“The Real Victim of Lynch Law Is the <i>Government</i>”: American Protestant Anti-Lynching Advocacy and the Making of Law and Order

Abstract

This article examines American Protestant anti-lynching advocacy in the early twentieth century. In contrast to African American Protestants, who framed their anti-lynching efforts in ways that foregrounded the problem of racism and black experiences of suffering, white mainline Protestant critiques of lynching regularly downplayed race and framed the crime in terms of its threat to American civilization and national law and order. This article connects these latter concerns to the national war on crime of the 1930s and 40s and the early history of the modern carceral state.

Keywords

• American religious history
• lynching
• American Protestantism
• African American Christianity
• religion and race
• incarceration
• criminal justice