In my 2004 book Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1847–1947, I considered the role of religion in shaping lynching cultures in the southern, western, and midwestern regions of the United States. The evidence, I argued, was often suggestive but ultimately ambiguous. “Whether Christianity served as context or contradiction for lynching, primary sources are generally silent on how the religiosity of lynchers and their opponents may have influenced the performance and understanding of collective murder,” I asserted (Pfeifer [University of Illinois Press, 2004], 60). Sifting contradictory and complex evidence, I ultimately argued that American Christianity played complex roles in shaping or hindering the impulse of some Americans to lynch.

I do not believe that Donald G. Mathews's richly researched and eloquently argued (if overly prolix) book on the role of religion in the lynching of Sam Hose (also known as Thomas Wilkes) in Newnan, Georgia, in 1899, compels a revision of what I wrote about religion and lynching nearly fifteen years ago. In this book, however, Mathews has written the most thorough and thoughtful scholarly analysis available of the relationship of Southern religiosity to the propensity of Southern whites to lynch. Southern white lynchers' brutally ritualistic assertion of white supremacy over African Americans was perhaps no more vividly displayed than in their collective execution of Sam Hose, an African American accused of the murder and rape of whites, who was dismembered and immolated before a large crowd as one white participant reportedly shouted, “Glory be to God!” (1).

While African American scholars, such as Orlando Patterson (Rituals of Blood: Consequence of Slavery in Two American Centuries [Civitas Counterpoint, 1998]) and James H. Cone (The Cross and the Lynching Tree [Orbis, 2011]), have explored lynching as a sort of blood ritual and the lynching tree as a kind of crucifixion, with the exception of Mathews (who began considering these matters in articles in the early 2000s), few white scholars have systematically considered what relationship the South's prevalent evangelical Protestant culture may have had to Southern whites' frequent lynching of African Americans in the late nineteenth century. Mathews's findings are ultimately complex and ambiguous. Southern evangelicalism's abiding emphasis on blood punishment and vindicatory justice fit well with lynching's emphasis on brutal punishment of African Americans absent due process, while campground revival shout-enthusiasm blended well with lynch mobbers' carnivalesque festivity. Only a minority of Southern white ministers would risk public opprobrium by condemning lynching as unchristian (which a few did), while the majority of white Southern evangelicals all too readily reconciled or elided their Christian commitments with the sanguinary demands of white supremacy. Meanwhile, black evangelicals saw the world differently, identifying lynching as a kind of crucifixion anticipated by Christ's and seeking Christian transcendence from the sinful, racial oppression perpetrated by Southern whites. Moreover, lynching itself became for Southern whites a kind of religion, a ritual that “affirmed the moral order” as it simultaneously “generate[d] community solidarity.” As Mathews explains, “Religion did not cause lynching; lynching was religion” (2). Mathews pulls these themes together powerfully in the book's conclusion, noting:

Mathews perhaps gives more space to elite whites, such as Cora and Lundy Harris, than their role in this story may merit, and the extent of the social and cultural distance between the Southern white ministerial class who dominate his narrative and the working and lower middle-class whites who were most likely to participate in lynching perhaps could receive more attention. Yet Mathews has given us in this book the fullest case study of the lynching of Sam Hose and the most meaningful treatment of the role of religiosity available to date in the now extensive literature on Southern lynching. His book will be of considerable interest to scholars of Southern religion and racial violence in the American South.