Race lynching and Christian Evangelicalism: performances of faith

Abstract

This essay locates the performance of ritual lynching within the white Christian Evangelical worldview that predominated among members of the white supremacist community responsible for lynching African‐Americans. The emergence of Christian Evangelicalism is connected to Anglo‐Celtic emigration in the eighteenth century to the backcountry of the American South and the Appalachians. Through a fusion of cultural folkways with faith centered on the violent death of Christ on the 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.