p. 12 | Lynching and Religion by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Feb 18, 1913

Lynching and Religion

By Editor

Is it true that lynching is “what we all stand for,” as Albert Jay Nock intimates in the February American, as he recalls the lynching of a Negro in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, August 13, 1911? The Negro had killed a man, he said in self-defense. No one knew. But he was nevertheless taken from a hospital, dragged a half mile along the ground, and burned to death, in a Republican Quaker community. Three different attempts were made to secure conviction of the criminals; but in every case the law proved futile. Mr. Nock lays the brutal deed and the failure to an industrial system which produces “an upper class materialized, a middle class vulgarized, a brutal class brutalized.” But how much has religion without God’s moral standard to do with it?