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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/easter-lessons-james-cone/"></div>President Donald Trump had a foolish idea about today, telling reporters last month about a plan to re-open the economy by “that beautiful Easter Day… a very special day for many reasons,” though he was unable to explain it further.
He has since backed off the idea of an economic resurrection on what is also known as Pascha, which celebrates the belief of Jesus Christ being raised from the dead by divine power three days after his death at the hands of Roman imperial torturers. Trump’s apparent cluelessness about the holiday suggests a need to reckon with its deeper meaning in light of his racism.
The late black theologian James Cone wrote in his The Cross and the Lynching Tree of the overlap between the symbol of the cross on which Jesus was crucified and the lynching tree which is a painful reminder of oppression and terror for black Americans. “Until we see the cross and the lynching tree together,” Cone wrote, “until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.” Cone argued that white Christian thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr, still beloved by both liberal and conservative theologians, ignored the striking parallel between their crucified savior and lynched blacks. Had he survived cancer two years ago, Cone would have celebrated the 50th anniversary of his appointment at Union Theological Seminary this academic year.
This September Eric Garner would have celebrated his 50th birthday, had he not been choked to death by NYPD officers. Video recordings of Garner’s murder launched “I can’t breathe” protests. Victims of the cruel punishment of crucifixion, like Jesus two millennia ago, also ultimately died of asphyxiation. In the words of Cone, Jesus and lynched blacks in the United States have both been “publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty” with the aim of striking “terror in the subject community.”
As Americans try to stave off the novel coronavirus’s attack on the breath itself, the original disease of supremacist domination goes uncontained. Many Christian leaders continue to suffer from ignorance on both issues. One of Trump’s most die-hard supporters, Liberty University president and white Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell, Jr., recently welcomed students back to campus, essentially offering them as a sacrifice for the leader’s ideology. Liberty could face negligence liability for such a reckless policy. According to Pew Research, three quarters of all white evangelical Christians approve of Trump’s handling of the crisis, and believe that the news media has blown the crisis out of proportion. These numbers indicate that the country will go on tolerating not only racism, but bad leadership sanctioned by white religiosity.
To be sure, many United States Christians are committed to racial reconciliation. But implicit racism has driven many of our national failures, and many white Christian churches are complicit. Their predecessors helped to justify slavery, and continue to practice willful ignorance of economic injustice and mass incarceration. Until these lies are exposed, until we reckon with the lynching tree as a modern cross, we will all remain chained to the past and hindered in our ability to promote the health of the world’s wealthiest nation.
In service of this reckoning we can collectively re-read Cone’s vital works this Easter season and contemplate how America houses a fourth of the world’s prison population while having only a 20th of the world’s total population. Disproportionate numbers of those in prison are poor and black.
As we are terrorized today by the threat of an uncontained virus, let us also remember that white supremacy is a lasting illness. The virus will someday be contained. But racism’s damage will live on until we collectively agree to confront it and repair it. This Easter season, let us not let our hopes for economic miracles take away from the deeper truths of resurrection as made clear to us by courageous scholars like James Cone. 
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The Courage to Face Death: Easter Lessons from James Cone

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/front-lines-civilizational-crisis/"></div>Late this August, I assured parents dropping off their first-year students at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks that we would take care of their precious cargo. “This is one of the safest communities in America” coupled well with “Your kids are going to have a great education here.”
This past Wednesday night, five miles from that August send-off, Ian David Long brought his semi-automatic Glock handgun into a celebration of college students and shattered the night, and their lives, with his bullets. Long was a veteran of American combat missions with the Marine Corps, including Afghanistan. Domestically, he killed a dozen of his countrymen, including himself, in another act of mass murder, described as “senseless” yet not wholly unpredictable.
Thursday morning, with the night’s fog still enveloping our campus chapel, I found injured victims and friends had gathered with clergy and counselors to cope well before the sun rose. I heard from the mouths of those who escaped, including one disabled student who huddled in a blanket, barely able to tell of the horror of watching people jump out windows to escape the bullets. He could only stay in place, hide, and hope that the shooter didn’t see his crutches trembling.
As the sun rose, we walked around campus to find students weeping and coping, staring at televisions, reassuring worried parents, and seeking information about friends who were yet unaccounted for. Throughout the day we hosted religious services, and connected wailing students with grief counselors. By the evening we had a plan to support faculty as they opened up classes on Monday morning to students who were coping with sudden, violent loss.
But as I drove home to Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, hillsides lit in orange flames surrounded me. By Friday morning, as if the week had not been enough, our campus was closed as another round of wildfires threatened our little corner of civilization.
They say life in Los Angeles envisages the future of the United States. “America, only sooner,” has been a tagline that has predicted our ever-growing love for fast food and Drive Thru windows, cars and superhighways.
But today it feels like an ominous statement about the fraying civic fabric of our communities, the numbing effect of widespread violence, and the chaos of ecological catastrophe. If it is true that Los Angeles is America, only sooner, then please heed our warnings.
Act collectively to understand and slow the effects of climate change. Act collectively to slow our gun violence epidemic. Act collectively to stop us from sending young men and women into wars that return them to us shattered and broken.
In mourning, we will ask “Why us?” and “Why now?” and “How could this happen?” We will throw up our hands and curse our fate. But the cause of this is not fate, nor the deity, nor randomness. The cause of this is brokenness: broken relationships, broken people, and most of all, broken policies.
Many of those who escaped Long’s bullets on Wednesday, had escaped Stephen Paddock’s a year earlier in a Las Vegas mass shooting — the worst in United States history. Our campus had just mourned with our Jewish community, the hate-tinged deaths of attendees of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Many of my students had been at the Oaks Mall during a murder-suicide attempt just this past spring. I continue to mourn a 2012 hate crime shooting at a Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin, and a 2015 massacre of African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. And the wildfires, and the mudslides to come later, are now a common occurrence, too.
Maybe the statistics will still show that Thousand Oaks is one of the safest communities in the United States. But now there can be no complacency in such safety. We, as a country, have to stop electing leaders who are making the world ever more dangerous for all young people. We have to support policies that ensure that humanity sees a twenty-second century. We have to support leaders who understand the urgency of sharing solidarity across lines of difference, and not those who give ammunition to racists, bigots, and murderers. This is a global, civilizational crisis. As an educator, and as a parent, I implore you. Hoping and praying is not enough, we have to act for change.
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From the Frontlines of a Civilizational Crisis

We Were Eight Years in Power

Rahuldeep&nbsp;Singh Gill, PhD, is a Professor of Religion at California Lutheran University, and the author of&nbsp;Drinking from Love’s Cup&nbsp;(Oxford University Press), a book about the religious poetry of redemptive suffering.

Rahuldeep Singh Gill

Rahuldeep Gill is professor of Religion at California Lutheran University, where he has served as director for the Center for Equality and Justice and currently serves as campus interfaith strategist. His work has appeared in the&nbsp;Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Huffington Post.&nbsp;He recently published his first book,&nbsp;Drinking from Love’s Cup, with Oxford University Press,&nbsp;and is currently working on a memoir. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.

Rahuldeep Gill

Black Threads in the Civic Quilt

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins