Jesus, his way of the cross, and many Christian resources, this is because I am seeking to move my own tradition into a closer and more effective solidarity with multiple interfaith and secular organizing already underway. Muslims, Jews, engaged Buddhists, the Yoruba, traditions of Caribbean cultures, secular activists, and well as many others abroad and in the U.S.—all must be engaged to take on Lockdown America.

A further special reason for focus on Christianity is that challenging complicit Christian formations and re-envisioning alternative practical logics of resistance for Jesus followers helps to foment Christians’ subversion of their own hegemony in the United States. Christianity still holds a status in the U.S. as the legitimate religion, often providing, in Judith Butler’s terms, the cultural preconditions of the public, identifying even for secular minds whose symbols circulate freely within the public as distinct from others assumed to threaten the foundation of secular life, whose symbols . . . are considered ostentatious or threatening to democracy itself.[4] Christians who are able to subvert their own public hegemony of Christianity are able to aid in the dismantling of Lockdown America because that hegemony unleashes many ideological reflexes that often sustain today’s capitalist-carceral state.[5] Paradoxically, this subversion of Christianity’s hegemony also can serve to revive the spirit and ideals of the church.

The title of this book, The Executed God, is a phrase naming a complex symbol that both expresses and catalyzes a much needed force for reorienting Christians in the United States. I will elaborate below, especially in the Introduction, on the power of this symbol, the executed God. Here, it is important to note that "the executed God does not refer simply to the executed figure Jesus of Nazareth, as readers might first think when reading this book’s title. No, the executed God names a whole life force that we can trace in suffering and resisting imperial, state-sanctioned violence. It is a whole life force, a greater power, if you will, lively and creative in three dimensions of Jesus’ way of the cross": (1) being politically adversarial to religiously supported imperial power, (2) performing creative and dramatic practices of resistance to imperial power, and (3) organizing movements that can continue resistance and flourishing amid and against Lockdown America, even in the face of state violence working at multiple levels. The executed God is a force of life that is greater than the assemblage of imperial powers and foments necessary resistance and hope for people today.

The executed Jesus of Nazareth, as remembered and haunting later history through oral and written, often fragmentary, traditions, provides a way to talk about this life force. I suggest that the force of this communal remembering is resilient enough to endure, resist, and flourish amid the Pax Americana of today as it did during the Pax Romana of old. But to understand this power as effective one must again resist abstracting from the executed Jesus’ experience of the state politics of terror. Jesus did not just experience a death in general, one that then might be interpreted for a number of Christian theological projects—the one most often developed by Christians are projects that highlight a person’s deliverance from guilt and sin (redemption or salvation), perhaps also a person’s renewal for exemplifying sacrificial love, and so on. No, Jesus on the cross is best understood as suffering, again, an imperial execution.[6] When interpreted as that kind of death—a torture-death—the narrated stories of Jesus become ones about vulnerability amidst and challenge to the powers that visit imperial terror on subjugated peoples.

The executed God, then, can be understood as that life force that catalyzes people’s actions to resist Lockdown America, to build anew beyond it, and to celebrate communal living. People today are lifting up their cries and forging new actions from an oppressive regime in our day. At the start of the twenty-first century, even the normally cautious human rights organization Amnesty International began to charge the United States with violating its own citizens’ human rights with a pattern of unchecked police brutality.[7] Today police violence continues, and the nation’s ready use of the prisons is barely abating, if it is at all. Laws have been altered and practices shifted to give police officers greater discretion in their work.[8] That discretion is extended to citizens who use guns to lethal effect in racial encounters, with Stand Your Ground laws in some states and similar provisions elsewhere. Yet, police killings are often felt by officials to be of such little consequence that they rarely maintain statistics on the numbers of shooting deaths they inflict annually.[9]

If Christians do not act on a solidarity with criminalized populations, locked-down communities, and with others suffering extrajudicial and judicial violence, they themselves, along with many other citizens who think themselves free from the criminal justice system’s negative effects, may find themselves easily caught up in the indignities of today’s punishment regime, if they are not already.

Please do not mistake this book’s critique of Christendom, or its call for ending Lockdown America’s theatrics of state terror, as a mere rhetoric of denunciation and doom. I do, indeed, seek to expose a systematic exploitation, a deadly destruction, evident in U.S. mass incarceration, police violence, and the keeping of some 3,000 on U.S. death rows. This, however is a call to resistance, to practices of a counter-theatrics to state terror—and thus to hope and life. The symbol of the executed God, and the thought and practice to which it gives rise, is solely a gruesome notion if we forget what it means. Its meaning is that a God of life endures and somehow surprisingly continues to mobilize an effective and comprehensive resistance to executing state powers and its structural violence. What I mean by God will be explicated in the Introduction. But note the logic here: I refuse to make sacred any execution—that of Jesus or of anyone else. Nevertheless, along the way of Jesus’ life toward execution, we can learn of a way of living that guards life, beginning with the materially dispossessed, and that resists, challenges, and flourishes against the terror of the state’s structural violence.

No, this work is no rhetoric of doom and denunciation. It may be, instead, more than we usually dare to hope, a way of finding hope for peoples, places, and practices long neglected by churches. The way of the cross in today’s theatrics of state terror, in Lockdown America, is a way through the terrorizing powers of the day toward a restored humanity and a liberating of communities in the U.S. My theological approach is different from Tolstoy’s, but in the spirit of the passage from his book Resurrection, which I have placed on this volume’s facing-page, I seek to connect the gruesome torture-death of crucifixion with liberation. This is not because the cross that ended Jesus’ life in itself liberates. Nor is it because his sacrificial torture-death was or is a necessary cause of liberation. It is more due to today’s communities, those that Ignacio Ellacuría termed crucified peoples, which foreground liberating action when remembering the torture and death of Jesus at the hands of imperial powers. It is through such lived modes of identification, along the way of what this book terms the way of the cross, that there can be an undermining of the powers of state terror that is Lockdown America today.

Abu-Jamal was an award-winning journalist and revolutionary writer, before being wrongfully arrested and convicted in 1982 for the shooting death of Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. He served over 29 years on death row. His death sentence was ruled unconstitutional in 2011, and finally vacated in 2012. He now serves a life sentence without possibility of parole in a Pennsylvania prison. Today, after more than thirty years in prison, his renown has only grown. He has authored thousands of audio and print essays, and eight books. He has become the voice of the voiceless for many repressed others across the nation and world. His humanity, courage, power of pen and mind, as well as the flagrant injustice of his own treatment during trial and appeals, have drawn human rights activists’ attention. Amnesty International declared that his 1982 trial clearly failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal procedures. See Amnesty International, The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Life in the Balance (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), 55. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu demands he be released immediately. Democracy Now!, interview with Amy Goodman, December 8, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/8/south_african_archbishop_desmond_tutu_calls, accessed June 30, 2015. For an introduction to the writings and case of Abu-Jamal, see Johanna Fernández, ed., Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015), xxi-xxxvi, 314-22. ↵

John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 14. ↵

Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 77-104. ↵

Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness as a Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 115. ↵

Mark Lewis Taylor, Christianity and U.S. Prison Abolition: Rupturing a Hegemonic Christian Ideology, in Socialism and Democracy 28, no. 3 (Novermber 2014): 172-88. ↵

For more on the imperial execution of Jesus, see Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, 411-14. ↵

Amnesty International, The United States of America: Rights for All (London: Amnesty International, 1998), 1-2, 17-26. ↵

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 62-63, 89, 104. ↵

For a citizen-initiated effort to keep careful accounting of the numbers of those killed by police, see the online site Fatal Encounters, offered as a step toward creating an impartial, comprehensive and searchable national data base on people killed during interaction with law enforcement, http://www.fatalencounters.org/, accessed June 20, 2015. See also Arlene Eisen, Operation Ghetto Storm, updated April 4, 2013 (New York: The Malcolm X Grassroots Project, 2013), which has a comprehensive photo-listing of victims killed by police, http://www.operationghettostorm.org/, accessed June 20, 2015. ↵

Introduction

The Executed God

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

To consider the executed God and the spiritual practices it entails will demand some important preparatory work. Christians have written a great deal on the notion of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. What new turn is taken when we emphasize today, as this book does, that Jesus’ death was an execution?

I will begin by acknowledging the ways some traditional theologians have spoken of Jesus’ death as disclosing a crucified God and will then suggest the difference it makes to speak of an executed God. In Baldwin’s terms, this concept of an executed God, I suggest, can help make us larger, freer and more loving,[1] especially when we confront imperial power today. If one is at all interested in confronting that power, whether one is a believer in God or not, such a concept can be welcomed as a gift in the human struggle for liberating life.

The phrase executed God does important conceptual work symbolically, and with practical effects for communities that center themselves around such a notion. The phrase links the state-sanctioned killing of Jesus to God, and then forces us to ask what precisely we mean by that three-letter term, God. In this chapter, after clarifying how that term functions in the phrase the executed God, I will suggest that we let die some all too common views of God (other gods, as I call them). These are the concepts of which, to recall Baldwin again, we do well to rid ourselves.[2] These concepts, many of them quite prevalent in the established religions and especially in U.S. Christianity, are not gifts but constructs that often reinforce exploitative power.

The Crucified God

Jürgen Moltmann’s still important book, The Crucified God (1973), reminds us just how central the fact of Jesus’ crucifixion is to Christian faith. Moltmann reminds us that the God of Jesus Christ, though confessed as risen and living—powerful, grace-full, liberating, reconciling, and salvific, if you will—is the one who was also crucified. Jesus’ crucifixion is interpreted by Moltmann as the power of God as grace amongst the rejected.[3] Talk of the crucified God, then, links all of the basically positive meanings of God to the Jesus who was rejected by the powers of his day and who died on an instrument of torture amid Roman empire.

You will find in The Executed God no extensive speculating on just how it might be that God was in Jesus. Nor will I pretend to be able to offer precise descriptions of how one named God, taken to be beyond history and world, transcendent, as well as all powerful and all good, could be in the individual human figure, Jesus. Cogent and convincing descriptions of that are, to my mind, impossible. Neither will you find here, then, theologians’ quite intricate, often metaphysical, fantasies of a dogmatic calculus, about how two natures (divine and human) came together in Jesus without confusion or separation. Christian talk about the crucified God has not persisted, primarily, because of theologians’ reputedly scientific or rational explanations of how God became man, or became this crucified Nazarene. The power of the symbol works in relation to a more practical logic that it will take this book’s entirety to explain.

Christians themselves, especially the poor and exploited among them, have usually found it enough to believe and say that the life of love, power and justice they most need, a veritable power of God with and for them, somehow emerged by identifying their struggles with the life and teachings of this crucified Jesus. Oral testimonies and written narratives about a crucified Jesus, whose life was bound up with God, were kept alive and developed by communities variously called the Jesus movement or the early Christian movement. For these movements, first and foremost outgrowths and variants of Judaism, the reality of God was focused around communal remembrance of this one who had been crucified. The emancipatory meanings of this Jesus fused both Jewish elements and also larger currents in the Greco-Roman environment.[4]The crucified God is a phrase that keeps to the fore this focus on liberating life for crucified peoples.[5]

As Moltmann and others have pointed out, there is a risk that focusing our talk about God around such a crucified one will lead to a glorification of suffering. The risk is that suffering, weakness, and modes of being exploited become sacralized. Suffering is made so holy by talk of a crucified God that, for some minds, glorying in their own weakness seems in itself a kind of sacred worship.

The results of such pious worship of suffering have included quietism, acceptance of suffering (for self and others), and in the extreme, a kind of sacralizing of destructive sadomasochistic impulses. Regarding such sadomasochism, I am thinking of torturers during the Argentine Dirty War of the 1970s and 1980s who told their victims, We are going to make you Christ, and actually seemed to cloak themselves in the mantle of holiness because they were applying torture to victims, being God in the torture room, putting torture victims to the cross.[6]

Even though Christianity in the past and in the present sacralizes suffering, in both subtle and blatant forms, it is not a necessary feature of a Christian understanding of the crucified God. At its best, the expression crucified God reminds us that the power of all life, God, faces and suffers the worst that a creature can endure and emerges with newfound power, strength, and hope. What is sacralized or made holy is not suffering but the facing, endurance of suffering, the resisting it with hope and life.

A God believed to be entangled in crucifixion is an antidote to pieties and theologies that seek their God high above the earth, away from and untouched by suffering peoples. The crucified God takes believers on a journey into earth, into its and its people’s pain and suffering, and finds in that journey not the holiness of pain but the wonder of life’s power to persist and transform. The way of the crucified God seeks God in earth’s humanity, especially among those who are what Jacques Rancière terms the part that has no part, those included but always as excludable, usually repressed and viewed as disposable, and, as Rancière notes, also policed.[7] These peoples often frequent the zones of abandonment in city and country, and are rejected and despised wherever they move.[8] They are the incarcerated and warehoused of our time, those anywhere who know life amid struggle with structural and institutionalized violence.

From Crucified to Executed

To speak of Jesus as executed adds something distinctive. A crucifixion, of course, was an execution, a horrific one, involving public display of the victim in a slow and agonizing death. Over centuries of Christian theological interpretation and ritual worship, however, crucified has tended to signify largely Jesus’ general experience of suffering and death, a redemptive death–a problematic interpretation to which I return later. Here I note that this is again that problem of de-politicized abstraction at work when Christians interpret Jesus’ death. With this, the crucifixion of Jesus is often fitted into some larger theological schema, some overall plan of God for all the living and all the dead. The focus thus tends to shift away from his experience of one of Rome’s most distinctive kinds of execution, to a supposedly more sublime plan of God. Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino also terms this an act of abstraction from the concrete world of Jesus of Nazareth.[9] With this abstraction, the horror of crucifixion as a politically-loaded mode of state killing retreats into the background of Christian reflection and faith, and the politics and specifics of the torture-death of Jesus are themselves rarely given theological meaning.

The phrase the executed God reminds us that the God who was bound up with the life of Jesus of Nazareth was exposed to material conditions so malignant that he was executed. Jesus did not die accidentally. He did not expire in the culmination of a long disease. His death did not come when his life was full of years and maturity. Nor have historians been able to endorse the theologies that claim Jesus was possessed of a will to die, as many Christians put it, or that Jesus was "intending to die for others."[10] No, if he was crucified he was put to death. He was captured by armed agents; he was confined (however briefly on the way to a quick execution); he was ridiculed, whipped (perhaps also sexually abused and assaulted[11]), and driven on a forced march to his place of death. There, he was done in by executioners.

Comedian Dick Gregory once said that if Christians understood the meaning of Jesus’ cross, they would wear around their necks and hang from their earlobes little electric chairs. I think he’s right. The fact that his suggestion seems morbid and that many of us persist in hanging a silver or gilded cross from our bodies suggest we have lost touch with the ugly and terrorizing dimension of his crucifixion as torture-death.

It is time to take with theological seriousness the historical eventfulness of Jesus’ death as an execution: a state-sanctioned execution, one also supported by key religious officials. We should guard against interpreting state-sanctioned as meaning solely judicial and official. Indeed, it was that, but there was also an extra-judicial and populist dimension, even, at times, a mob action dimension. In the narratives about Jesus, this is apparent when the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, is said to have appealed to popular will when proceeding with Jesus’ execution. Because of the way that crucifixion combined judicial and extra-judicial actions and agents, theologian James H. Cone is certainly right in seeing the similarities between crucifixion and lynching, as in his 2012 book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. It is another sign of Christian abstraction of the cross from its context in a politics of terror that the similarity has almost never been mentioned by theologians. Concluding his analysis of Reinhold Niebuhr’s silence on the issue, James Cone writes, During most of Niebuhr’s life lynching was the most brutal manifestation of white supremacy, and yet he said and did very little about it. Should we be surprised, then, that other white theologians, ministers and churches followed suit?[12] The historical grounds for seeing the relations between Jesus’ cross and U.S. lynchings are strong. It is not only the mix of judicial and extra-judicial elements leading to Jesus’ crucifixion that creates a parallel with lynching. Perhaps more importantly, as I will show below, both crucifixion and lynching had the political function of consolidating rule: Roman domination in Palestine, and white supremacist social domination in the U.S., respectively. To neglect theological interpretations of the cross as lynching discloses the ways white entitlement and racism continue to infuse Christological readings of Jesus. In the first edition of this book I myself all-too-briefly mentioned this connection of crucifixion to lynching. Indeed, I did embed my analysis of Lockdown America in the U.S. history of both slavery and lynching, but in a way that elided the direct affinities between lynching and crucifixion.[13] In this edition, I emphasize the connections more prominently, since the legacy of lynching is at work in the U.S. state’s racist pattern of official executions, where those executed are still more than half black, and even more frequently, executed for killing white victims. In the 35 executions of 2014, no white person was executed for killing a black man or woman. Lynching’s legacy, though, is also evident today in law enforcement’s freedom from accountability in the shooting of black and other youth of color, thus displaying a de facto, and often actual, legalization of white supremacist killing of black life.[14]

In sum, Christianity, defined by this executed and lynched Jesus, is not just about a crucified one who faced the threat of human death in general. No, against all pious abstractions—whether these come in the form of beliefs held by Christian fundamentalists, evangelicals, or liberals—the executed Jesus challenges Christian thinkers to enter the world of the politics of terror at work in Jesus’ imperial execution. Christians who confess that the presence or reign of God was uniquely given, in some mode, with Jesus’ presence, are confronted with the need to do a political theology of state terror at the very heart of their Christology and at the heart of their discourse. By Christianity’s own traditional logic, we are compelled to face and to meditate on a figure who entered into Rome’s and Palestine’s state-sanctioned theatrics of terror. We are challenged