National bodies of both northern and southern denominations adopted platforms objecting to lynch law, although the groundswell of opposition to racial violence did not compel these stances until the prevalence of lynching was on the wane in the 1920s (Miller 1957). In fact by the early 1930’s, no organized church failed to officially condemn all lynchings (Grant 1975). Brundage (1993) also identifies the use of Christian morality in condemning lynching and cites church organizations combating mob violence in Virginia in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

February 10, 2015 - “Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort,” writes historian Amy Louise Wood in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940.

April 2, 2021 - The cross and the lynching tree need each other: the lynching tree can liberate the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. The crucifixion was a first-century lynching. The cross can redeem the lynching tree, and thereby bestow upon lynched black bodies an eschatological meaning for their ultimate existence.

Through a fusion of cultural folkways ... cross, the practice of lynching can be read as ritual reenactment of blood sacrifice, of propitiation for the sin of blackness and expiation for the white supremacist community...

White Southerners did not think ... by literary figures and historians, but he did believe that the religion of white Southerners had created the "particular fanaticism" that led to lynching. He recounted a list of atrocities inflicted by Christians against people unlike ...

May 10, 2022 - They were religious rituals.” Just like slavery and Jim Crow were often justified in the name of Christ, so was the evil of lynching. The Christian faith was polluted by the toxin of white supremacy.

March 19, 2020 - Preaching to a crowd of 3,000 gathered in downtown Wilmington, Reverend Robert A. Elwood urged the jury in the trial of George White – a black farm laborer accused of raping and killing a 17-year-old white girl, Helen Bishop – to pronounce White guilty speedily. Otherwise, Elwood continued, according to a June 23, 1903 New York Times article, White should be lynched. He cited the Biblical text 1 Corinthians 5:13, which orders Christians to “expel the wicked person from among you.”

September 11, 2023 - “The Christian white supremacy, entitlement and superiority, that led to enslavement of African Americans, also justified the genocide, and forced removal of indigenous people that came before that. If we look upstream, from what even good, well-meaning people have called the Negro Problem, or the Indian problem, we see what I call the white Christian problem.” · Robert Jones goes on to look at the connections between infamous cases of the lynching and murders of African Americans and the treatment of indigenous populations in three states.

February 17, 2019 - The lynching of Jesus excels in brutality, and in the slaughter of the innocent, all succeeding offenses.” If the Christian citizens of America continued to understand the “mobbing of Jesus with unconcern and apathy,” the repulsive sinful ...

As Mathews noted "Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness." Further, "Blood sacrifice is the connection between the purposes of white supremacists, the purity signified in segregation, the magnificence of God's wrath, and the permission granted the culture through the wrath of 'justified' Christians to sacrifice black men on the cross of white solidarity."[1] His research and writing are both haunting and horrifying in facing the stark reality that white Christians may have used perceived principles from Christianity to murder our African Americans brothers and sisters in order to maintain a white-controlled social order in the early twentieth century.

February 4, 2025 - Preaching to a crowd of 3,000 gathered in downtown Wilmington, Reverend Robert A. Elwood urged the jury in the trial of George White – a black farm laborer accused of raping and killing a 17-year-old white girl, Helen Bishop – to pronounce White guilty speedily. Otherwise, Elwood continued, according to a June 23, 1903 New York Times article, White should be lynched. He cited the Biblical text 1 Corinthians 5:13, which orders Christians to “expel the wicked person from among you.”

At its most basic, the resulting African American evangelical notion of the church was a community of believers in Jesus Christ. White southerners who lynched placed themselves outside the church, black evangelicals argued. They did not follow the words and deeds of Christ; therefore these particular whites were not Christian.

September 22, 2021 - And, of course, in some churches ... often cited in condemnations of lynching. Christianity, at least in its official ecclesiastical form, seemed firmly opposed to such violence....

August 26, 2013 - God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own. God transformed lynched black bodies into the re-crucified body of Christ. Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus.

JavaScript is disabled in your browser · Please enable JavaScript to proceed · A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser

February 19, 2021 - And in a society where Christianity had a particular social and political cachet, there were some who sought to mobilize it to that end. And so when your fundamental commitment is to “protect your women” that took precedent over the recognition of human life. The levels of brutality present in a number of these spectacle lynchings suggests that while you may say that you hold human life to be precious, it's also very clear that you hold some lives to be more precious than others.

September 22, 2021 - The body of Christ is made to be whole, not divided – therefore lynching’s lingering effects need to be discussed and met with the gospel of Jesus Christ. As a result, I’m grateful for what I learned and for the conversations the event provoked. Even more, though, I’m grateful for this deeper sense of community. ... Eli is assistant professor of Christian Ministry at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and a proud graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

August 28, 2022 - EJI’s museum in Montgomery displays soil samples from Alabama lynching sites. Religion intermingled with violence is nothing new, and you can find Bible-believing Christians on both sides of racial conflicts in many countries with a large Christian presence.

March 1, 2022 - NAACP leader Walter White wrote ... than Christianity. … Through tacit approval and acquiescence has the Christian Church indirectly given its approval to lynch law and other forms of race prejudice.”...