Parade

Approx. 10 min read

A brief preface… this is one of my blogs that I wrote a while ago and for whatever reason, I sat on it. However, current events brought this to mind, and it feels very appropriate to post. I made minimal edits since leaving it off in 2023.

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I recently caught a revival of the Broadway musical, “Parade.” (Present Day Seth here, – the show was actually March 3rd, 2023, almost 2 years ago!) The musical, at its outset, is a tragedy. Before the show even began, the background lit up by a projected image showed a memorial sign discussing the events surrounding the main character’s lynching in 1915. The audience knows the end before it begins, and yet hopes otherwise.

One of the major themes of the play deals with how one celebrates home, how one ought to go about celebrating a history and a place that can often be filled with unspeakable tragedy, such as one the theatre-goer is about to witness. The opening and ending number of the play sounds as a rousing memorial anthem about the old red hills of home (Georgia), and those who give everything to protect them. One wonders exactly how those red hills got to be so red, covered in the blood of those who left to protect them, or covered in the blood of those who threatened them and the way of life they signified? While the show seems to give an unambiguous answer, it also leaves room to wrestle with the question of how one celebrates a nation mixed through and through with heroic bravery and despicable acts. Do we clap along to the Memorial Day parade anthem or do we stand aside in silence? (Memorial Day, by the way, began historically as a consolidated remembrance by the North and the South to honor those who died in the Civil War.)

The theme of home runs throughout the play, and because the protagonist, Leo Frank, is not from home (in this case, the show is set in 1900’s Georgia – Leo is from Brooklyn) his mannerisms, education, and accent immediately alienate him from his fellow Georgians, and even his wife. After he is accused of murdering a 14-year-old girl, the Georgians rise to protect home from the ghoulish outsider Jew and condemn him in a dubious trial.

As the show builds to the conclusion, one final emotionally raw and intense scene depicts the Jewish Leo Frank as he is about to be lynched. For any Christian, the echoes of the biblical narrative are painfully evident, and they are echoes I would like to explore as the show, along with a book by Catholic priest James Allison, has given me insight into the nature of Jesus’ death, and the way one might be able to understand substitutionary atonement in a different light.

As the mob prepares to lynch Leo Frank, they give him several opportunities to avoid their judgment by simply confessing to the crime he had supposedly committed, to play along and give validity to the prosecution. Leo maintains his innocence in the face of increasingly desperate pleas. It is almost as if the mob is breaking under the injustice they are committing in an effort to maintain and find “justice” for the innocent girl who was murdered earlier in the show. At one point, an old man shouts out, “Someone’s gotta pay!” Right after, Leo steps off to his death and hanging (in the show, he falls below the stage, presumably onto a padded stunt cushion), showing the supposed “justice” for exactly what it was all along – a cruel and vindictive murder.

“Someone’s gotta pay!” That line stayed with me long after the show, and still lingers with me now. It is why I am writing this blog. Growing up in evangelicalism, the theology sort of begins with that sentiment – “someone’s gotta pay.” Now, there’s more nuance than that, but put simply, the whole theological endeavor of evangelicalism is to maintain the notion of God’s infinite justice at all expense. The starting point is God’s infinite justice, and the ending point is God’s infinite justice. When this is paired with the story of the garden and Adam and Eve and original sin and human depravity etc. etc., the result is an angry God who needs payment in order to satiate his infinite justice (see also, Jonathan Edward’s sermon titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God). Of course, evangelicals typically paint this God character as having his hands tied about the whole affair. One might imagine this God saying something like, “If there were only another way, if only we could talk to the person who invented the system and ask for mercy in this one situation, I would choose it immediately and spare my own son from death!”

“Someone’s gotta pay!” In the evangelical narrative, God is the angry, but justly so, divinity who demands a sacrifice. Fortunately for us, he also provides a solution. We have to do nothing, and the price is already paid. Fair enough, simple enough. The system of blood atonement is maintained, validated, and then concluded with the death of Jesus on the cross.

Sometimes it feels very loop-hole-y, as if we stumbled into a crime scene with the blood-soaked murder weapon placed into our hands by our virtue of, well, being born, and God did one of those things with his mouth, where he sucks in the sides of his mouth and goes “oooh, that’s gonna be a problem”… He retreats to his office where he studies the law books and discovers a brilliant solution that requires no effort on our part except that we go along with the whole thing with him as lawyer, judge, jury, defendant, prosecutor, witness. It ends with a sort of read the terms and conditions, sign here, sign here, initial and date here, and yet we never actually get rid of the murder weapon. We are supposed to walk around with the murder weapon daily, reminding us of how we all committed “murder” by just being born. We’re no longer under the original sentence, thank God, but it also feels like being on house arrest, an anklet reminding us of what we have done, reminding us of the whole trial, the “not guilty” moment, and how fortunate we are that we don’t have to die. I don’t mean to make light of the theology; rather I’m trying to take an outsider view of an explanation of the theology.

An alternative view of substitutionary atonement, (again, to which I am deeply indebted to the work of James Allison, and which I will quote here shortly at length) begins with the notion that in the grand scheme of the narrative, God is not the one who is angry, rather we are the ones who are angry and demand payment, because that’s how we think the system works. That’s how early cultures believed the system was maintained. No rain, no problem – just sacrifice something of great value, like a human, to appease the angry gods. Once payment has been made and the blood is flowing so too will the rain and whatever other bountiful providence was supposed to be, but “someone’s gotta pay!” We bought into the idea at some point in our human history that we need to have a victim, an other, an outsider that is responsible for the woes of the world and that once they are removed, all will be well. Typically this “other” is someone on the fringes of society, an outcast, an easy target.

(Present Day Seth here, does this sound familiar? Who, in the current news, is being blamed for inflation, plane crashes, and wildfires? Let me help you out: “DEI” individuals, who are often people of color, queer folk, or women. Now, back to the blog.)

Here’s how Allison says it:

“All sacrificial systems are substitutionary; but what we have with Jesus is an exact inversion of the sacrificial system: him going backwards and occupying the space so as to make it clear that this is simply murder. And it needn’t be…. what Jesus was doing was actually revealing the mendacious principle of the world. The way human structure is kept going is by us killing each other, convincing ourselves of our right and duty to do it, and therefore building ourselves up over and against our victims.”

As the men of Georgia are about to lynch Leo Frank and they are shouting things like, “Someone’s gotta pay,” I wanted to shout back, in the middle of that Broadway audience, “Why?! Who said someone had to pay to keep the system safe and to keep home, home?” I imagine Jesus’ death on the cross provoked similar responses – “Why? Who said someone had to pay to appease the angry god?” Well, I think that’s something we invented, and I think Jesus showed us how unnecessary it is, and how we are now freed from the system of victim-making. Whatever happened to God’s infinite mercy, which always seems to get sidelined in the discussion of substitutionary atonement?

Jesus says in the gospels, “Go and learn the meaning of this: I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”

“Someone’s gotta pay!” Sure fine, someone has to pay, but whoever said that justice also necessitated the shedding of blood, or the victimizing of an innocent party? Or let me put it this way, can justice be attained apart from blood-letting? Can things be made right in the world without violence, the shedding of blood? Perhaps not right now, but isn’t that the whole point of this Christian endeavor? To help bring through God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven? If your eschatology (vision of how it will all end up) has no mention of war or death, or fighting, or blood, why do those things make it into the process of how it gets done?

The ethic is the ingredient and the way which will produce the end result. Let me say it this way: If one were baking a cake with ingredients like sugar and butter, but then presented it as being sugar free and butter free, we would think that person is crazy! Sure the cake looks a lot different than raw butter and sugar, but those ingredients don’t get magically “baked away.”

A world and system which is built from the backs of slaves will include slavery in the ethic. A world built from war and blood will include war and blood in the ethic. Why do you think God told King David he couldn’t build the Lord’s temple? A world built from (as cheesy as it sounds) peace, love and mercy will have peace, love and mercy in the ethic. Can we trust that operating as such will bring about the world we are all so eagerly yearning to experience, heaven? That’s called faith in my book. If heaven is supposed to be a place of peace, beauty, love, shalom, then why do some Christians think violence is a necessary part of getting us there? I used to think such a thing… I’m not sure I do anymore.

Granted, this particular reading of substitutionary atonement also requires a particular understanding of the way scripture operates, i.e. not always literal. For the evangelical reading this, I’m sure there are many objections. That’s fine. I’m not really trying to convince anyone who isn’t already in doubt about the whole thing. I’d like to think I’m providing a lifeline (mostly to myself, for myself) for those who deal with irreconcilable guilt and shame about the evangelical God who is both loving and also very very angry, and about the murder weapon we all carry around with us reminding us of how bad we are.

I’m also suggesting you go and watch “Parade” because I imagine it will make you think about all these things, like it has done for me!

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Present Day Seth here. It’s too late to catch “Parade” on Broadway, but I’m sure it’s on some streaming service somewhere!

Before I sign off, I really want to call attention to how this theory of substitutionary atonement can get hijacked by charismatic individuals. If the framework of this belief takes a central place in your life, nefarious individuals can bend it to their will, and place other inputs into the belief, to disastrous effect. If a president shows up and says the LGBTQ folks, the immigrants, and the DEI individuals are the source of our country’s problems, substitutionary atonement would suggest that getting rid of them just might solve our problem, and make our country great again.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s wrong to hold this view of substitutionary atonement, I’m simply suggesting it makes one susceptible to victimizing innocent people and treating them as less than. If someone holds to the traditional substitutionary atonement belief, then my hope would be that they fiercely examine any statements that attempt to demonize any group, or that they would consider how laws/executive orders being written by the current administration are depriving certain groups of their inclusion in society and giving symbolic strength to their status as “others.” This only further emboldens the general population to ostracize groups which already exist at the margins.

I’ll go ahead and bring this blog to a close (because I can get a bit rambly when I’m fired up): I believe that the “other”, the one who is not like me, who doesn’t believe like me, who doesn’t look like me or talk like me is the solution to our problems, not the source. I believe that justice (let’s call it “well-being for all”) can be attained apart from “blood-letting” and “victimizing” and I also believe that this is exactly what Christianity is supposed to be about. If you think I’m wrong, then I’d love to chat. After all, if you disagree with me, then that just means that I believe you are now a part of the solution to the problem!