Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America - Softcover

Mark 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 to destroy the predatory machine of corporate capital itself and liberate the captives. --Chris Hedges, author of Wages of Rebellion

The new edition of Mark Lewis Taylor's award-winning The Executed God is both a searing indictment of the structures of "Lockdown America" and a visionary statement of hope. It is also a call for action to Jesus followers to resist US imperial projects and power. Outlining a "theatrics of state terror," Taylor identifies and analyzes its instruments - mass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant repression, and capital punishment - through which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces a global neoliberal economic and political imperialism. Against this, The Executed God proposes a "counter-theatrics to state terror," a declamation of the way of the cross for Jesus followers that unmasks the powers of US state domination and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance, artful dramatic actions, and the building of peoples' movements. Heralded in its first edition, this new edition is thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, offering a rethinking of what being a Christian is and how Christianity should act to bring about what Taylor terms "a liberating material spirituality" to unseat the state that kills.