This is a disturbing book. Historians of religion, Christianity and the Church may want to read it anyway, but not because it is a historical study. Rather, it is about memory and how certain traumatic experiences can shape our understanding of the present. Sims is a seminarian professor of ethics. If her writing style is frequently challenging, her subject is compelling: how memories of violence and intimidation shape African Americans’ assessment of contemporary American society as a ‘culture of terror’. Sims came to this argument after interviewing African Americans willing to talk about their memories of lynching or near-lynching. The sociologist Leslie Hossfeld's Narrative, political unconscious, and racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina (London 2005), a study of the long-lasting effects of white collective violence against black people, demonstrates that Sims's subjects are not alone. Their perception of American culture is shaped by a reality from which they cannot flee and within which as Christians they must find disciplined ways to live.

Sims reveals how memories of violence and damage inflicted by whites help African Americans understand contemporary American culture not as having ended the peril of violence but as having continued it in different ways. As every historian knows, if ‘history’ shapes ‘memory’, the latter also shapes the past that we remember when confronted by events and situations in the present that seem all too familiar. For those who have remembered – or have been schooled by others who remembered – black bodies hanging on a tree, black bodies lying on the street after being shot by police seem more than analogous. Whites kill in both instances; dead black bodies in both instances signify the power of whites to intimidate through the threat of further violence (p. 96). That this situation betokens a ‘culture of terror’ may seem to be a tendentious over-simplification, but memories of lynching yield a moral logic with which Sims wants her readers to contend. The people to whom she listened certainly taught her this lesson.

Sims entitled the ‘ethico-historical’ project upon which the book is based: ‘Remembering Lynching: Strategies of Resistance and Visions of Justice’. From July 2009 to February 2011 she interviewed fewer than fifty people in eleven states whose memories became, in her words, ‘a point of entry from which to examine personal-corporate practices of sacred ritualization’ (p. 2). She had somehow not anticipated ‘the range of emotions that a discussion of lynching might elicit’ as she learned how various ‘strategies of resistance’ inspired the faithful in the drive for justice (p. 5). That drive was preceded by the experience of unprovoked violence, pervasive terror and undeserved suffering that birthed an American Nightmare instead of the American Dream. That experience planted disturbing memories in the personae of possibly millions, but Sims is curiously unaware of the many available studies of memory associated with lynching and segregation. She mentions none of the compelling analyses of the damaging effects of trauma upon men, women and children despite her obvious horror at those effects upon the people with whom she engaged and from whom she learned.

Sims wants her readers, who she assumes will be of African descent, to learn from her subjects the ‘ethic of resilient resistance’ (p. 123). Christians should learn to ‘challenge practices that are neither just nor fair’ (p. 124) and follow four rubrics: work hard to achieve ones highest goals (pp. 126f). Keep the faith as well as victims of the lynching culture did (pp. 129f). (James Cone made the point clearly when he wrote that the cross ‘points in the direction of hope, the confidence that there is a dimension to life beyond the reach of the oppressor’: The cross and the lynching tree, Maryknoll, NY 2011, 162.) Sims wants her readers, too, to be alert to white supremacy in all its guises (pp. 132f), and, finally, to learn to forgive (p. 137).

One of the most important contributions of her study is to reveal once again just how important to black (and by implication to all) Christians is an existential understanding of the crucifixion. The ‘lynching tree’ and the cross seem essentially conflated among those who were touched and affected by lynching and oppressed by the culture of white supremacy. Christian blacks understood lynching as crucifixion and, since being enslaved, had sung ‘Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?’ It was a question about the present as well as the past. If they were there, Christ was here – now. True, evil had yet to be overcome; captives still waited to be freed. Christ still had to come again and his crucifixion with them meant that he would; that is, they would prevail at last through him. But the memory of lynching among far more black people than whites want to think about is still a psychological stigmata. An elderly Christian whom Sims interviewed remembered that as an eleven-year-old boy, a group of white men had put a noose round his neck and ‘led me away to be crucified’. He was saved by a local landowner, but the terror lived on. He felt it still through the events that led to the crusade to ensure that Black Lives Matter (p. 3). The lynching tree, writes Cone, ‘is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land’ (The cross, 166). The people whom Sims interviewed would agree.