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

Taylor, Mark Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0800632834 ISBN 13: 9780800632830

Publisher: Fortress Press, 2001

Synopsis

Winner, Best General Interest Book for 2001, Association of Theological Booksellers Between 1980 and 2000, the number of prisoners in the U.S. has tripled to over 2 million people, 70 percent of them people of color. Indeed, by 2000, 3,600 people were on America's death rows. This growth industry currently employs 523,000 people. Among abuses that Mark Taylor notes in this "theater of terror" are capital punishment, inordinate sentencing, violations of fairness in both process and results, racism in the justice system and prisons, prison rape and other terrorizing techniques, and paramilitary policing practices. With twenty-five years of involvement with prison reform, Taylor passionately describes and explains the excesses and injustices in our corrections system and capital punishment to foster compassionate and effective Christian action. His book convincingly relates the life-engendering power of God - demonstrated in Jesus' cross and resurrection - to the potential transformation of the systems of death and imprisonment.

About this title

From the Publisher:

From the Preface (pre-publication version): “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 Is it a contradiction that Christians pray to and adore their imprisoned and executed God while supporting or tolerating the execution and imprisonment of so many today? The United States is now on a lockdown craze, and many confessing Christians have played a key part in building it up. Termed lockdown America in a recent book by Christian Parenti, this nation now incarcerates more than two million citizens. The massive number now confined—70 percent of whom are people of color—is nearly quadruple the figure of 1980, being “the largest and most frenetic correctional build-up of any country in the history of the world.” Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of these imprisoned two million, and one of the thirty-seven hundred locked down on death row (usually for twenty-two or twenty-three hours per day), awaiting execution. He is fighting for his life and for a new trial, aided in this by Amnesty International, branches of both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and by a worldwide movement. In 1999 and 2000 alone, while Abu-Jamal waits and fights for his own life, nearly two hundred people were marched down prison corridors for execution, often with the approval of Christian chaplains and U.S. Christians.

Is Abu-Jamal right? Is there not only something “odd” but perhaps also something hollow, inconsistent, wrong in Christians supporting the imprisoning and executing apparatus of lockdown America while claiming to be followers of a “fettered, spat-upon, naked God”?

Not only was Jesus, the “Lord” and “founder” of what came to be called Christianity, executed (after arrest, flogging, torture, and a forced march), but Christians’ first prophet, John the Baptist, was also imprisoned and executed. Its first missionaries, Paul and Peter, were imprisoned and executed, the first beheaded, the second crucified. Early followers of Jesus were pitched against empire, often fell out of safe positions in the system, or were disloyal to it. They suffered Rome’s punitive regime, living at the edge of prison, in and out of jails, risking torture and execution. Isn’t it odd, indeed, that Christians today are so accepting of the punitive regime that is lockdown America.

Many objectors would say, in response to Abu-Jamal that it is not odd at all. First, Rome was an unjust imperial power that early Christians had to resist, whereas the U.S. system today is not an unjust entity; hence, detentions and executions in America are more justifiable. Second, the objectors might say, the early Christian community should not be likened to the criminal element we see in our prisons and death rows today. Christians should help and approve the locking up and executing of the criminal element today, who are so different from early Christians.

I will show in this book that these objectors are wrong on both their points. First of all, lockdown America today is significantly like the punitive regime of imperial Rome in the early Christian context. There are, to be sure, significant differences, and no easy equations of the two regimes can be made. Some of the most recent and best analyses of empire, however, confirm that the official powers at work in the United States today (often transnational ones working with national and local politicians) are similar to the unjust processes that the first-century Roman empire used against Christians.

As to the second point made by Abu-Jamal’s critics, or at least those of them who view early followers of Jesus as nice, noncriminalized people, we need to remember that members of early Jesus movements were much closer to the alleged and actual criminal element than most people think. They were not pure and holy, in the sense of being separate from those whom Rome and Roman society deemed the criminal element. In fact, what Protestant theologian Karl Barth termed “the first Christian community” consisted of the executed Jesus in his relation to common criminals (the thieves alongside of whom he was crucified) and in relation to those convicted of sedition and rebellion.

It is the solidarity of the executed Jesus with the other imprisoned and other executed ones that makes up the “first certain Christian community.” The first community was this criminal element, all three, Jesus and the criminals, hanging together—“exposed to the same public abuse, to the same interminable pain, to the same slow and irrevocable death throes.” Even though Barth emphasizes the importance of this criminal identity taken on in the process of Jesus’ crucifixion, he fails to take with theological seriousness the politically seditious character of that identity. What later became Christian community and church was birthed, as this book will argue, from a communal identity that could be labeled both criminal and seditious. The Pauls and Peters, the disciples whom many presume to be Jesus’ first community, were not present at the time of execution. These can only “get in line behind the two criminals who were already first, and up there in front, with Jesus on Golgotha! .”

About the Author:

Mark Lewis Taylor is Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. Among his publications is Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (1990). He is also editor of the Paul Tillich, The Making of Modern Theology (1991), and co-editor of Reconstructing Christian Theology (1996).

About this edition

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0800632834
• ISBN 13: 9780800632830
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208