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The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, by Mark Lewis Taylor
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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.
- Sales Rank: #1157059 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
- Published on: 2001-04-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .52" w x 6.00" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 228 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
As more Christians begin taking stands on the justice system (see review of Charles Colson's Justice That Restores, this issue), some are critiquing it as an "injustice" system. In The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, Princeton Theological Seminary professor Mark Lewis Taylor attacks U.S. prisons as racist and unjust. Taylor discusses violations such as prison rape, excessively long sentences and capital punishment, employing the example of Jesus as a means of transforming an evil system. "It is time to confess forthrightly that in Jesus of Nazareth, God suffered not just death but execution... supported by religious officials," he notes. Taylor's voice is strident and uncompromising, making this a moving if controversial read.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this work, Taylor (theology and culture, Princeton Theological Seminary) discusses the similarities between the current U.S. prison system and that of imperial Rome, where Jesus Christ and his followers were considered a criminal element. He explains how economics, a culture of terror, and other methods of catalyzing people have created a "lockdown society" in which the downtrodden suffer punitive indignities. The rise of the prison population, under the premise of protecting society, has diminished the freedom for society as a whole, with the United States leading the way for a global lockdown. Taylor shows how ancient Rome saw the crucifixion as a just deterrent and method of control over poorer and slave populations who might threaten the system of imperial privilege if they resisted authority. Jesus created a popular movement that dared to challenge the elite, leading Pontius Pilate to deploy his only means of control over the unrest execution. Taylor points to a current movement that also seeks to undermine police brutality, prison industries, and the death penalty. This book serves as a reminder and expos of the systemic failure of criminal justice as it creates more victims of crime and dishonors those already victimized, but Taylor strays from his premise. This is recommended only for larger religious and sociology collections. Leo Kriz, West Des Moines P.L.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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! .”
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A single-faceted approach to a multi-faceted problem
By Steve
I was a little surprised upon reading Mark Lewis Taylor's "The Executed God."
In favor of the book, it displays many problems with the contemporary criminal justice system and speaks of the importance of justice amidst these problems. Yet, the book is very one-sided, a dichotomous construction of black and white, good and bad (in this instance prison inmates being "good" and the criminal justice system being "bad"). It articulates the abuses of institutional and social oppression, but dismisses the Christian imperatives of free-will and personal responsibility.
"The Executed God" offers a picture for many who may have never been the victims of institutional oppressions that such things exist and demand justice. However, Taylor's suggestions for reform such as "No more prisons!" (p. 142) are very questionable and I was a little surprised at such an easily drawn conclusion. How should those who commit crimes be dealt with? How can incapacitation take place if one is a threat to others? Can society afford to just eliminate prisons and expect everything to work out? This book simply points out much that is wrong with the criminal justice system without acknowledging that something(s) may be right. It holds an oppressive system responsible for its actions but not anyone else.
Also, It relies on a hermeneutic of Jesus as a political victim of the Roman empire, something seen in politically correct contexts of academic studies of the Bible. (An approach which I find limited in its understanding of the depths of Christian spirituality).
Recommended if you are interested in looking at some serious problems in the current criminal justice system. Not recommended if you are looking for reasonable solutions as well.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
The Cross and Prison Reform
By John T. Farrell
According to Mark Lewis Taylor, the "executed God," the God who suffered not just death but execution, is, "a force of life that is greater than all imperial powers and thus can foment the resistance and hope that all suffering peoples need." Comparing contemporary America to imperial Rome, Lewis, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, argues passionately against a penal system he regards as monstrously punitive, inherently unjust, and deeply racist. Using both statistical evidence and experiences drawn from a quarter century's involvement in prison reform, Taylor describes the American prison system as a "theater of terror" that relies on the institutionalization of prison rape, excessive sentences, and executions to maintain a prison population that has tripled since 1980 to two million.
Proposing a radical Christian response to this scandal as a "theatrics of counterterror," Taylor places the Way of the Cross at its heart. To redress the agony of our prisons, he outlines a solution based in adversarial politics, dramatic action, and the building of people's movements. A God entangled in crucifixion is, in Taylor's scheme, "an antidote to pieties and theologies that would seek their God above the earth and its suffering peoples." The executed God takes believers on a journey into the pain and suffering of a broken world and proffers the power to persist and transform. The Way of the Cross finds God in the marginalized, abandoned, and despised, the people who know life through struggle.
The Executed God is an important book grappling with an important topic. Taylor himself, however, diminishes his book's effectiveness. His tone is shrill and his language polemical, perhaps too polemical for those he seeks to persuade. His arguments, especially in Part Two, often rely on emotive generalities and could be more tightly structured and detailed. References to "gulag America," the "theatrics of terror," "big house nation," "lockdown America," and the like seem pugnacious rather than passionate after reading them a few times. And his use of the plight of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted Philadelphia police killer and cause celebre, as the centerpiece of an argument against injustice in America is bound to be controversial and alienate otherwise sympathetic readers.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
God Against Empire
By Tedd Steele
If you want a simple summary of the book, there it is. God is against all forms of manipulative, power-hungry empire, especially what Taylor terms "lockdown America." According to the book, police brutatliy, prison life, and the death penalty are all "theatrics of terror" designed to increase America's imperial power. We are meant to be terrorized by our own government. Taylor proposes a way of counterterror, consisting of an adversarial politics, dramatic action, and peoples' movements. Basically, it is civil disobedience with drama.
Alright, lets get to the good things. There are three qualities that bring this book to the 3 star range. Frist, the problem he has identified is real. Although the language is harsh (perhaps too harsh) the reality just may be worse. Second, Taylor's understanding of a political Jesus is right on. Third, Christians do need to do something.
Now, the problem with this book is it proposes the wrong solution. His take on civil disobedience has been done. It is part of the democratic culture, although a part that most people wish would go away. Second, the "executed God" ends up being the god of the lowest common denomenator of all religious people. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will not be reduced to lowest common denomenator. What is needed to fight injustice is a church, which Taylor abandons. The church must not only provide dramatic action, it must provide an alternative drama to the one that democratic capitalism assums. Perhaps the most radical action we can do is to gather around the Lord's Table together, all being equal. That is a radical form of justice. When we grasp the true meaning of God's justice and live it in the church, America and the world will have no choice but to sit up and take notice. The church needs to be a justice filled alternative culture.
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