That the analogy between the cross and the lynching tree should have eluded the Christian agents of white supremacy is perhaps not surprising. But how do we understand the failure of even the most “progressive” of America’s white theologians and religious thinkers to make this connection? A case in point is Reinhold Niebuhr, widely regarded as America’s most influential theologian in the twentieth century, and possibly in American history. Among his contemporaries he was unusually attuned to social reality and the “irony” and tragedy of American history. Among white theologians he was
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