The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice Donald G. Mathews In a society where distinctions and dichotomies 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; for "belief in someone's right to punish you," wrote Lillian Smith "is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture." If the polarity were 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 an otherworldliness plunged deep into this world. Christian commitment required a rigorous life of self-discipline, self-reproach, and self-denial which was decidedly "this-worldly." Equally so were the many 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 "otherworldliness" 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. Otherworldliness seemed to be associated with dogma, "narrowness", biblicism, 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."58 The perspective was authoritative and certain. The hard and rigorous fundamentalism which Suzanne Marshall found throughout the violent culture of the Black Patch, and the primitive Calvinism which caught Arthur Raper's Methodist-lensed eye among vigilantes, and the punitive wrath which 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."59 To write that Christianity permitted lynching within a
segregated society is not merely to make a homiletic point. Nor is it on the
other hand a preface to linking specific acts of violence with specific people
in a specific place who did hideous things because God told them to do so. To be
sure, some people did believe they were absolutely justified, which 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 with illegal community acts of violence, students may want to go
beyond mentioning such things to ask how we might understand this nexus,
realizing that the task is not simple and that the connections run through the
mentality of white Southerners if not necessarily their consciousness. At issue
is neither the integrity of Christianity nor the ignorance and credulity of
simple folk who believe myths that "sophisticated" modernists have
rejected. At issue is the cultural reality behind what we have known existed but
never had the temerity to confront; and the place to begin is with Lillian
Smith's understanding of Christianity as punishment, and W. J. Cash's perception
of the "blood sacrifice." It is important to ask: "How could
Cash's words have come so easily; could he have meant that whites literally
sacrificed blacks?" "Where could he possibly have conceived the
fantastic metaphor that birthed such a preposterous idea?" The question is
not rhetorical; there is a specific answer: "In church." If Cash sloughed off loyalty to his Baptist past with the help
of Baptist professors at a Baptist college, he could never 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
salvation. 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 Crucified." 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 reliance upon His
saving act through which a "price" had been paid and satisfaction
made; it lay in sanctifying a life of obedience in anticipation either of a
struggle for perfection or faithful 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." And a few agreed that the idea was indeed scandalous.
When Thomas Jefferson 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 of the Lamb knew that Jefferson had ripped salvation out of
the Bible and left only an impossible ethic and a remarkable man; that was all,
and that was not enough.60 If churches and ministers could agree with Jefferson that the
Christian life 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 evangelical 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 feeling of being "saved". "Saving knowledge,"
meant knowing that one had been made just–justified–before God, but not
justified through the experience itself. That experience had content: an inner
knowledge that the crucifixion 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 returned 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 slippage between private doubt and
public 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! Familiar references to Christ as "Savior",
"blessed Savior", "the Lamb," the "dying, risen
Jesus," the "redeeming Lord"62 all referred to a supernatural,
vicarious and sacrificial act upon the cross: Christ, the Lamb of God was slain He 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 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 words of "price", "cost",
"ransom" "penalty," "pardon,"
"satisfaction" and above all: "atonement." At the heart of salvation were the metaphors of retributive
justice; at the 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 Southern
Christians before 1930 on the signal importance of Christ's sacrificial death.
That agreement reflected a pervasive moral sensibility that emphasized divine
wrath with, 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 through whose action salvation was made 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 Southern Baptist theologian of the late
nineteenth century;65 it was imposed, wrote a future bishop, by the "wrath
of Almighty God"66 Whose nature, warned a fellow Methodist, was to
"punish the guilty."67 As a Presbyterian divine insisted,
"Vindicatory Justice [is] Essential to God."68 This insistence on
punitive justice reflected the absolute righteousness of God as opposed to the
total depravity of humanity which 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 Wesleyans69 it did
not preclude agreement until possibly the turn 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 stain–some would say
total depravity–was ineradicable.70 Only an infinite act of Infinite Being
could bridge the infinite distance between Divine Righteousness and human
corruption. Ministers knew that not all of their laity 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 and discipleship in a dialectic
relationship between faith and hope, consciousness and orthodoxy could be
conflicted. When it was time publicly to repeat the Creed or renew the Covenant
or affirm the reception of "amazing grace," the sound of ones own
voice uniting with others in song, prayer or public recitation confirmed the
mystery represented by orthodoxy at least for the moment. Such people heard
countless familiar and ritualistic sermons, whether read, exposited or chanted,
that described the blood flowing from Redeemer's head, hands, side, and feet;
they felt the terrible jolt against His searing wounds when the cross was
plunged into the earth. They could not fail to have been impressed, as was the
young Wilbur Cash, with the "primitive" feelings that would later
allow him to understand the "blood sacrifice" as essential to the Mind
of the South. The message of sin, guilt and punishment associated with the
elemental and universal symbol of blood was conveyed further by exhortations,
prayers, hymns, recitations, scowls, maternal tears, and patriarchal
condemnation. All worked to cry "guilt", to teach guilt, to instill
guilt: to make the offending soul shudder at the enormity of his/her guilt. The
feelings that sustained the credibility of the incredible doctrine of penal
satisfaction had afflicted generations of white Southerners by the twentieth
century. Even tepid or rebellious believers learned that religion was
punishment: they endured or remembered or heard about the connection in church
trials; they heard and felt the depth of divine wrath from angry preachers; they
learned, too, from admonishing looks, raised eyebrows, whispered confidences and
the anguish of awakening sexuality the pervasiveness of sin and the necessity of
retribution. All these things when contrasted with the righteousness of God
taught children of conventional Christians that Someone had a Right–as Lillian
Smith recalled–to punish you; it was also an Obligation. The mood focused on a
mysterious, cosmic and violent transaction at the crux of Christian
consciousness.76 The source of this penal theory of atonement was presumably
the Bible; everyone who accepted it certainly believed as much; but it was not.
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
of the theory. During that time various understandings had circulated within the
Church, and some of these played upon the motif that 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.77 References to sacrifice came out of
Old Testament texts from a cultus that maintained the holiness of community
through spilling blood (the "containing life 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."78 The
vicariousness of such rites is clear for the Day of Atonement [Leviticus 16]: in
one ritual a goat is sacrificed for the sins of the people. In another, a goat
[scapegoat] is laden with the sins of the people through prayer and driven into
the wilderness thus banishing violence and guilt. Against such references, however, may be cited others that
subvert the importance of sacrifice. In I Samuel [15:22], Amos [5:22ff] and
Micah [6:7-8], for example, sacrifice is repudiated in favor of humbly walking
with God. Such contradictions in a complexity of books, laws, and ritual acts
suggest why it is tendentious to write of a "biblical theology of
sacrifice."79 Yet Jewish discourse when Saul of Tarsus was a student
included the redemptive qualities 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 an engine of Roman torture 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] 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 was to bring
Jews and Gentiles together into a new community in which all were reconciled to
each other and to God by themselves becoming living sacrifices.80 Because
the Biblical 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? Since we already owe God everything it is
impossible for us to pay satisfaction for our sins. Worse, because dishonoring
God is the dishonoring of Infinite Being, only an infinite satisfaction is
appropriate. Therefore, Deus Homo (God-man) 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."81 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 victory 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 liberated Christians from bondage to the Law had become Law
Itself.82 Over the next few hundred years, this theme shaped the
medieval mentality which 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
religious sensibility 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.83 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 relied on the metaphors and analogies of criminal law; for Anselm, Christ
"pays our debts; in Calvin he bears our punishment."84 Even Wesleyans
who were not enamored of all 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, like medieval knights,
lived in a culture of honor, the clearest statement of the theory was made by
Robert Lewis Dabney whose desire to distinguish clearly between faith and
faithlessness made him an ideal spokesman for the religious of 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."85 He wrote easily of "God in his
punitive providence," of a justice that demanded punishment, and of a
Christ who "suffered legally and righteously for the guilt of sin imputed
to him."86 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 which Christ had taken upon himself and which "satisfied the
divine perfection outraged by our sins."87 In this fashion, punishment was sacralized by the dominant
religion of the American South. To be sure, as Dabney knew, there were
Christians 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 was more revealing of Love than Justice.92 African Americans'
views of Christ's work, too, were dramatically different; they had perceived
that the one broken on the cross suffered with and not for them. They believed 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.93 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 "stern and
inscrutable God of Israel" rather than the "amiable and understandable
God" Whom liberals were then fabricating from the New Testament, modern
science, and sentimental optimism.94 Written in response to such namby-pamby
idolatry and the anti-Southern fall-out from the Scopes trial,95 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 burnt offerings and arbitrarily
crushed Job into the dust.96 The rage of such a god was magnificent. If Ransom
eventually left both Church and South, he had indeed captured the religious
ambience of his region in pleading with believers to "restore to God the
thunder;" that is, the wrath and the penalty. |
The Southern Rite of Human
Sacrifice, Part III
