The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Freddie Gray

Beginning with Plato, and carried over in the Christian tradition, western political thought has been wedded to the proposition that justice and virtue can be achieved in history through the adoption of proper norms. Hannah Arendt termed this “the tyranny of truth,” and its effect is to transform politics into a religious exercise through commitments to metaphysical propositions like truth or goodness.

The tumultuous political aftermath that formed the wake of Freddie Gray's crucifixion in Baltimore, MD, is an example of politics turned religious exercise. In those politics, confessional commitments to propositions related to race, society, and structure came to dominate the interpretation of the killing of Gray's mortal body. But as Gray was resurrected in various forms in the weeks after his death, one consequence was that a very poor community had one of their sons stripped from them first by police violence, and then again through politics whose discursive violence appropriated Gray as proof of its own metaphysics.