The Cross, the Lynching Tree, the Blockade and the Bomb

By JP Sloan

The author is a representative of Black Alliance for Peace and Radical Black Christians and was an organizer of the April 3 Good Friday event at the Metropolitan Detention Center described here. 

For the past few months, a coalition of anti-imperialist organizations has gathered outside of Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn to demand the release of Nicolás Maduro, the constitutional President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and First Combatant Cilia Flores. Because Maduro and Flores were abducted on Jan. 3 of this year, the coalition has mobilized on the 3rd of each month to show solidarity with the Venezuelan people and denounce U.S. imperialist violence.

On April 3 — Good Friday — the coalition returned to MDC to hold a vigil and a speakout to honor those who were killed defending the Bolivarian Revolution. The vigil included the reading of the publicly available names of those martyred in the Jan. 3 pre-dawn U.S. bombing: the names of 32 Cuban military personnel, 43 Venezuelan military personnel and two Venezuelan civilians.

During Friday’s [April 3] vigil at MDC, the coalition made the connection between the violence of crucifixion perpetrated by the Roman Empire and the naked demonstration of violence by the U.S. empire on Jan. 3. While Good Friday is the day when many Christians meditate on the death of Jesus Christ, it is critical to remember that crucifixion was an innovative imperial technology of violence that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people dominated by Rome.

The church has since reclaimed the cross as a central religious symbol, but for those living under the boot of the Roman Empire, wearing a cross on a necklace or hanging a cross on a wall in your home would have been a brutal reminder of imperial threat and control.

James Cone, widely considered the father of Black liberation theology, helps 21st century audiences understand the cross as a tool of violent subjugation by noting the parallels between the cross and the lynching tree. Extending Cone’s contemporary connection, I submit that sanctions and bombs — U.S. empire’s go-to weapons of hybrid warfare — function as 21st century crosses. They are tools of torture used by U.S. empire to inflict pain and suffering on the world’s peoples in its asymmetrical Holy War for resources.

In short, the cross, the lynching tree, the blockade and the bomb all belong to a longstanding tradition of imperial terror. Those on the underside of this tradition of terror are desperate for Christians — especially those in the U.S. — to see that the slow suffocation of Jesus on the cross is mirrored in the slow, collective suffocation of Cubans, Venezuelans, Iranians and others by U.S. sanctions.

Those on the underside of this tradition of terror ask, “How long?” before Christians make the connection between the prophet Isaiah’s Suffering Servant who was “so marred he no longer looked human” and those incinerated by U.S. bombs.

Che Guevara once said, “When Christians have the courage to commit themselves completely to the Latin American revolution, the Latin American revolution will be invincible.” He recognized the revolutionary potential of Christians and the church in Latin America.

Christians in the U.S. and throughout Our Americas must not only see the connections between the cross, the lynching tree, the blockade and the bomb, they must also embrace the counter-tradition of the revolutionary Acts — or, more precisely translated, Praxis — of the Apostles. They must embody a revolutionary love which, as it did in the earliest days of the church, confronts the violence of the empire and bears witness to a better way.