The Executed God is a breath of fresh air. As a civil rights lawyer and advocate, I have long hoped that people of faith might come to see the moral and spiritual dimensions of our criminal injustice system and feel called to bold action in solidarity with those who have been locked up and locked out. I am delighted that Taylor goes even further, declaring that “Christian resistance to Lockdown America needs to be construed as constituting what it means to be a Jesus-follower” (204).

The book is a powerful indictment of what its author, Mark Lewis Taylor, describes as the “triadic structure of police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty.” It offers a guiding vision for moral and political practices that Taylor believes Christians in the United States ought to undertake in resistance to state violence in all its forms. Taylor challenges readers to reconsider the crucifixion story within its historical and political context, an approach that is intended to open the door to spiritually-grounded adversarial politics, dramatic actions, and organizing movements that “catalyze the power we need to go through Lockdown America” (33, 323).

According to Taylor, Christians have strayed from their revolutionary origins and long-term mission by “over-spiritualizing” Jesus’ crucifixion and accepting the false narrative that Jesus was the ultimate scapegoat for our sins. Jesus’ death was not a transcendent moment of atonement, but a horrific killing by the Roman empire. And Jesus’ disciples—by declaring Jesus to be their Lord and forming communities of worship—were not simply following Jesus’ spiritual teachings, but voluntarily placing themselves in adversarial relationship to empire, casting their lot with those who were the most marginalized and deemed criminal. Taylor asserts that Christians, to be true to their faith, must locate themselves “on the suffering side of empire,” put their “bodies on the line” in the struggle for liberation, and embrace a “politics of remembrance” (322). By remembering the historical life of Jesus, he says, Christians will see that “to embrace and love the executed God is to be in resistance to empire” (33). At this moment in our nation’s history, that means building people’s movements against criminal injustice, as well as engaging in dramatic, creative actions that will capture the public’s imagination and force a national reckoning.

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Just a few pages into the book, I wanted to cry out: This book is good news for the poor! For a fleeting moment, I allowed myself to imagine that Christianity might be rescued from doctrines that often seem to encourage passive complicity with injustice and isolated acts of charity rather than organized, courageous resistance and movement-building in solidarity with the least advantaged. And yet, as I continued, I found myself surprisingly conflicted and began wondering whether it was even appropriate for me to comment on a text so deeply committed to resurrecting a Christian theology of radical, adversarial resistance to empire. Who am I to offer useful reflection on what the cross ought to mean to Christians in these times? I am not a theologian. I don’t even call myself a Christian, because over the centuries that term has been used and abused and distorted beyond any meaningful recognition for me.

I know why I was asked to comment. Several years ago, I published a book called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which helped to frame a national conversation about race and justice in America. In that book and numerous speeches, I argued that all those who claim to be committed to justice must get serious about building a bold and courageous multiracial, multiethnic, interfaith movement to end mass incarceration. Taylor’s call for movement-building and his analysis of the political dynamics that birthed mass incarceration are similar, in many respects, to my own. But I did not cite theologians in my work or view religion as a useful resource. The reason is simple. Back when I was working as a civil rights lawyer and advocate in the 1990s and early 2000s, it often seemed that churches were reluctant allies at best, or obstacles to be overcome at worst. Black faith leaders were no exception; in fact, they were often the most problematic in their rhetoric and politics. It was not uncommon to see black male preachers strutting back and forth on a stage or pounding a podium while loudly condemning black youth for their sagging pants and their many failures: dropping out of school, getting locked up, having babies out of wedlock, selling drugs and destroying their own communities. It seemed the only answers Christianity had to offer black youth were shame, blame, condemnation, and vindictive anger wrapped in a form of self-aggrandizing righteousness. When I decided to write The New Jim Crow, it did not occur to me that religion or theology might be of any use to me at all.

That changed when I read Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), by Howard Thurman. That book has haunted me, challenging me to consider whether my preoccupation with advocacy, protest, and organizing might have blinded me to an inconvenient truth: if we fail to acknowledge the deeply personal and spiritual dimensions of individual and collective liberation, all our movement-building efforts may be in vain.

I could not stop thinking about Thurman while reading The Executed God. It seemed Thurman was speaking to my heart and Taylor was trying to speak to my head. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Thurman seemed to speak directly to the hearts of the disinherited, while Taylor seemed to be making a logical argument addressed to an academic audience. Both posed questions about how best to resist American empire.

Thurman said the “urgent question” was: “What must be the attitude toward the rulers, the controllers of political, social and economic life? This is the question of the Negro in American life.”

Taylor, for his part, asked his audience to consider what is required of all Christians in the era of mass incarceration, given that Jesus and his disciples modeled a way of the cross firmly rooted in adversarial politics, community organizing and theatrical resistance to empire (322).

Both Thurman and Taylor agree that nonresistance offers no hope for liberation. Yet Thurman situates the most important site of struggle as being within the hearts and minds of the disinherited. He repeatedly brings the focus back to the existential pain and anguish of the oppressed, and the necessity of the disinherited developing a relationship with (and an understanding of) God that makes principled resistance possible. In his words:

It is a man’s reaction to things that determines [the oppressor’s] ability to exercise power over him. . . . The awareness that a man is the child of the God of religion, who is at one and the same time the God of life, creates a profound faith that nothing can destroy. . . . To be assured [of God’s love] becomes the answer to the threat of violence—yea, to violence itself. To the degree to which a man knows this, he is unconquerable from within and without. (emphasis in original)

Not including the foreword, Thurman’s song of freedom addressed to the disinherited runs less than one hundred pages.

By stark contrast, Taylor spends nearly five hundred pages outlining and justifying adversarial forms of resistance to empire that ought to be pursued by all Christians, no matter what their status. His argument is rooted in historical evidence, some of which is conflicting. He has relatively little to say about the emotional territory of the disinherited or the psychological terrain of his own audience. When he does touch briefly on the realities of shame and guilt, he does so in the context of rejecting “the age-old atonement sacrifice idea” which he traces to the false notion that human beings have an existential need to be saved from sins and “delivered from guilt-consciousness.” He writes:

This book presupposes that any deliverance from guilt occurs not by way of the traditionally projected divine scenarios—usually declaring that “Jesus paid it all” and so now the guilt just falls away. While guilt, along with shame, are real burdens one feels as we participate in life as violated and violators, the remedy for this is not declarations of forgiveness. The best response amid guilt and shame is participation in the liberating political cultures of insurrection that resist the systems that violate.” (284, emphasis in original)

This statement is remarkable not only because it is offered without any explanation regarding how, exactly, participating in dramatic actions or movement-building addresses feelings of guilt or shame, but also because it seems to minimize the depth of those feelings among the “violated and violators.” In my experience, people cycling in and out of prison and their families experience profound shame and guilt, as well as trauma that requires forms of healing typically not offered by collective political action. Reconciliation within families is often difficult without pathways to forgiveness, and the same might be said of society as a whole. While I am skeptical of Christian notions of forgiveness – as they often seem rooted in some kind of duty on the part of those who have been violated to suffer quietly without anger or protest or reparations – I found myself unsettled by Taylor’s insistence that forgiveness has no role to play at all.

The underlying premise of the growing restorative justice movement is that victims of violence often want answers, healing, and reparation far more than retribution, and that forgiveness (when properly understood as not excusing or minimizing the harm) can help to free both victims and offenders from forms of suffering that serve only the interests of a system that thrives on shaming, blaming and unrelenting punitiveness.

Perhaps Taylor can make the case that forgiveness ought to be replaced entirely with political insurrection. What was notable to me is that he does not even try. The emotional landscape of those struggling to heal psychological wounds and make meaning of their lives in Lockdown America is not his primary concern. He does not suggest that a personal relationship with God is necessary or even important. And he says next to nothing about whether Christians have an obligation to help people meet their basic survival needs. Thurman, on the other hand, believed in the centrality of one’s personal relationship with God, and emphasized that unless and until the emotional and physical survival needs of the disinherited are meaningfully addressed, large-scale resistance to the status quo will be impossible.

How might I reconcile Taylor and Thurman? Is it even necessary or worthwhile to understand them in relationship to each other? As I wrestled with those questions, I found myself thinking about formerly incarcerated advocates, such as Susan Burton (founder of A New Way of Life in Los Angles), who have dedicated their lives to meeting the survival needs of people returning home from prison, as well as healing trauma in families shattered by drug addiction and incarceration. Most are serious about their personal relationship with God, but much less serious about religion or church doctrine. Many of them have managed to do their healing and service work while also building radical movements for prison abolition and the restoration of basic civil and human rights. Have they, in their own lives, built a bridge between Thurman and Taylor? A passionate argument began stirring within me as I turned the pages, a dispute that I could not name and still cannot describe.

When I reached the final page of The Executed God, I wanted to hand the book to fellow advocates and activists and get their take, but I decided against it. When I read Jesus and the Disinherited, I shared the book with numerous friends and allies, including formerly incarcerated folks, and had equally meaningful—but wildly different—conversations with each of them. I wouldn’t hand The Executed God to those same people and expect to have similar experiences. That isn’t a critique of the book. It’s simply an observation that the book reads and feels like an academic argument written for theologians, not for people outside the academy.

To be clear, I do not fault Taylor for writing an academic book for other theologians. That’s what academics generally do: write books for each other. But I do worry about the lack of translators today—people who are willing and able to make theology meaningful and relevant for the rest of us. Once upon a time, that was the job of clergy. But as people continue to leave churches in droves, and few clergy seem inclined to grapple with the urgent questions raised by The Executed God, the need for books that speak directly to ordinary folks about what—if anything—religion can offer us has never been greater. Jesus spoke directly to ordinary folks. I hope more theologians who care deeply about the struggle for liberation in the age of mass incarceration will choose to do so as well.

At the heart of Christianity, there are many crosses with almost limitless meanings. The significance of the cross is symbolic, theological and descriptive of “the Way” of Christian discipleship. As a sheer symbol, the cross has been used as a military symbol and in racist hate crimes; it graces jewelry and bumper stickers. In tattoos, the cross may represent faith convictions, white supremacy, or prison sentences served. According to the website HotNewHipHop, gang members frequently choose tattoos of “the crucified Christ, as inmates often draw comparison between their own experience and the oppression of Jesus.”1 In theology the cross symbolizes numerous understandings of atonement, focusing on the discussion of where and how God and human relations are set aright. Indeed, the subject of the cross is a theological tangle where all areas of theology intersect and where one’s convictions about the Divine/God, Jesus Christ, human nature, and ethics all are thoroughly mixed. Mark Taylor’s book primarily addresses the third dominant way the cross is meaningful for Christians: the “Way of the Cross.” While the Way holds various meanings, depending on the theologian, it always refers to a calling and path for Christian life and ethics. Separating out these various meanings of the cross becomes almost impossible and complicates both discussion and praxis.

But it is precisely this confuscation surrounding the cross that Mark Lewis Taylor rejects in his book The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America. He asserts that abstract thought surrounding the cross continues to dazzle everyday Christians and good theologians such that they miss the most obvious and pressing meaning of the cross: Christians follow Jesus, a first-century Jew who was imprisoned, tortured, and publicly executed by the state. Taylor proposes that Jesus’ death is neither necessary nor salvific and Jesus is not a prototype to follow, a moral example of self-sacrificial love. He did not set out to be tortured. He set out to oppose Rome and creatively, radically challenge the system of fear and intimidation that supported perpetual militarized terror of the poor and oppressed. It was not an act to save individual souls. Rather, Jesus’ staged, dramatic political resistance to the oppressive Roman empire provided a social catalyst that formed a movement to address injustices done to the poor. Unfortunately, Christians joined empire rather than following Jesus’ path. Continuing the expanse of Roman power through fear and oppression, Constantine fused empire and Christianity in the fourth century; this led to a support of exploitative violence that Christianity does not seem to be able to shake. Taylor’s first edition was part of the new wave of scholarship on empire—helping us to understand the meaning of the cross in light of this history and its legacy today. Critique of empire has, in fact, been central to historical Jesus and Christian theologies in the last fifteen years or more.

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Drawing connections to today, Taylor moves beyond tattoos and draws direct connections between Rome’s power-hungry oppression of the marginalized to the current United State’s “incarceration state” which protects the white privileged people through the creation of a state of fear, through intimidation, incarceration, torture and death penalty—all primarily aimed at minorities. This profit-making, white supremacist, hyper-masculine system involves an increasingly militarized police force. Thus, United States Christians today should see, name and resist torture, imprisonment and execution of our family and neighbors and cooperate with secular people’s movements in doing so. In addition, Christian liturgy should involve creative, dramatic rebellion against the excessively violent penal system of today. Resisting detention and torture of immigrants and citizens alike should be forefront, according to Taylor, to Christian conscience and political activism rather than seen as “outside” the scope of the heart of the Christian message. Thus the “way of the cross” of Taylor’s book title refers to Christians following Christ’s path of resistance to violent nationalist forces that create a state of fear, torture and death that disproportionately impacts racial minorities and the poor.

This perspective in The Executed God is echoed in his chapter in my volume Cross Examinations when he states: “Passion week is understood best, I suggest, as a deliverance of a people, of their bodies, as well as hearts and minds and souls—their fullness of being—from the social, political, and physical cruelties of domination. . . . What kind of sociality marks the body of Christ? It is a sociality of deliverance, of integral liberation for those in need.”2 Taylor calls on Christians to have rituals of remembrance to expose wrongs today and encourage communal activism. In particular, “the eucharistic practice of the body of Christ can be seen as the collective performative force of Christians, moving and on the move, to provide succor and strength to those under repression who are cut off from the social flourishing of soul and body that mark life in the Spirit.”3

Four avenues of response emerge for me in the process of reading the revised edition of Taylor’s book. These center on: feminist and womanist theologies of the cross, the Way of Christ versus the Way of the Cross, the secular power of Christ, and the irreducible complexity of the cross.

Feminist and Womanist Theologies and the Cross

In 1990, the art installation the Silent Witness National Initiative was started. The goal of the project initially was to raise awareness of domestic violence and protest the death of twenty-six women in Minnesota who had been killed in one year by a husband, ex-husband, acquaintance or partner. Life-sized red wooden cutouts with gold breastplates were stationed in the room. One walked among the dead, reading the plates that held each woman’s name, occupation, date of death, and suspected murderer. Almost all the deaths had been left legally unresolved but the women were brought back from the dead, through art, to protest their deaths and attest to the pervasiveness of domestic violence. It was hauntingly effective. Since then, the Silent Witness project has been performed in many states, schools, government buildings and various public arenas to draw attention to the death of women through domestic violence. Like the incarceration state, to which Taylor refers, women continue to be oppressed by a hyper-masculinity identified with control through intimidation, debasement, fear and violence. Instead of being located in prisons or the city streets, this oppression makes home one of the most dangerous places for women. The creative resistance and protest the project literally embodies is similar to the actions of remembrance Taylor proposes against Lock-Down America.

Womanist and feminist theologians have likewise engaged the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross. In particular, they have connected and critiqued theologies of sacrifice and suffering directly to violence against women. It is interesting, however, that the revised edition of Taylor’s work does not engage the deep resources of feminist, womanist and Asian-feminist theological work precisely on the significance of the cross that have burgeoned in the last two decades. Clearly, one cannot cover everything and Taylor’s book already references work by women and has an extremely extensive agenda for one book; it includes biblical studies, theology, political theory, liturgical practices, contemporary research on the death penalty, incarceration, terrorism, racism, and social movements that oppose them. He also incorporates the theological work of black theologian James Cone who connects the lynching tree and the cross, a seminal work that emerged since the first publication of Taylor’s book.4 Nonetheless, he has many allies in Asian feminist, womanist and feminist theology whose work would be compelling to incorporate because their work directly correlates to his own: examining systemic violence, oppression, and the cross today.

For example, womanist theologian Joanne Marie Terrell agrees with Taylor about the importance of Christian ritual and sacrament as remembering injustice and invigorating social change. She differs from Taylor because she proposes that even wrongful death itself may be considered salvific if it sparks revolution and resistance to oppression. She cites the murders of Emmett Till, whose 1955 murder was an early impetus for the civil rights movement, and her own mother, whose death was the result of domestic violence combined with the social sins of racism and sexism. She writes that such death can become “saving” if it is remembered and spurs social action. Taylor rejects that the cross is the point of salvation and my own work on the cross concurs with this. Taylor also states that the concept of sacrifice tends to lead theologians down the wrong path, abstracting the meaning of the cross while inadvertently justifying execution and torture as a means toward greater justice.

Nonetheless, Terrell and Taylor share deep similarities when it comes to how they understand the Christian community’s act of remembrance and resistance as the most powerful embodiment of the cross’s legacy today. In “Our Mother’s Garden: Rethinking Sacrifice,” Terrell engages the work of womanist theologians on the meaning of Jesus’ death and the cross, namely Kelly Brown Douglas, Jacquelyn Grant, and Delores Williams. Terrell clarifies that God does not sanction violence. Furthermore, “sacrifice understood as the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim”5 must involve individual choice or agency in order for it to be liberative. Terrell claims that a sacramental understanding of sacrifice calls on the community to tend, to remember, and to learn how to overturn the powers of crucifixion still at work. Like Taylor, she marks Jesus’ death as an outrage and posits that “Jesus’ sacrificial act was not the objective. Rather, it was the tragic, if foreseeable, result of his confrontation with evil. This bespeaks a view of Jesus and the martyrs as empowered, sacramental, witnesses, not as victims who passively acquiesced to evil.”6 Taylor also agrees that the cross was the result of Jesus’ active, deliberate confrontation with violent empire and encourages Christian liturgical and sacramental remembrance of contemporary evil to encourage activism.

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker’s field-defining work on the topic of empire, oppression and the cross shares even more commonality with Taylor’s proposals. Brock and Parker firmly insist that Christians, following Jesus, work on behalf of liberation for all. One may or may not be called upon to sacrifice on the path to that goal, but sacrifice itself is a misguided objective. Sacrifice also has particularly destructive consequences for women and economically or racially oppressed people. In this way, they are closer to the work of Taylor than James Cone’s. Like Taylor, Brock and Parker deeply promote the perspective of Jesus as anti-empire on behalf of the poor and hence Christians also must oppose patriarchal, racist, heteronormative, economic systems of power. Their books Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (2008) and their 2002 book Proverbs of Ashes thoroughly develop critiques of atonement theologies which valorize power while justifying violence and sacrifice. I cannot help but think that a thorough engagement of their work or other womanist and feminist theologians on the cross would have been a rich support and maybe even challenge for Taylor’s own proposals. Their work is indispensible for contemporary theologies on the cross and social protest.

The Way of the Cross & the Way of Christ

In Mary Solberg’s book Compelling Knowledge: A Feminist Proposal for an Epistemology of the Cross,7 she describes her own experience of living in El Salvador during the time of government oppression when dissidents were “disappearing,” taken by the government and paramilitary organizations for torture and murder. She describes her own initial refusal to believe that her own government was complicit with the repressive regime; it was inconceivable. But then she describes the scales falling from her eyes, of seeing reality fully for the first time, and how this both demanded and compelled her into ethical and political action. Likewise, many years ago in my pastoral care and counseling course, Christie Cozad Neuger asked her students to try to understand that some people will honestly report that they did not see abuse in their homes, even if it happened right before their eyes. This cannot be dismissed as a lie automatically because we have powerful mental blocking mechanisms that serve to “protect” us from what we refuse to accept as true. Nevertheless, honest seeing is the start of ethics.

Taylor is correct in his assessment that Americans do not want to look at our abusive “correctional” system too closely. In Germany last year, I learned that citizens around Sachsenhausen concentration camp were likewise shielded from active torture and killing of Jews, Poles and Russians while being assured that it was a correctional and reeducation facility for people who were a danger to society. Taylor’s book is an indispensible resource for information on the fear, torture and suffering in our own incarceration state that surrounds us with jails and immigration detention centers. The rationale is that this incarceration protects society and that “those” people must deserve this type of treatment. Taylor states that less than 30 percent of those imprisoned have committed the types of violent crimes that people typically think justifies such harsh conditions. White, economically privileged communities are, for the most part, the “society” that is protected from the life-disabling impact of incarceration and a militarized police force. Predominantly black and Latino communities continue to bear the perpetual weight, cost and scars of the system. Certainly the recent exposure of police brutality against black people, through Black Lives Matter and other groups, attests to the veracity and imminent need of Taylor’s analysis.

Throughout his work, Taylor is making visible the torture, death and crosses around us—calling us to see what we would rather render invisible—and to respond in resistance and reformation. In my own theology, I concur that Christians are called to “surround the crosses of the world and insist that they stop.”8 I would suggest, however, that Taylor is not actually supporting a “way of the cross,” as that language implies a sanctified bearing of crosses and inevitable end point at the cross. I would argue that he is proposing a Way of Christ that has resonances with Lutheran epistemologies of the cross (such as Solberg’s) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ethics of Christ the Center. Both call Christians into active political resistance in response to abuse and oppression. In my own Lutheran tradition, there are those who lift up what they term Luther’s “theology of the cross” in a manner similar to a “way of the cross.” I have repeatedly argued that this valorizes or justifies suffering, intentionally or unintentionally. The goal and center of grounding for action becomes the cross and suffering rather than Christ or his life in resistance to oppression. Luther does not develop a full theology of the cross but rather an epistemology of the cross where he states that God is known in real life, even in the presence of deep sins, dark moments and shames. He certainly affirms that God is also known in creation, sacraments, intimate love, the birth of Jesus, scripture and other parts of life as well. Nonetheless, Luther’s epistemology of the cross affirms that God does not belong to the powerful and intellectual.

Solberg’s Lutheran epistemology of the cross provides additional theological basis for much of what Taylor proposes in his work. Even the worst realities, ones we would rather not see, are not beyond the love and scope of God so we can delve into even the worst situations with our eyes wide open. One is accompanied by what Taylor calls “a deeper power . . . Life’s own vital forces—flowing through bodies, land, wind and all creation” and how this may be a resource “for catalyzing political efforts” (14). For Solberg, the cross is evoked not as a necessary tool of salvation but the reality of the deep pain and suffering around us, especially the crosses we intentionally or unintentionally enable. Seeing these crosses, we are convicted in our complicity and simultaneously called to respond in everyday personal and social action. Taylor also writes that seeing or vision is also involved in addressing violence and oppression. Christian ability to imagine the basileia tou theou, the commonwealth of God, emerges from a vision of love and justice offered by Jesus’ love in direct confrontation with the repressive vision of the Roman Empire. Taylor describes Christian creative struggle against oppression as grounded in our ability “to think an ‘unthinkable’ power” (304). An emphasis on being people of the Way, the Way of Christ, better captures the path Taylor advocates in his book and this will be further evident in the next section on the secular Christ.

The Secular Christ: Christ the Center Arising from the Factory Floor

In Nazi Germany, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenges the Christ that seemed to be worshipped in churches by the wealthy and powerful, the “bourgeois.” He argues that the socialist worker, fighting for change to an oppressive system, has every reason to distrust the God and Jesus touted by the church. “The church is all one with the fossilized sanctions of the capitalist system. But at this very point, the working class may distinguish between Jesus and his church; he is not the guilty party.”9 Bonhoeffer argues that Jesus is more genuinely followed by the socialist worker who simply claims he is a good man rather than the church that says he is God. He writes, “But Jesus can be present on the factory floor as the socialist, in politics as the idealist, in the workers’ own world as the good man. He fights in their ranks against the enemy, capitalism.”10 John B. Cobb’s Christology in Christ in a Pluralistic Age (1975) also seeks to describe Christ as the power of creative transformation that is present beyond the church in any architecture, art, loving acts, etc., that embodies courageous work for Life.11

Likewise, Taylor also says that his theology seeks to embody the “deeper power” and God’s common vision of peace, justice and love for all in every and any venue where it may appear. It can be religious movements and liturgy but it also may be embodied in the natural world or other religious and secular movements for justice. As a Christian theologian, he is willing to support the power of life anywhere it emerges. Bonhoeffer’s theology offers that the ability to follow this vision comes from holding “Christ the Center.” Bonhoeffer’s Christ is not found in simple black-and-white answers but is followed through one’s constant meditation and grounding in the Way of Christ in relation to world events. This Way may be revealed in scripture, Christian community, and prayer. But it may also emerge in loving, brave acts of people beyond the scope of Christianity. Based on Bonhoeffer’s insistence that Christians must bear the cross on behalf of the neighbor, one could argue that the Way of Christ may involve sacrifice and crosses, but it may not. The focus and center is on following Jesus. On the path, one is called to resist all that opposes the Christic vision and living presence at the center of Christian life. In my mind, this more accurately reflects what Taylor is conveying in his book rather than a “Way of the Cross.” It is certainly the basis of my own theology and social action in the world.

My own perspective on the cross in relation to various forms of violence and oppression today also supports some of Taylor’s work in his book. He and I agree that violent death is not the locus of Christian understandings of salvation, but rather salvation emerges from Christ’s love and his resistance to powers of hate and oppression. Thus, Christians are called to follow the way of Christ, insisting on love in the face of systems of power that demean, abuse and kill. Taylor applies this directly to Lock-down America in a way that is surprisingly unique, considering that Jesus is executed by the empire of his day. And Taylor’s emphasis on Jesus as a victim of an empire’s system of torture, incarceration and the death penalty is, shockingly, nearly absent from theological reflection on the cross. Therefore it is an invaluable contribution that keeps Christian feet on the ground, facing our own systems of violence today.

The Irreducible Complexity of the Cross

After decades of engaging the symbol of the cross, various atonement theologies, and perspectives on the Way of Christ, I have reluctantly come to accept what theologian Susan Nelson told me years ago. The meaning of the cross is beyond my control. I can add one interpretation to the conversation and plead for certain ideas to be questioned as damaging or oppressive. I can offer arguments for what I think reflects Jesus’ vision more vividly. But, despite my best thinking, Christian interpretation of the cross will evade me. It is necessarily complex and multivalent and perhaps that is for the best; it is not mine to control. As a person of strong convictions and decades of thought on these matters, this is not easy for me. But there is another conviction I hold that assists my acceptance of this. I believe that we become closer to what is true and of God when we argue vigorously and respectfully from different perspectives. Much like the process of studying Talmud, where the conversation between diverse scriptural interpretations leads the community in its own search for truth and ethics. Along with arguing steadfastly for his perspective, I wonder if Taylor may join with me in considering what it means to posit a single interpretation of the cross as the “best” in light of irreducible complexity. He argues that theology on the cross often gets overwrought in complexity, abstraction, and naval gazing to the detriment of the world’s real issues. If we never get down to what really matters, then what is the point? I couldn’t agree more. And yet, reducing the meaning of the cross to a singular, correct, and applied interpretation also strikes me as limited. Would he join me in thinking about how the Christian community may embrace both multiplicity of perspectives on the cross without losing the wisdom and prophetic call he offers throughout this significant book? Can we see Jesus directly as a tortured victim of the state and, at the same time, affirm some more spiritualized interpretations of his presence today? There is no doubt that Jesus performed acts of resistance and rebellion. I would offer, for the sake of conversation, that he did not interpret them through a single lens. That is the beauty of creative enactments of protest. They are necessarily open to interpretation and application by followers who seek truth, love, and justice in Jesus’ wake.

What a distinct pleasure, and a no less distinct urgency, to be invited to think with and engage the issues and questions raised in the second edition of Mark Lewis Taylor’s The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America. I say “pleasure” because I have long appreciated Taylor’s efforts to bring politics, activism, theory, and autobiography to bear on the categories and procedures ordinarily associated with the disciplinary modality called “Theology.” And I say “urgency” because mass incarceration and what Taylor has termed “Lockdown America,” in my view, must make its way into as many conversations and deliberations of ethics, justice, theology, and humanity as possible. With Taylor, I would say that it is not possible to “do theology” or “do religion” without sustained attention to the material circumstances shaping and circumscribing that “doing.” I appreciate the opportunity to think about these matters alongside such a distinguished group of colleagues in the Syndicate forum. In what follows I will briefly reflect on how this work might intersect with that of recent scholarship and pedagogy on the New Testament, early Christianity, and the Roman empire, which is accented as part of Taylor’s rhetorical strategy toward recontextualizing contemporary Christian living as a “counter-theatrics” to state terror.

The reissue of Taylor’s book is quite timely. The human toll taken by the criminal justice system in this country is too much to bear, and the collusion between religious institutions and relations of power made manifest through the institution of mass incarceration continues to be inexplicable and inexcusable. It is also the case, as Taylor notes, that many types of Christian churches tend to be complicit in “Lockdown America,” a stance which has produced skepticism about whether there can truly be an authentic Christian resistance to empire. In light of such long-standing collusion, combined with basic religious illiteracy about what goes on in various traditions and communities, it is understandable that some Americans may not seek affiliation with Christianity or Christian theology. And frankly, we live in a situation that Robert P. Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, has called “the end of White Christian America,” wherein the very institution that has shaped the ethos and ideological configuration of the United States—American Protestantism in its mainline and evangelical forms—is no longer that which holds considerable sway among “ordinary Americans.”1 Given that a number of Americans are wary of Christianity, Christian theology, and Christian practice in their late-capitalist institutional forms, given the attention to religious diversity and pluralism as a strength rather than a hindrance, and given the attention (hype, even) that the so-called religious “Nones” and “Dones” are receiving for their disidentification from Christian living from professional polling to popular media, it stands to reason that a reimagination, redefinition, and revolution concerning Christianity, and especially Christian subjectivity, are in order. Such reimagination, redefinition, and revolutionary conscience, and consciousness, are, as I see it, at the heart of the project that Taylor outlines in The Executed God. This is a project with which I resonate. Herein several basic questions can be posed: what would it take to disentangle Christian living from imperial designs, to live as Jesus-followers in right-relationship with humanity and the earth, in mutually and socially transformative and healing ways? Is that even possible? And what would it take to overcome deep suspicion about Christianity so that solidarity and justice might be more fully realized? Can we, and should we, reclaim and reframe the (Christian) theological task so that it is more squarely focused on justice? Taylor’s assessment is not only “yes,” but that this kind of “yes” to resistance and transformation is actually at the original core of the Christian tradition.

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I come to the questions raised by this conversation primarily as a socially engaged scholar of the New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianities. Ostensibly, it is my job to figure out the contours of this original ancient core, trace its development into the institutional church and creed, unlock its meaning through exegetical practice, and provide resources for contemporary theological and ethical reflection. However, as a biblical critic, I find it more productive to conduct work that focuses methodologically, in some way, on the ethical imperative I think all scholars of the humanities share: that of understanding humanity through understanding the various products of human hands, across time and cultures. This is messy, as all exegetical work should be. As Bruno Latour has put it, the task of the critic is to reveal the human origins of all ideological stances, particularly those making claims to a kind of truth that lies beyond space and time.2 This is especially tricky in the study of religion, for religion is precisely that which humans consistently maintain is beyond human reach and created outside of human touch—what Bruce Lincoln has called the contingent masquerading as the universal.3 As far as the study of biblical literature is concerned, the task of the critic means in part to maintain a rigorous insistence that texts and traditions enjoy “sacred” (universal) status on account of human (contingent) activity. That is, what matters is not what sacred texts do to people “from outside,” but what and how people do sacredness and meaning-making with texts—inside and outside of institutional religious contexts and situations usually bounded around traditional theological and dogmatic questions. What people do with sacred texts, and how they do it, will be dependent on their historical and social situatedness.

Moreover, in my view, every encounter with biblical literature ultimately is an encounter with ourselves as human beings struggling in the present. That is, there is no unmediated access to the ancients, as much as some would desire for that to be so, and these texts are more rhetorical than historical. By “rhetorical,” I mean that the texts are not necessarily transparent windows onto a fixed and stable ancient reality that is already “back there”; rather, the texts in some sense construct ancient realities. For those biblical interpreters and other readers with interests in the ancient world, this means that the ancient world(s) that we bring to foreground in our attempts to understand the texts—Jewish backgrounds, Greek backgrounds, and Roman imperial backgrounds—assist us in constructing what I would call a useful past, in that it is a past that is usable in the present for imagining different futures.

What Taylor appears to be doing in The Executed God, and particularly through chapters 3 (“Way of the Cross as Adversarial Politics”) and 4 (“Stealing the Show: Way of the Cross as Dramatic Action”), is identifying with an original Christian past that is characterized by resistance to the Roman empire and the creation of alternative communities. This resistance is manifest in Jesus’ adversarial life (especially as narrated in the Gospel of Mark) as well as the orientation and activities of the Apostle Paul. For those interested in looking for resources to validate what Dorothee Soelle called “creative disobedience” in our world, this reading of the New Testament and reconstruction of Christian origins can serve as a past that is incredibly useful. Indeed, for contemporary marginalized peoples, activists, and other justice-seekers, the idea that a Christian counter-narrative to the status quo could have deep, ancient historical dimensions—that resistance and revolution could be built into the beginning—is alluring, not to mention affirming. “My way has always been there and your way is a deviation” as a justification for a position taken in the present is a very convincing argument, in both its dominant and subversive articulations, for multiple audiences. In fact, perhaps this kind of argument accounts for why the recent scholarship on the relationship between the New Testament and the Roman empire—or, as I might call it, between Christian myth-making and politics—has gained traction in theological studies.

Let me give an example from scholarship about Paul and empire that some interpreters have found useful. Herein the Roman empire is taken as the political background—the “state” and/or “governing authorities”—in the Pauline correspondence. The main question hinges on whether and how Paul negotiated the Roman imperial power structures in which he was situated, or whether and how Paul’s life and work in the ancient world can be interpreted as having political intentions, inclinations, and consequences for contemporary readers, particularly those invested in Paul’s writings as a scriptural resource.4 There could be a variety of possible responses to the question of Paul’s relationship with the Roman empire, as well as examinations of how such a relationship is expressed in the vocabulary and themes of the epistles and the portions of Acts narrating Paul’s words and deeds. Debates about Paul’s possible political inclinations are a priority in discussion about Paul and empire, and these tend to focus on the characterization of the apostle as “pro-imperial” or “anti-imperial,” along with the implications of such portraits for contemporary ethics and theologies.

I detect two major patterns in “Paul and empire” studies that concentrate on locating politics in the text as well as the politics of interpretation itself. One interpretive pattern aims to reread Pauline literature in light of political issues, and addresses the question of how, or to what degree, one can claim Paul is enmeshed in colonial and imperial contexts. Taking a cue from the “New Perspective on Paul,” some scholars have contended that readings of Paul have traditionally been more heavily indebted to Protestant church dogma than historical analysis, and have begun in earnest to work on understanding the Roman empire as the landscape in which Paul dwells. Highlighting the relationship between Paul and empire, this strand of scholarship takes seriously the idea that the apostle’s writings can be read as responding to Roman imperial ideology, military intervention, and material presence. Expanding the semantic range of “political” terminology, studies in this area have focused on the “submerged,” “forgotten,” and/or “ignored” resonances between Paul and his Roman imperial context, noting what Adolf Deissmann, nearly a century ago, called a “polemical parallelism” between the New Testament and Roman imperial culture. And when Paul is cast in this way, it is very tempting to read him as an “anti-imperial hero” that reinforces a version of history that is fixated on “great men” and their deeds, even if those deeds are revolutionary. Since Paul has been used to justify all kinds of modern systemic oppression from slavery to patriarchy, some might be anxious that constructing Paul as a “heroic” figure would hide this history and undermine liberatory projects in the present. In other words, Paul and empire scholarship might just lead toward a reification of Paul as a “mansplainer.” Fair enough.

In light of such complex and landmine-laden territory, I find that Taylor (understandably) gives Paul a relatively gingerly treatment, perhaps so as to avoid falling into the “heroic Paul” trap. It is the case that Paul’s legacies, embedded as they are in patterns of domination and subordination, are difficult to navigate. Following some scholars critical of the “anti-imperial hero” pattern, it would be easy to ask why we should not just ignore or get rid of Paul and find some other ancient conversation partners, such as the people who may or may not have been in Paul’s “alternative communities.” In the service of extending the search for a past that is usable in understanding and transforming “Lockdown America,” though, I would propose a subversive move and strengthen, rather than weaken, the resonance between the ancient apostle’s rhetorical subjectivity and that of modern incarcerated persons toward the redefinition of humanity and justice.

The key aspect of Paul that I would highlight for such a usable past is his radically conscious humanity. Perhaps we are so used to characterizing Paul as an elite dogmatic theologian whose greatest contribution is articulating the finer points of justification by faith that we have been unable or unwilling to see what, as he might say, is “before our very eyes.” That, however, is about us. If we take Paul’s own self-construction seriously, what we can see there is a portrait of a man who put others in harm’s way, who used violence to solve his problems, and who deployed a kind of vigilante justice that he thought would get him ahead in life. And, at some point, he needs his audiences to know that he had an experience of identification with the executed Jesus, commonly called “conversion,” that showed him that his violent ways were actually propping up a violent imperial system. Paul went away to reflect on that, and gave up his actions and life. Now, this Paul could be characterized rather unheroically as someone who used violence and then “reformed” himself, not unlike a convict. And also not unlike a convict, his reintegration into local communities is narrated as being fraught with difficulty, as it seems that very few people want to trust that he has changed or that he is different. No wonder, then, that Paul constantly appears to be on the defensive, constantly trying to convince people of his altered consciousness, that he won’t kill them or drag them off by their hair as he formerly did. No wonder that he is a suspect individual among strangers and authorities. It is this basic, radical, vulnerable humanity—which, as I have argued elsewhere, at times presents in gendered and sexualized discourse—that makes Paul, at least to me, an exemplary (but certainly not “heroic”) figure with whom to think about what it means to be human. Paul’s performance of humanity could be a potent counter-theatrics in its own right.

Why should an unheroic characterization of Paul matter? I am a biblical scholar who is also a teacher of undergraduates in a small liberal arts college setting. I teach biblical studies and religious studies in a humanities-focused program, rather than in a seminary or theological school. That is, I participate in the project of teaching about, rather than for or of, religion. Although I do not necessarily subscribe to a notion that theological and religious studies are opposites, I will say that in a humanities framework religion is not a “given” but a site of contestation. That said, there is much misunderstanding and mapping onto the study of religion that primarily takes the form of confusing understanding for advocacy. As a teacher of biblical literature in this context, I view the Bible as a potent arena where identities and power relationships are negotiated. Sometimes these identities and power relationships are part of religious affiliation, and most of the time this is not so. Nevertheless, as I usually stress in my courses, one need not have a certain relationship with biblical literature to understand and think with it. Engaging the Bible is a matter of being an educated citizen. In this context, narratives about Jesus or Paul are reframed as resources for reflection on humanity and justice. When we take the humanity of Paul seriously, a different set of questions can come out of his letters: can we sit at the table with our enemies, some of whom may be criminals? Can we care for the poorest among us while challenging the conditions that create poverty? Can we give up our own privileges in the service of being “reborn” as different human beings? If the answer to all of those questions is an easy “yes,” then what are we doing to live into that?

This past semester, I taught The Executed God as the culminating text in an upper-level religion course called “Sacred Texts and Social Justice,” and I thank the students who thought together with me: Allison Devine, Jeni Hollander, Thatch Mulcahy, Annelies Schellingerhoudt, Ali Solomon, and Carly Zahniser each made significant contributions to our learning community. In this course, we started with a twofold assumption that many of my students hold: first, that we know what “social justice” is and what it looks like, and second, that the Bible has nothing to do with social justice. After all, this collection of ancient sacred texts has been used so often to further oppression, violence, and empire, rather than liberation, peace, and democracy. In our course we asked, though: is it really that simple? Are sacred texts and social justice to be best understood as contradictory to one another? We spent the semester examining the intersection of sacred texts and social justice as a matter of methodological interest and an energetic space wherein critical questions could be posed. We engaged the uses of biblical texts in historic and contemporary social justice movements, and considered modern abolitionist, Marxist, anti-racist, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and pacifist interpretational paradigms. We tried to understand sacred texts as responses to the world in which they originated, as modes of religious and social criticism in ancient contexts of imperial domination and injustice. And we explored the various uses of biblical texts in contemporary religious traditions, public debates, and popular culture, with attention to movements and impulses toward social criticism and justice. Race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography were important categories of analysis. We expanded our understanding of both how biblical texts are used and what social justice might look like in various contexts, ancient and modern.

What I want to end with, here, is a series of questions born of conversations with my students. So: why should we rethink Christianity? Who does that benefit, and who does it exclude? Does a focus on counter-theatrics reinforce a binary between oppressor and oppressed? Is there room for restorative justice in this formulation of Christian living? What about when resistance movements become branded in late capitalism and/or become part of the dominant culture—or, what about when the counter-theatrics get appropriated and repackaged for consumption by “Lockdown America?” All of this is to say that Taylor should be commended for entering into the messy business of reconceptualizing what it means to be human, and for taking a step back to reconsider what justice means and could mean in a world where that term is thrown around all too glibly. As we are all implicated in what Michel Foucault (in)famously termed “the carceral,” the task to resist easy categorization and binary/dichotomous thinking and action, as Taylor performs herein, is itself a counter-theatrics worth deep consideration. It is a task that re-members the human, then and now, despite systemic efforts to erase humanity at every turn.

Complexity is one of the mantras of our time. Academics tend to embrace it because they are concerned that easy answers fail to do justice to the diversity manifest in the world. Liberals embrace it because they are concerned with the kind of black-and-white thinking that is a trademark of conservative discourse. Even people of faith sometimes embrace notions of complexity because they feel they should be “all things to all people” (1 Cor 9:21). Much could be said about the value of complexity and the need for complex thinking, but certain realities of our times provide other perspectives.

What is now called “Lockdown America” presents one of these perspectives. The walls of our exponentially growing number of prisons provide clear divides between inside and outside, jailed and unjailed. This does not mean that all unjailed are free, but it reminds us of the predicament of the growing number of those who find themselves incarcerated. A great deal of research has been done on that predicament, and Mark Tailor’s book The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015; 2nd revised and expanded ed.), has made substantial contributions, beginning with its first publication in 2001 to its substantially revised and expanded version in 2015.

There is growing awareness of the fact that the number of prisons and of inmates has increased tremendously over the past several decades, although the sheer numbers are still stunning: between 1970 and 2015, the number of US prisons and the corresponding populations have grown by 700 percent and the number of people imprisoned is now between 2.2 and 2.3 million people. No other country confines a larger percentage of its citizens. In addition, over 60 percent of those in US prisons are members of racial and ethnic minority groups, 40 percent are African American and 19 percent Latinos (69, 91).

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In light of those realities, the truisms that we are all free and unfree, oppressors and oppressed, victims and victimizers, and so on, will have to be rethought. What has to be rethought also are notions of solidarity, and here is where Taylor’s book makes some important contributions but also leaves a good deal of room for further work to be done.

What Are We Up Against?

Several factors have contributed to this enormous growth of what some have called the prison-industrial complex. As with many other developments, the interests of big business are a major factor. In 1999, the cost of maintaining prisons was between $20 and $35 billion a year; in 2012, the cost had risen to over $60 billion. Already in 1999 the prison industry employed more full-time workers than any Fortune 500 company, with the exception of General Motors (74). As prisons have turned into business opportunities, a growing number of prisons are now managed by private corporations, which are actively promoting the growth of the prison industry in other countries, including Western Europe (75).

Another factor of the growth of prison populations has to do with the need to control growing parts of the population that are considered “surplus” in neoliberal capitalism. As Taylor notes, “our present system of punishment” is “related to the production of economic wealth in the recent history of the United States” (147). What needs to be controlled here are possible reactions to the growing divide of wealth both in the United States and globally, keeping in mind that in the last two decades of the twentieth century wage inequality grew more in the United States than in any other country (160). In the contemporary United States today, more than one-third of the population lives in poverty or near-poverty (161).

Order is maintained by increased imprisonment of people who would be disillusioned, either by the lack of jobs that is amplified by factors like race and ethnicity, or (a factor not discussed by Taylor) by the lack of decent jobs and the opportunity to move up the ladder of success. Add to that the fact (also not discussed by Taylor) that prison populations provide extremely cheap labor, and the interest of capitalism in the building up of prisons becomes even clearer.

In his descriptions of Lockdown America, Taylor notes several times that we find ourselves in a situation where the binaries of oppressors and oppressed are not as outdated as the advocates of complexity continue to maintain.1 While in this book Taylor is in conversation with many projects and authors, it is surprising that he makes no mention of the growing body of work done on class and religion. No doubt, this takes some nerve in the current academic, cultural, and religious climate, which explains why Taylor throughout the book makes an effort to argue with potential distractors.

Taylor’s solutions, which make up more than half of the book, are worth considering. What is surprising, however, are two major blind spots that ultimately jeopardize Taylor’s solutions. In the following, I will address them not in order to dwell on where Taylor might be going wrong but in the hope that these comments will allow us to move forward together.

What Does It All Mean?

The biggest surprise is that, despite an analysis that is aware of capitalist interests, in the second part of the book all efforts of resistance and rebellion are directed against the state. This is the first blind spot. While I do not doubt that Taylor is aware whose handmaiden the state is, this is rarely addressed in the second part, leaving the reader with the impression that if only we were able to defeat the repressive functions of the state, life would be better for all.

In other words, what is missing here is a sustained awareness that we cannot have a transformed political system without a transformed economic system. Even socialism, a term that pops up a few times, seems to be a matter of politics rather than economics for Taylor, something along the lines of “a decision of the public for a government whose primary concern would be the social well-being of all its citizens” (179).

This approach picks up on a popular American concern about governments that overstep their boundaries, which is significant, and there is no doubt in my mind that this needs to be developed in many of the directions that Taylor suggests. However, without a clearer understanding of how politics, state, and government are beholden to the economic powers that be, the project may fail to develop the reach it deserves. This failure has several dimensions.

While a theatrics of the cross and thus a politics of the cross is crucial, an economics of the cross would provide not merely an ally but a necessary component without which liberation is hard to imagine and without which an important aspect of the work of Jesus and Paul—traditions that are crucial to Taylor’s argument—goes missing. What is also missing in Taylor’s argument is a sense of how resistance in the broad realm of economics could be a crucial factor in the liberation process that he envisions: not surprisingly, the work of labor unions and many other grassroots organizations that deal with the particular matters of economics and labor that are fundamental to lockdown America is rarely mentioned.2

The second blind spot has to do with the role of those who are privileged to some degree but who do not belong to the 1 percent. Taylor states: “I include within the culture of the economic elite those other groups who live dependent upon, or in proximity to, this largely white overclass” (180). Unfortunately, this move is not argued and it is never again mentioned in a text that tends to repeat its key claims and statements often for emphasis.

One reason for including people who enjoy certain privileges with the ruling class (a term that may be more helpful than “overclass” because it describes the function of this class) might be that there is indeed a connection. The middle class, broadly conceived, often assumes that it has more in common with the ruling class than with any other class because it enjoys some privileges, like homeownership, reliable transportation, or retirement funds. In addition, academics, pastors, and artists (important groups that Taylor seeks to address) sometimes enjoy the patronage of donors from the ruling class.

What this approach overlooks, however, is the difference between the middle class and the ruling class, which is crucial for the production of solidarity, as we shall see. The most obvious of these differences, but also perhaps the more difficult one to see, has to do with power. The power of the middle class is rather limited: even a powerful pastor of a wealthy church is not in a position to say things that major donors would not want to hear, and many academics and artists are in similar positions even if they may have somewhat more leeway. The differences can be seen more easily in terms of income, as an upper-middle-class family earning $200,000 a year is still closer to the one earning $20,000 a year than the one earning $500,000 a year (a number where the 1 percent barely begins) or much more.

When compared to prison inmates, of course, even those earning $25,000 a year are still free. If our earlier analysis is correct, however, we must keep in mind that capitalism’s tireless efforts to increase its revenue and to control people also affects them. By extension, it also affects the middle class, whose reach is shrinking, with increasing uncertainty about jobs, retirement, health care, and the uncertain futures of both the younger and the older generations.

What to Do?

At this point in the argument it should be clear that we are up against a set of formidable problems. The reminder of the Paul of Ephesians sums it up in the language of an earlier time: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph 5:12). Politics, state, economics, culture, and even religion are working hand in hand to promote and build a status quo that renders millions of people dispensable and that destroys the lives of millions more, reaching all the way into the middle class.

As a result, the response to the problem needs to go just as deep. Including for instance religion in this argument is, thus, not just talking about a random component but about the fundamental question of what religion is and whether it will be part of the problem or of the solution. Taylor’s arguments along those lines are right on the money, pointing out the consequences for Christianity in particular: is it a way of life that is liberating, loving, and just—following Jesus and Paul—or is it condemned to remain an essential component of the status quo of lockdown America?

No one can go this alone, as Taylor notes frequently. This is an important reminder especially for people of the Christian persuasion, who have a history of trying to do just that. But this is also an important reminder for all other organizations, foremost for those who belong to what might be called the NGO-industrial complex and who are being seduced by the worlds of the media and the funders.

The crucial question, of course, is what brings and holds us together? Moral commitment alone will not do it, as Taylor notes, but his suggestion of “shared delight” (313) may not be quite strong enough either. I would argue that we also need to develop a sense of shared pressures and of a shared struggle that affects all of us. This is why a deeper analysis of economics, labor, and class is indispensable. When the proverbial 99 percent understand that they are not benefiting from the system as much as they tend to assume, even though some are better off than others, a new understanding of what brings us together emerges. This is what some of my coauthors and I have called “deep solidarity.”3 Note that at one point, Taylor talks about the need “to strike a deeper solidarity with politicized prisoners, because they challenge the carceral state and not just its prisons” (383, emphasis mine). This goes in the right direction, although I am not sure whether Taylor is considering the pressures that we share in common. Conversely, neglecting or even erasing the difference between the ruling class and the rest of us prevents deep solidarity.

This kind of solidarity does not require leveling or ignoring differences; to the contrary, it provides a framework in which we can put our differences to use constructively. And if Paul is right that “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Cor 12:26), direction and insight for all is generated in places of suffering, particularly where the suffering is greatest. In lockdown America, prisoners are part of that.

It is only towards the very end of the book that Taylor develops some more sustained reflections on what might bring us together, producing what I am tempted to call “Derridean solidarity.” Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “great criminal” is also used in instructive fashion along these lines. While there is no room to comment further on these dynamics here, I would like to note that deeper reflections on both race and class might be required: One reason why Americans may ultimately not be able to identify with Mumia Abu-Jamal as much as Taylor hopes has to with deeply engrained racism, which blocks the two necessary elements of empathy for and fascination with the “great criminal.” Moreover, unless there is some minimal class consciousness, at least in the form of a rudimentary sense of not being a member of the ruling class, mistaken assumptions about class privilege will continue to block the path towards solidarity.

Conclusions

If readers come away from this conversation with a sense that it is time to take sides, Taylor’s work and my engagement of it have been worthwhile. In situations of great pressure and imbalance of power staying neutral is never an option. Even the state needs to learn how to take sides, and so do people of faith, as many of our traditions have modeled.

Moreover, if readers come away from this discussion with a sense that we are up against deeply structural problems, we have succeeded to some degree. However, this is the point where we need to do more work. Too many progressives these days agree on the structural nature of problems without developing deeper understandings of these structures: how exactly are racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism structural, for instance? What about class? Starting with the latter, condemning “avarice and greed” as Taylor does at one point (406) is not only insufficient, it is potentially misleading. The same would be true for an understanding of racism (which I do not believe Taylor ascribes to) that holds that it is merely a form of aggregated prejudice.

In sum, we need to continue to dig deeper in our investigations of the structures that hold in place the maladies of lockdown America and all the other evils that are destroying life on the planet today, both human and nonhuman. In the process, we need to initiate fresh conversations about the intersectionality of all of the factors involved in ways that are not merely additive. Conversations such as the ones that Taylor has started in this book have the potential to take us there part of the way. After all, the prison system, not unlike the system of labor, is a microcosm of intersectionality.