Rage Against the Imperial State
Resistant Faith in Lockdown America
Taylor has thoroughly updated and expanded this 2015 edition of his award-winning book (it received The Best General Interest Book Award from The American Theological Association in 2001). Like the first edition, the 2015 edition of The Executed God stands as a searing indictment of the structures of “Lockdown America” and is a visionary statement of hope. Outlining a theatrics of state terror, Taylor documents its instruments – mass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant suppression, and capital punishment – through which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces global neoliberal economic and political imperialsm. Against this, Taylor proposes a “counter-theatrics” – the way of the cross – that unmasks the powers of state control and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance and dramatic action – a Christian politics of remembering the Jesus executed by empire.
“A powerful critique of America as empire and the challenge it poses for all who believe in the way of the cross.”
James Cone, author The Cross and the Lynching Tree
“The first edition of this superb book brilliantly deconstructed a gathering nightmare of state vengeance and oppression. Now that we have social movements taking on the nightmare, it is profoundly important that Mark Lewis Taylor has updated and revised this book, a cry of the heart expounding a theology of the cross.”
Gary Dorrien, author of Reason and Hegelian Spirit and The New Abolition
“Mark Lewis Taylor correctly identifies mass incarceration as the logical result of a ruthless capitalist system that has impoverished and abandoned the poor, especially poor people of color. The bodies of the poor are surplus labor on the streets of our decrepit cities. But once these bodies are placed in cages they can generate $50,000 or $60,000 a year for the prison industrial complex where they are abused, tortured, and exploited in a system of neoslavery. Taylor knows that reforms are useless. We are called as Christians to mobilize in order to destroy the predatory machine of corporate capital itself and liberate the captives.”
Chris Hedges, author of Wages of Rebellion
“After police brutality in Ferguson and in other cities, this courageous book updated and expanded, is most timely and needed. It should be studied in churches, seminaries, and classrooms to help develop a counter-politics based on a prophetic reading of the way of the cross against American imperialism.”
Kwok Pui-lan, author of Postcolonialism and Feminist Theology