At the Altar of Lynching

It is exceedingly doubtful,” Walter F. White wrote in Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch in 1929, “if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity” (1929; 2001, p. 40). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader and antilynching crusader traced a straight line from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition to the killing fields of the Jim Crow South, where religious fervor seemed to incite racist brutality rather than subdue it. Nearly a century later, in At the Altar of Lynching, Donald G. Matthews offers a bold and compelling claim of his own. “Religion did not cause lynching,” he contends. “Lynching was religion” (p. 2, emphasis in original). This arresting claim is bolstered by a sweeping examination of Jim Crow–era lynching, grounded in a single, searing act of white supremacist violence. The introduction and each of the seven chapters begin with an epigraph—a trio of verses from the King James Version of the Bible—and the same three-sentence sketch of the 1899 lynching of Hose in Newnan, Georgia. Each chapter returns to this central event, but another violent act—a near-lynching of Matthews's grandfather after he faced off with a mob intent on killing a black neighbor—inspired not only a stunning reinterpretation of lynching but also the fruits of five decades devoted to the study of religion in the American South

Altar · Art · Art history · Biography · Literature · Political science · Reinterpretation · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies

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