The Electric Chair Necklace

Accessorizing with Torture Devices

Picture the necklace. Not a cross. An electric chair, in miniature, cast in silver, hanging from a fine chain at someone’s throat. Or a little gold guillotine with the blade raised. A tasteful gallows on a charm bracelet. You recoil, and you should. Wearing a scale model of the machine that kills people is ghoulish, the sort of thing that gets a person quietly avoided at a party.

Now notice that nobody blinks when someone wears a cross.

The cross was a Roman killing machine. Not a metaphor for one. An actual one, the slowest and most shameful method the empire owned, kept for slaves and rebels and the lowest of the conquered. Rome used it on thousands of people who were not Jesus. And we have hung it over altars, stamped it on flags, inked it into skin, set it on the graves of the people we loved most, and worn it, in gold, against the heart. Richard Dawkins put his finger on the oddity. He found it strange that a religion would take an instrument of torture and execution and make it the thing you wear around your neck.

He is right that it is strange, and the necklace is how you feel it. So here is the question this small essay exists to ask, before a longer one takes it up in earnest. If the electric chair necklace is appalling and the cross is beloved, what exactly is the difference between them? At first glance there may not be one.

Think about what makes any symbol spread. It helps to be simple, so a child can draw it. It helps to be charged, so it lodges in the memory. It helps to be repeatable, so it can go on the wall and the grave and the chain and the hand. An electric chair necklace would qualify on every count. So would a guillotine. By that measure the cross is not special. It is an execution device that happened to win. If spreading is the whole story, the cross should be exactly as morbid as the chair, and the only reason it is not is that we have gotten used to it.

That is the deflationary account, and it is strong, and I am not going to pretend it is weak. Most of the way down, it is correct. The cross does behave like a successful symbol, and familiarity has sanded the horror off it. If you want to be unsettled, look at a crucifix as though you had never seen one, and let the electric chair come back into it.

But run the comparison all the way to the end and it breaks, in two places.

The first is small, and it is the door into everything else this blog cares about. An electric chair has no shape. It is a box with a seat. A guillotine is a frame and a blade. They kill, but they do not mean anything. You cannot read them. The cross is the one execution device in history that is also a diagram: a line standing up, crossed by a line going out, with a center where they meet. It is an upright. Whatever else it is, it is the shape of a thing holding vertical, which is the shape of a body that stands and a plumb line that hangs true and a good deal more that a separate essay is for. The chair cannot carry meaning because it has no form to carry it. The cross is shaped like something. A skeptic will say the shape only made it easier to copy, and he has a point. But hold onto the oddity that the winning execution device is the only one you could draw a meaning out of.

The second place is where the analogy simply snaps.

Every other killing machine is the end of the story. That is the point of a killing machine. The chair, the gallows, the rope, the blade: the person sits, or stands, or kneels, and then they are dead, and the machine has done the only thing it does. A gallows on a chain would be a little monument to a corpse. There is nothing else it could be.

The cross is worn for the opposite reason. It is worn because, in the one case the wearer cares about, the machine did not get the last word. The whole reason there is a cross around anyone’s neck is the claim that the man it killed did not stay dead. That is the difference, and it is the only one that counts. Nobody wears a guillotine, because the guillotine always wins. People wear the cross because they believe this one execution was reversed, that the instrument of an ending became, just once, the instrument of a beginning.

Notice what that does and does not settle. It does not prove the death was undone. A skeptic can grant every word of this and say the difference is only that Christianity bolted a comforting story onto its execution device and the others did not, and that the comfort is exactly why the symbol spread, the wound and the cure sold in one package. That is a serious answer, and I am not going to wave it away. The necklace cannot tell you whether the tomb was empty. What it can do, more plainly than almost anything else, is show you where the whole weight rests. Take the resurrection away and the cross is an electric chair on a chain, and Dawkins is simply right, and we are all wearing a torture device because we stopped paying attention. Leave it in and the cross is not in the same category as the chair at all, not a monument to a death but the claim that a death failed. Same object, two readings, and everything hangs on one question the object raises and refuses to answer.

That question deserves more than an appetizer. My companion article, The Perfect Fit, takes the cross apart as a shape, lays it against the human body, and asks whether we made it or were made to fit it. This was only the thing on the chain, to get you to look at it again.

Turn it over before you wear it.